Where WE review our games

Red Dead Redemption

In short, I'd give it a 90% at minimum. This game is excellent.

It's a sandbox third-person shooter set in the Wild West in 1911. Think Grand Theft Auto with horses. There are plenty of missions you have to eventually complete, often in no particular order, but it works out well. Additionally, there are optional side quests that can provide numerous rewards, such as fame and honor. Fame has numerous effects; if high enough, it offers certain perks like free stagecoach travel, reduced willingness of people to report your crimes, and other things, but it also means that a good number of gunslingers will challenge you to duels in the hopes of killing you to make a name for themselves. Honor can be high or low; high honor reduces prices in most shops, sometimes attracts gifts from grateful citizens, and improves your standing with the law, but may cause outlaws to shoot you on sight. I'm not sure what low honor does, as I tend to be honorable.

What's truly remarkable about RDR is the sheer size of the world, with cactus-filled deserts, grasslands, pine forests, and swamps. Horses are essential to success, as they help you quickly travel and are very useful in combat. Numerous different breeds of horses, each with their own appearances and traits, may be purchased, stolen, or caught and broken in the wild. There are many activities in the game, such as Texas hold'em, blackjack, liar's dice, horseshoes, arm wrestling, hunting, horse breaking, night watches, herb collecting, bounty hunting, attacking gang hideouts, reading the newspaper, rinding trains and stagecoaches, and going to early cinemas. Skins, meat, herbs, and the like can be sold at stores, fetching different prices in different locations. There are also several challenges you can complete in the fields of hunting, herb-collecting, sharpshooting, and treasure-hunting, all with their own rewards.

You can be a good Samaritan or a feared outlaw. If the latter, a bounty will probably be placed on your head if you're seen committing a crime, and both posses and police will hunt you. Bounties can be paid off or pardoned, and witnesses can be bribed to keep quiet. There are a good deal of crimes to commit like robbery, horse theft, murder, kidnapping, burglary, and bank robbery.

The game has a plethora of weapons available such as revolvers, repeaters, shotguns, rifles, sniper rifles, dynamite, knives, lassos, semi-auto pistols, and even the occasional Gatling or Maxim gun. During combat, you can enter "Deadeye Mode", which temporarily slows time and lets you place a few aimed shots in quick succession. As you progress, this gets better and better until you can mark targets in Deadeye and do things like shoot guns from hands or shoot several men in a real-time second. The Deadeye meter depletes with use, however, and can replenish with either time or the use of certain items.

The story ranges from decent to compelling, and is pretty long. By the end, you'll probably have become attached to some of the characters. You can participate in things like hunting outlaws or the Mexican civil war.

Different outfits can be unlocked, some of which are purely aesthetic but others have effects like disguising yourself as a gang member, improving your Deadeye, and even complete immunity to the law. Which is, of course, hilarious. Nothing quite like lassoing and hogtying random passers-by and lacing them on the train tracks for the sake of evil. Another fun activity is hunting. However, be VERY careful while doing so, or even while travelling through certain areas, because predators are extremely aggressive and often come in large numbers, even the bears. Cougars are best described as Velociraptors trained by ninjas: Fast, silent, and very deadly. They're so bad I call them "satans" and refuse to travel through their territory at anything slower than a gallop.

Multiplayer looks fun, though I've yet to try it. There's even a free roam mode which has you and your friends exploring and fighting across the whole map together.

Now for the downsides. Most of the music is pretty forgettable, apart from four songs that only play once each:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yag41F7eCLU&feature=BFa&list=PL880D572DF1EA418B&index=18
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ9iflvCwok&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IkvAb6THQY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wfNjf1cWRs&feature=related

There are occasional glitches, particularly one in which you stay unmoving on the ground after crashing a horse cart. After a while, you get more money than you know what to do with, and there aren't too many things to buy.

I'd highly recommend this to anyone with a PS3 or Xbox 360. It's one of the best games I've ever played.

Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War

Company: Namco Bandai
Release Date: 25APR2006
Platform: PlayStation 2
Rating: T



This is one of Namco's series of Ace Combat games, arcadey combat flight simulators that put you at the controls of a ton of different aircraft to fly various missions (ground assault, dogfighting, a combination of the two, etc.). Their first really good one was Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies (2001), a groundbreaking installment with a good story and just the right amount of difficulty. They followed that up with Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War (2004), which more or less continued the formula of air combat from AC04, adding extra planes, wingman commands, and a vastly expanded storyline that took center stage in the game.

The Ace Combat games take place in a Strangereal world that features many aircraft, weapons, cultural memes, and whatnot from modern Earth, but with vastly altered geography and history. Most of the countries in the Strangereal world have analogs on Earth: the Osean Federation is basically the USA, while the Union of Yuktobanian Republics is basically Russia/the USSR and Belka is basically (Nazi) Germany. One of the seminal moments in the world's history was the 1995 Belkan War, in which Belka invaded most of its neighbors in a lightning strike, but was eventually pushed back by a coalition including Osean and Yuktobanian forces in addition to groups of smaller nations around Belka. Threatened with the occupation of their heartland, the Belkan fascists detonated seven nuclear weapons to block the allied spearheads, killing thousands of their own civilians in the process. The Belkan leadership was overthrown by its horrified citizenry, which agreed to an armistice with the allies and ended the war.



Fig. 1: The Belkan fortress of Glatisant

Since ACZ's gameplay mechanics and storyline were basically defined in light of AC5, I'll start with the latter. AC5 centered around the Circum-Pacific War in the fall and winter of 2010, in which Osea and Yuktobania fight a destructive war, which, as it turns out, was orchestrated by a cabal of Belkans bitter about the outcome of the 1995 war. As the flight lead of Osea's Wardog Squadron (later the Razgriz Squadron), the player character battled Yukes and eventually discovers the truth about the war, and helps the leaders of both Osea and Yuktobania stop the fighting and defeat the Belkans once again. Pretty much everything in that game was overshadowed by the happenings of the Belkan War, and upon its release pretty much everybody knew that Namco's next Ace Combat game would just have to be about that conflict.

Whereas AC5's storyline and plot were very well developed and fleshed out in pre-rendered CGI sequences before and after missions, ACZ's were a bit more sketchy. You're kind of dropped into the middle of the fight with little information about what's going on, and if you hadn't played the previous game you might get lost pretty quickly. Still, it's not as though the plot's absolutely necessary to complete the game (shooting down the bad guys is pretty simple) and the descriptions did get better as the game went on.

Of course, this also has a plus side. Much of the complaining about AC5 centered around the premise that the game was too plot-heavy: characters blathering on about how much the war sucked (the game came out right at the beginning of the global reaction against the American war in Iraq and it really freaking showed) pretty much filled the game up entirely, and the voice acting, while not bad at all, was frequently kinda uninspired and sometimes even hammy (hammy for video game voice acting, that is, although I have pretty high standards for good VAing these days, namely, Mass Effect 2). AC5 also implemented a dialog system for use in combat, which annoyed a lot of people, especially since your 'yes/no' answers were basically meaningless except twice, when they decided which of two missions you would fly next (something that was extremely unclear at the time), and were very distracting. Others liked the sense of immersion that was kind of lacking in AC04, when the player character was an aloof pilot who was always talked about to the extent that it seemed like player fellatio (ground forces retreating in terror from "that ribbon plane" or "the Grim Reaper", depending on how badly they were hyperventilating, etc.).

Instead of player interaction with the plot by dialog choices, ACZ's form of interaction was much more subtle. In each mission, there were, in addition to 'red' targets (necessary to complete the mission) and 'green' ones (optional), there were 'yellow' targets, representing defenseless enemies (damaged planes, soldiers' tents) or civilian properties (windmills, houses); the number of yellow targets you destroyed each mission had an effect on your Ace Style. Destroy a lot of yellow targets, and you're labeled a 'Mercenary', with the game adjusting your enemies and the dialog accordingly; destroy very few, and you're a 'Knight', and destroy a balanced number, and you are a 'Soldier'. This also affects the paint jobs you can acquire for your planes (always important) and what planes you can be permitted to purchase.

The CGI renders of AC5 had focused on the story of the Wardog/Razgriz pilots. Although the player character (callsign "Blaze") never spoke, and his face was always obscured, Wardog 2 (CPT Kei "Edge" Nagase), Wardog 3 (LTC Alvin "Chopper" Davenport KIA, later CPT Marcus "Swordsman" Snow), and Wardog 4 (CPT Hans "Archer" Grimm) all had prominent roles in the dramedy/action, along with journalist Albert Genette, CPT John "Heartbreak One" Bartlett, and Wolfgang "Pops" Buchner. By contrast, ACZ reveals nothing whatsoever about the player character, "Cipher", who went by "Galm One" ("Galm" being an amusing Japanese mistransliteration of the Norse demon-dog Garmr) and "the Demon Lord of the Round Table". Instead, the plot centered on a series of interviews conducted in 2005 with several aces that Cipher shoots down (the interviews vary based on your Ace Style), combined with documentary discussion of the outline of the Belkan War. It was a somewhat more experimental way to handle things, but in my opinion it succeeded fairly well.



Fig. 2: Larry "Pixy" Foulke, "Galm Two", being interviewed

ACZ did not have as many flyable aircraft as AC5 did - while the first game had 51 flyable planes from the real world and 2 fictional flyable planes, ACZ "only" permitted you to play with 33 real-world planes and 3 fictional ones. Still, that's more than enough choice to ensure a large amount of replay value and I was honestly not disappointed with the selection at all. Part of the reason that AC5's plane numbers were so inflated is that each plane was restricted to one special weapon, so multiple variants of the same plane were sometimes included to show off greater amounts of special weapons (e.g. the F/A-18C Hornet, which had antiship missiles, was next to the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, which had air-to-air missiles, and the EF-18G Growler, which employed electronic jamming equipment). In ACZ, each and every plane comes with a choice of three special weapons (including usually at least one air-to-surface weapon and one air-to-air weapon), two of which must be purchased to unlock. ACZ lets you play with most of the modern world's favorites: the F/A-22 Raptor, the F-15C Eagle (the game's flagship plane), the F-14D Super Tomcat, the aforementioned Hornet, the MiG-29A Fulcrum, the Su-27 Flanker (a beautiful freaking plane), the Eurofighter, and the Gripen are all on the list. So are some older planes, like the F-5E (a staple of Ace Combat games), the J35J Draken, the F-4E Phantom, and the MiG-21bis Fishbed are all available. Specialized ground-attack planes like the A-10 Warthog, the F-117A Nighthawk, and the Su-32 Strike Flanker are also in the mix.



Fig. 3: Mig-21bis Fishbed during the Battle of Anfang [Operation BROOM] 20JUN1995; Yellow, Green, and Red targets clearly visible

While ACZ's missions are fewer in number than AC5's (there are 18, same as AC04), they are much, much harder. It's very clear that they amped up the difficulty from the previous game, in part due to complaints that AC5 was actually easier than AC04. Partially this is accomplished by improved AI, but the game also unleashes a much larger torrent of enemies against you: there are 169 "named" enemy aces in the game in total, all of whom have better planes and better intelligence than the average gormless fool in his Phantom or Fishbed or whatever. Defeating some of them can be a real pain in the ass, especially when combined with hordes of mook planes, SAMs, antiaircraft fire, and the patented Ace Combat superweapons. The difficulty was almost intimidating for me at first, and when I first played ACZ I was at the top of my game in both previous PS2 Ace Combat games on the highest difficulty level. It took me awhile to adjust. The last three missions in particular - the final clash in Airspace B7R (the "Round Table", see below), the attack on the Avalon Dam, and the duel with the ADFX-02 Morgan - are probably the toughest slate of missions in any Ace Combat game, bar none.

Of superweapons, there are three: "Excalibur", a tower-mounted long-range laser system (and it's actually a laser, i.e. it fires a continuous beam); the XB-0 "Hresvelgr", a massive airborne flying fortress (akin to the Arkbird of AC5, but on steroids); and the V2 rockets located at the Avalon Dam. To destroy the last of these, ACZ brought back the famous "tunnel flight", a staple of Ace Combat games, in which the player must do, well, exactly what's on the tin: fly her plane into a very small tunnel with not a whole lot of space to maneuver in order to do to the enemy superweapons what Lando Calrissian and Wedge Antilles did to the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi. Ace Combat 5 had three separate tunnel flights in two missions, one of which featured enemies attacking from in front and behind; Ace Combat Zero only has one, and there are no attacking enemy planes, but it must be flown three times in order to destroy all targets inside, and it's dark as all hell so you can't really see what's going on.



Fig. 4: Excalibur firing at approaching allied bombers

As you may have divined from the "Excalibur" superweapon, the "Avalon" dam, and Cipher's title "Demon Lord of the Round Table", ACZ employs an Arthurian mythical motif. This is in sharp contrast to AC5, which also centered around a mythical story, but a fictional one: that of the demon "Razgriz". In ACZ, however, we get something much more familiar, and it works a lot better. The stage on which Belkan and allied planes duel is a plateau called the "Round Table", and Cipher, master in three separate major engagements there, is its Demon Lord. In addition to the Avalon Dam and Belka's Excalibur, the Belkans construct a defensive fortress line called the "Hydrian Line" to stave off Osean attacks (a clear reference to Hadrian's Wall, a key element in plenty of Arthurian tales). And finally, the prototype Belkan plane that also serves as the final boss, the ADFX-02 Morgan, is named after the sorceress Morgan le Fay. In order to defeat that plane, you have to shoot missiles at its frontal air intakes, forcing you to basically "joust" with the enemy pilot, an incredibly dangerous endeavor (making the Morgan and its pilot one of, if not the, toughest bosses in the entire Ace Combat series) and adding to the Arthurian references.



Fig. 5: Passing the ADFX-02 Morgan at high speed during the "joust" (Cipher is flying his canonical F-15C)

The Ace Combat games have always had an unusually good soundtrack, and ACZ was no exception. Although it didn't make much of an impression early on, the music really picks up later in the game, and the attack on the Avalon Dam and the duel with the Morgan have some of the best music in any Ace Combat game, rivaling the fine tracks from Ace Combat 6, Ace Combat 04, and Ace Combat 5. I might quibble a bit because it isn't the series' absolute best (Ace Combat 5 had the most consistently high-quality soundtrack), but that's really just nitpicking.

The game's focus is on the single player mode, and providing an experience that's got enough replay value to keep players interested. By comparison, the couch multiplayer received much less thought. You can play with a friend using any planes you've already unlocked and bought in the campaign in a series of mission types: head-to-head; a Battlefront-type clash between the two of you, each at the head of a squadron of AI minions; obstacle-course race; competitive attacks on the AI (air, ground, or both). It's basically a rehash of AC04's multiplayer, albeit something that was sorely lacking from AC5. I wasn't particularly happy with it, but I was happy it was there.

Anyway.

Overall, I would say that my takeaway from Ace Combat Zero was very positive. While I missed the plot elements of AC5 and the relatable characters (even if many of them were whiny, they were still the best the series produced) as well as the sheer number of missions, the increase in difficulty made the game a fine successor to the rest of the series and the soundtrack held up very well. If there were anything else I might complain about, it would be the comparative lack of innovation in the series. Mostly, they just used the generally-successful air combat mechanics of the previous two games, and incremented other areas, like tweaking the plane selection, plot, and whatnot. While I myself didn't have much of a problem with it - don't mess with success - enough people did that eventually the series took a huge leap with the most recent title, Assault Horizon, which revamped combat entirely and brought new focus in to close-in engagements that looked way way cooler.

7/10.

Right, annother Review/Summary/bored item hybrid.
But I'll aim for the Review, it's just a beautiful game...
Anno 2070
Anno 2070 is Ubisoft's latest adventure into island-building games. And for once, it's not in the past. It's in the future. I will point this out as one of the reasons the game is so great: Being in the future you will never get the feeling that something is wrong for X happened in year Y. It's the future.
And you'd better make the best of it.
The setting is very, very simple. It's 2070 (the title was a bit of a giveaway). You are one of the people alive on an earth that was very recently ravaged by some flooding (example: Oman is now two different islands, the Great Lakes are connected to the sea) and the world's climate going awry. This did result in a green sahara though.
Then the world divided itself up into the following factions:
Global Trust: A megacompany, for a given value of mega (off the scale?). I won't go into the bonus for choosing them here since that's another section.
Eden Initiative: Aka Ecos. You can sorta guess now. They want to live in harmony with nature etc etc blah blah blah. oh yes. They want to bomb everyone who disagrees.
S.A.A.T.P: Because I just couldn't be bothered to write the whole name. These are the people who are the scientists. Like, all of them have a minimum IQ of 130 and they are ruled by a very smart AI.
Oh yeah, there's people like Trenchcoat the Black Market dealer (I want his ship ) and Hector the pirate, and tons of other NPCs.
on the note of NPCs...
Every NPC has an affiliation to one of the above major parties (save for: Trenchcoat, Hector, etc etc.). They vary from being eco-terrorists to stuck up buisnessmen, and they all distrust you. And there's a Jorgensen, of course, couldn't have Anno without them. I just wish she had something to do with music and really bad singing
Oh yes. You also have a thing called an "Ark", which allows express deliveries for money.

Back to the factions, what they can do and their problems.
Global Trust:
+ Massive Population
+ Massive income
+ Propaganda that gives you more tax
- Low Env
- Electricity guzzlers
- very complex production lines.
Eden Initiative:
+ Can raise ENV
+ can build the hovercraft, a fast ship
+ Various differing Propaganda.
- Low production
- Low electricity
- "overlapping"
- Low population
S.A.A.T.P
+ can settle underwater
+ Allows research
+ Airplanes
- Come too late to be worth it
- Assistants require algae which can only be grown underwater (suprise suprise)
- Too many refineries necessary
- Things cost too much.

Campaign is nice but lacking in parts. (I will not go into major detail, I do not wish to spoil your games )
Graphics are the same as anno 1404, but slightly more, and many concepts are also from this game.
Sounds: This game has the most calming music a strategy game can have. Sometime it's rather depressing.
Also, if you zoom in, where in the Tycoons it's all "profit from our offer" Ecos are all hippies.

Furtherly, overall, 9.5/10. The DRM is not that bad actually. Just don't try weird stuff, i.e. accessing the download from the ubi.com account like I did (and it failed to download some files)

I'll do a quick review of Skyrim for those interested in buying it. I am hesitant to review this game because I haven't finished it, but I do have over 50 hours into it. At the rate I'm going, I'll probably have over 200 hours before I finish it, but I'd rather review it now, rather than later. The only thing I can't review is the ending. But I wouldn't spoil that anyways.

Graphics: Graphics are very impressive. Although I may have that texture bug people are talking about. I'm not exactly sure what textures even are, but I do get these wavy lines on objects sometimes, I'm not sure if that's the same bug, or maybe a graphical card issue. It makes the objects look a little blurrier than they should be and not crisp and clear. This is easily made up for with gorgeous dungeons and caves, and of course the beautiful outdoor areas. The caves are different from each other, and you won't find the sort of repetitiveness you might find in a game such as Dragon Age 2. I give it a high score, but note top notch graphics were never necessary for me anyways. Grade: A

Sound: The sound is pretty good for the most part, I'll grade the music separately. I like the animal sounds, and footsteps. The voices aren't loud enough in my opinion, and I had to turn down the effects sound, keep voices at 100%, and raise the sound on my speakers so I can hear them clearly. Grade: A

Music: The music is pretty good, although I admit I'm more of a fan of Bioware music. Sons of Skyrim is a pretty good song. There's also this other song that plays that I really enjoy. My only complaint is the mixing. Sometimes the music is too loud in town, so I turned it down some, but now I don't even notice the music. It doesn't seem to play outside in dangerous areas, which is a good thing of course, so I can hear enemies footsteps. The downside is there is so much great music that I have yet to hear. I don't spend a lot of time in towns. I'm actually listening to this ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqQ6Q0VEZgY ) right now as I write this. Unfortunately it doesn't have a song list, so I can't tell you the name of the song I really enjoy. Great music, I just wish it stood out better in the game without being overpowering. Grade: A

Action: Combat action is decent, but limited of course by the first person perspective and limited spell selection. My main gripe is it gets repetitive when facing enemies you are familiar with. I have a theif/mage type character, but I primarily use firebolts except against more than 2 enemies (I tend to run out of magicka when facing more than 2 enemies). Firebolting is fun, but it get repetitive after a while. But you can mix it up if you want. You can conjure up summons to fight for you. I have yet to do that, but I may someday. Or you can just heal up your companions and watch them fight. Combat isn't the best, but it is satisfying. Duel wielding was a major improvement which helps make up for less spells and stats. Grade B+

Story: The story is adequate, but as we all know, story isn't Bethesda's strong point. I'd say the story is improved over Oblivion and even Morrowind. Quests are better as well. Although some of it is cliche fantasy stuff. I haven't finished the main quest story, I'm grading based on as much as the main quest I have done, and questlines for the mage and thieves guild I've done. Grade B

Characters/NPC's: This kind of goes with story, but I'll grade it separate. As usual for Bethesda, their NPC's lack any kind of emotion or personality. Are they all Vulcan's? There is no drama to be had here. Grade: D

Character level up system: I'm grading this separate because it is a serious issue with past Bethesda games. The leveling system is better imho than Oblivion and Morrowind. No more worrying about getting 5X Endurance upgrades for the HP's. It's a little disheartening they felt the need to get rid of stats like agility and whatnot, but made up somewhat with the perks. The perks are a little unimaginative, however. It's a little dumbed down for the console crowd, and getting rid of many spells was a mistake. Enemies level scaling with you hurts character development somewhat, because you need to develop your combat skills evenly with your non-combat skills, or you will be hurting. Overall it's an improvement over past Elder Scrolls games, but still can't compare to other games. Grade: B

Roleplay: I'm back and forth on this. The freedom to do what you want is amazing (although there are unkillable NPC's which I don't really agree with- Fallout: New Vegas didn't have that many unkilllable NPC's). This is limited somewhat by the fact that you need to develop certain skills due to the games level scaling enemies. If you want to be a peaceful crafter, you are SOL. You better stay in town, or you'll get your butt whooped when you go outside of town. If the enemies didn't level scale so much, you'd have even more freedom to roleplay. Roleplay is also limited due to the linear questing. Although to be fair, I have seen some quests with optional objectives that allow you to do a quest slightly different. But the overall plot of the quest lines (like the ones involving the mages and thieves guild) cannot be altered. You either do it, or you don't. Grade: B+

Bugs: There are many bugs in this game, but nothing gamebreaking. Game balance is a serious issue, but you can still work around it to complete your objectives. Some enemies will be really tough, but this forces you to think of alternate ways of defeating them. There are many graphical bugs. I've come to expect that with Bethesda games and engines. The game and quests are playable. Grade: B+ (A being the fewest bugs, and F being unplayable)

Interface: horrible, horrible, horrible. That's all I can really say. Oh, did I mention the interface is horrible? I should note I'm grading this on the PC, I'm not speaking for console interface. The game is designed for consoles, and it suffers because of it. But the interface is usable, and you can play the game with it. Grade: D-

Immersion: By immersion I am speaking how much you feel like you are in a game world. Elder Scrolls games usually get high praise for this. But I think their praise is too high. As beautiful as the world is, it's still feels a little dry and sterile. The people don't feel real to me. Visually it looks like you are there, but I feel the game lacks personality to make you truly feel you are in the world. Grade: B

One gripe is the game feels a little unfinished. And I felt they got a little lazy with clothing and armor. And why are people running around with robes in the middle of a harsh blizzard? Silly. The game should have cloaks, and even coats to put over your gear. They got lazy I think, and didn't want to fashion more clothing items. Grade on the game being finished: B-

Overall score for the game: A- (PC version)

Not my favorite RPG (Fallout New Vegas probably is still my favorite, and I think I like a couple Bioware games over this), but it's an amazing game. Will it stand the test of time? I tend to get bored of Bethesda games rather quickly. It's because their games don't have personality, and their characters don't have personality at all. The game lacks drama. It's worth playing through once at least, and maybe again with mods. We'll see. I may come back to this review after a year and evaluate. For comparison I grade Oblivion as a D+, and Morrowind as a C+

I'll post the link to this amazing soundtrack again. Listen to it in the background while you do other stuff on the internet. In game it's either too loud or too soft, but when writing posts and doing stuff on the internet, it's great background music.


Link to video.

You're high if you think Morrowind and Oblivion were bad games.

Oblivion wasn't a bad game. It was good for it's time. We just got tired of it after about 5 years.

Oblivion was bad, I never got past 20 hours of it. Morrowind I never said was bad. I gave it a C+ which is slightly above average. Like I mentioned many pages ago, my grades aren't like gamespot and the like which never give major games less than 85%. To me, average is a C which is 75%. Morrowind I would give a 79%.

BTW, I forgot to give a percentage to Skyrim. I said A-, I'll give it a 92%.

Your review is representative of something about Skyrim; while there are nagging annoyances and minor disappointments with almost every aspect of the game (you give most aspects C's and B's), somehow you can't stop playing and the game is amazing (you give the game A-). I don't quite agree with some of your more negative points, but I kind of do the same; I complain a lot about certain things, notably the lack of diversity in loot and the UI, but the sheer immersion and content just makes this game way better than any game I've played in recent years. Many of the flaws are hard to correct in a huge game like this, I guess they could have kept working on it for more years to add loot and branching choices and such, it's true that most of the roleplay is found in doing or not doing something... But they have to release it as SOME point. And... with the high quality of production these days (voice acting, graphics, animations, all these assets), it has become really expensive to be so diverse. It's like a dilemma between content and assets, where games with really low assets can have a lot of branching and diverse content and vice versa. In that sense, I find that Skyrim achieves quite a lot of content based on the quality of its assets. I can't want for a mod like Francesco's mod for Oblivion to show up in Skyrim. I'm also curious about what the DLC will focus on... Gameplay content or just more tacked on regions?

I find the quests a little more involving than past titles, I think that's why I like it. People complain the thieves and mages guild questlines are short, and that you rise to the top too quickly. But I still prefer quality over quantity. It's not the sheer number of quests that is important (if that was the case WOW would be the best game), but the quality of them. The quests aren't perfect, I still feel like the quests can be even more involving, but improvement is improvement. It's why I haven't gotten bored of this game like I have with Oblivion and Morrowind.

I was pointing out to Maniacal in Steam Chat that I'm getting close to 80 hours, and all I've done is like 2/3rd of the Thieves Guild, 2/3rd of the main quest, and most quests in Riften, which is where "I live", I've only done 2-3 daedric quests, I'm level 37. I've only recently started using more fast travel because I don't want to retrod the same roads over and over, but every time there is a region I haven't really explored much I fast-travel close to it and explore it, and there are still areas I haven't really seen. There are 9 holds to do quests in and become Thane, there are a lot more factions and daedric quests, so much stuff everywhere. I think that when I'm done with this character I will be able to start at least 2-3 other characters and experience entirely different quests and content with them. Hundreds of hours, unmodded.

I'm working on a review of Arkham City. I didn't play the first game though, so if someone has played both games and wants to review, feel free to go ahead.

I figure I'll update Skyrim a little. Not much has changed in my review. I have 137 hours played, and have finished the main campaign and all the achievements. I have also done all the major guild lines. The only major thing I have not done is become Thane of each city.

I still give it an A-, but I'll bump it down to 91% because of the bugs. One thing I did not review is system stability and bugs. I'll do so now. I have had about 4 or 5 hard lockups requiring computer reboots, and over 20 crashes to desktop requiring me to restart the game. Numerous graphical glitches (I'm not sure how much of this was my video card) including dragons flying backwards, fog that doesn't show up, waterfalls that don't show up etc. Nothing game breaking, the main quest and many side quests can be done. Balance is also an issue. A power attack with dual one handed weapons will do much more damage than a dual fire spell.

I'm going to knock the score down to a 91%. Damn good game worth investing many hours into. I just wish it was a little more stable. See my review above on post #264 for the rest of the review.

electric926 said:

I'm working on a review of Arkham City. I didn't play the first game though, so if someone has played both games and wants to review, feel free to go ahead.

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Haven't played Arkham City, but I wouldn't mind reviewing Arkham Asylum.

Arkham Asylum is a console game through-and-through, and I don't mean that as a perjorative; it is what it is, and it happens to be an exceptional example of it.
Thinking about what it precisely is that makes this game so good, I think it boils down to this: it does an amazing job of making you feel like Batman. You've got the gadgets, you've got the moves, you've got the swagger, you've got the gravel in your mouth, it's all there but it's more than that. There are plenty of games where your character is supposedly some impossibly skilled ubermensch, and you see this in either cutscenes or whatever pop culture thing it's based on, but when you get into the game it's very hard to make an ordinary player really feel like that super-skillful guy. Usually it kind of feels like you're guiding this powerful guy on awkward marionette strings while he silently shakes his head in frustration at the idiot controlling him. It's usually either compensated by really big health bars or big, showy scripted moves that don't quite seem connected to the button press that makes them do it.

This is a game where they've really nailed the controls, and it absolutely makes all the difference in the world. It makes performing the moves so natural that it's more about choosing the right thing to do rather than being capable of the precise button timing to pull off a move that should be second nature to a guy like Batman. It applies through all of the game and all of Batman's fancy gadgets, but where it really soars are in the main meat-and-potatoes bits; the fighting and the stealth.
Fistfighting is almost like a dance; you're usually arrayed against a whole horde of hostile partners, and the secret to success is to keep up the constant rhythm of the dance of attacks, blocks, dodges and special attacks to build up big combos. It's a system that really punishes mindless button mashing, but it's quite simple and intuitive to pick up the gist of it. It's hard but completely possible and immensely rewarding to go through a whole group of aggressors without taking a hit or once breaking the rhythm of your fighting moves.
And the stealth sections involve taking on groups of gun-wielding guys who can and will utterly shred you in seconds if they get a bead on you. But at every stage, you feel like the hunter; and when you time it right, it feels almost effortless to drop down from gargoyles to take a guy out and then grappling away again into the shadows before his buddies know what to do. It may not be the most in-depth stealth system ever, but it's always the stealthy games - where one false step can give the game up - that it's so much more frustrating to be fighting against the controls, and it's refreshing that it plays so easily. The other really nice thing about the stealth system is that the bad guys get more and more agitated as they start noticing their buddies becoming fewer and fewer. They get jumpy, they start teaming up, they start panicking; and while it can make it harder to keep taking them out, it sure makes you feel powerful at the same time.
None of this makes the game super easy (though it's not overly hard either); you don't have that much health and you're often arrayed against a lot of guys, sometimes with a few tricks up their sleeves. It's that they've managed to make it so rewarding and make you feel so powerful when you overcome its challenges. In a lot of ways, you could liken the gameplay to the Assassin's Creed games, but I rarely felt like I was fighting against the game like I so often did with the Assassin's Creeds, and the whole experience feels a lot more polished and a lot less frustrating.

The graphics are great, and the style is spot on - that sort of Tim Burton kind of thing, the sort of world where the concept of Batman doesn't quite seem so silly. Good voice acting too, especially Luke Skywalker doing the Joker. Though the game is pretty linear, the island is hub-based enough that it comes across as more of a place and less of a series of corridors. And it really is a pretty damn cool setting. The #1 problem with the graphics is that you've got Detective Mode vision - a Predator-vision sort of thing that highlights enemies and useful objects etc, and which is so damn useful and has so few downsides that it's often a struggle to make yourself switch back to normal vision and actually enjoy the sights.

There's a few criticisms of it though. By far the biggest complaint is that the PC version uses Games For Windows Live, and I could see this being a dealbreaker for some people. I'd probably suggest picking up the console version if you have one (incidentally, it works fine with mouse/keyboard but I think it would work even better on a controller).
The second issue is that the boss fights are terribly uneven. Some are truly excellent, but some are pretty much the same miniboss fight repeated a few too many times, and one in particular (in a sewer) is just downright dreadful and a total disconnect from the rest of the game. There's the aforementioned detective vision, which is also involved with some of the game's sillier sequences. There's also a little bit of a disconnect between the different gameplay elements - the demarcation of where there's a grappling section, and here's a beat-em-up section, and here's a stealthy-fighting-guys-with-guns section is often a bit too obvious and a little immersion-breaking.
But pretty minor complaints in the scheme of things, and the whole package is amazingly solid, ridiculously well-polished and really fun. I'd have to give it a 9/10.

Polycrates said:

Good voice acting too, especially Luke Skywalker doing the Joker.

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If you're describing Mark Hamill as "Luke Skywalker doing the Joker", you haven't watched nearly enough Batman cartoons.

Dungeon Defenders: developed by an indie studio in Florida using the Unreal engine, this is a hybrid game which is primarily a blend of tower defense game and action-rpg (think Torchlight/Diablo for the action-RPG, not Skyrim/Oblivion).

In short, I give this game a B+, because it's and addicting blend of the genres in real time, with doses of teamwork, campaign story, a broad variety of interesting alternative game modes, nice graphics, 3D 3rd person shooter, hack and slash RPG, and a bit of a free-for-all of loot whoring.

It's hard to say what this game most resembles, except maybe the RTS/3d Shooter hybrid Tremulous (another indie mod game, this time of alien vs. space marine) which had real time RTS building during the action. Unlike a RTS/Shooter hybrid, Dungeon Defenders only has you building Tower defenses which are typically towers, auras/traps, or passive defenses (e.g. walls). The strength of this tower building game is that teamwork is needed since there are limited build points, RPG class-specific buildings, and characters can upgrade any of the team's buildings as long proportionate to their own character level. Building is limited by a max cap per level, as well. So building is partly a scramble to collect mana (dropped by slain mobs directly, earned by selling gear mobs dropped, or dropped at the end of a battle wave), with mana also being used to power special attacks, or banked.

So there's a strong teamwork balance in which you can't succeed without teamwork, but there's also a strong self-interest---bank mana for yourself, loot whore for yourself from gear dropped in battle, or look out for team. Since kills are individually tracked without experience sharing, you might even be selective about which towers you upgrade (yours!).

The 3D action aspect of the game plays well too. Torchlight comes to mind immediately in the display and options. Basically you get a primary and alt attack, a range of weapons you can pick up with somewhat different characteristics (it doesn't approach the craziness of Borderlands, but there is a degree of customization available). Each class also has special attacks, like the Ranger gets a spreadshot attack to a missile weapon. The level mapping is solid and characters can jump around like Mario, dodging mob attacks, trying to pull mobs, dodge around towers and walls, execute flank attacks, etc... Playing the Ranger class (shooter primarily) felt a bit like playing an Unreal Tournament game after I upgraded the character's speed trait with experience leveling

Each level plays out as a series of waves, with a build phase between waves, which individual players can veto to speed up game progression (voting GO to start the timer to end a build phase). Some of the levels have a boss wave (boss plus mobs). The campaign strings together a story as you beat all the levels (approximately 8 hours of content there).

Some thought went into the mobs you play against. Though they act typical for a tower defense, they have some player AI and will divert from the path of attacking your HQ (a crystal, or ogre) to attack players or towers. That lends itself to some strategy and tactics as a player can take a hit to divert an orc, or place passive walls to divert the mobs' path a little into another tower. The mobs are also varied, not just walking melee. There are orcs and goblins as basic melee, but there are also suicide bombers, archers, flying dragons, long hopping elf meleers, mages that conjure armies of skeletons melee troops over times all of which gain rank and ability over the waves. Also the points of mob entry increase over the waves, so that new entry points will be used, changing the optimal tower defense strategy.

After the campaigns you can play in alternative modes: survival (map never ends and the mobs progressive in power over waves), strategy mode (not sure what that does), an ogre mode (basically your base is a giant ogre with 5000 hitpoints, who wanders everywhere, pushing your towers out of his way), paratrooping goblins, ogre rush (survive survival onslaught of ogres), turkey hunt (kill a huge number turkeys in a limited time while avoiding nasty spawning dark elf "indians"), and others. Also the devs promise to upload additional DLC (probably free) over the months, kind of like Turtle Studios does for L4D2.

Graphically the game is very pleasing to look at in every way. At first glance I thought it looked sort of like Torchlight met Borderlands, erring on being a bit cartoony. The mobs easily look like they belong in a full-featured MMORPG. Everything (towers, environment, mobs, characters) are at least decently animated in a colorful way.

Probably the only feature I'd add to this game would be the ability to upgrade gear as in Torchlight, but basically your banked mana can be used the same way. More plentiful gear like Borderlands would be cools, but face it this is an indie game.

Darkest Hour: A Hearts of Iron Game

Now, I want you to remember that no gamer ever won a war by rage-quitting for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb gamer rage-quit for his. Men, all this stuff you've heard about trying to make an alt-history in Hearts of Iron, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Gamers traditionally love to fight. All real gamers love the sting of battle. When you were kids, you admired the Pong champion, the fastest Sonic player, the big Donkey-Kong league player, the toughest Punch-Out boxer. Gamers love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Gamers play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a one-up in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why gamers have never lost and will never lose a Darkest Hour game. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to gamers.

Now, a Darkest Hour game is a game of many facets. Economy, technology,espionage and warfare. Concentrating on one is a bunch of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for IGN don't know anything about real gaming than they do about fornicating.

This game has the best scenarios and depth, the best grand-strategic game of its time. You know, by God I pity those poor lesser strategy games it goes up against. By God, I do. This game doesn't just outrank them, it cuts out their AI and uses it to grease the Europa engine that powers this baby.

Now, some of you gamers, I know, are wondering whether you'll chicken out under the depth this game offers. Don't worry about it. I can assure you you'll do your duty. Fear of failure is your enemy. Wade into this game. Try every tactic to see what works. Restart if you have to. When you put your hand into a bunch of goo that a moment before was the remnants of your previous save-game, you'll know what to do.

Now there's another thing I want you to remember. I don't want any messages saying that you're winning through cheats. That's not winning anything. Let the AI nations do that. We will win through superior human intellect and skill. We're gonna win by holding onto the AI by the nose and we're gonna kick him in the ass. We're gonna kick the hell out of every AI nation all the time and we're gonna go through it like crap through a goose.

Alright now, you know how I feel. Oh, and I will be proud to lead you wonderful gamers into battle - anytime, anywhere.

That's all.



Darkest Hour: A Hearts of Iron Game - 4/4
A rather excellent Hearts of Iron II conversion, a great alternative to Hearts of Iron 3, and a definite purchase for anyone who wishes to extend their HoI2 gaming. Still has some of the problems of the original, but the improvements more than make up for them. And that's to say nothing of the mods available for it.

A 4-scale rating? That's remarkable.

DaemonDD said:

A 4-scale rating? That's remarkable.

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It's actually 6-scale (no really) due to my disdain for giving a numerical score for an entertainment item. 4/4 is the second best.

Edit: I also forgot to mention the review was only possible due to the lovely Luckymoose, who gifted me the game a few months ago.

I'm not going to go into too much detail here. I suck at reviews, and honestly I don't have the patience at the moment. However, I do have to put on the obligatory Call of Duty rants and review that all review places need (plus a game probably no one plays but I enjoy). First, a game I consider one of the greatest of all time-
Call of Duty 4- Modern Warfare (PC)
Graphics (22/25)- I don't ask for breathtaking, 3-D, "HOLY ****!" graphics. They are nice, but if you don't know what you are doing, the really good graphics can make a game suck (Black Ops-I'll rant later ). However, the graphics from this game are rather high-quality for something from 2007. Sure, they can glitch sometimes, but I see no problems in this category too often.
Campaign (24/25)- The campaign has a storyline that actually makes sense (unlike Black Ops, but as I said, rant later(probably tomorrow)). I only dislike the missions with Corporal MacMillian and the fact that Gaz dies ()
Game Mechanics (22/25)-The game mechanics are stable, but there are still a few flaws, but like Monty in Civ4 they are just dealt with and no one gives a **** 90% of the time
Multiplayer (23/25)- The multiplayer community is highly active, but a few people use hacks (because they have no skills like me ) and I still hate quickscopers, but other than that most people are nice and/or hilarious. Also, the game is highly flexible and easy to mod, and often many servers use the auto-hack detection PunkBuster admin services making things easy.
Overall Rating- 22+24+22+23=91

Nuclear Dawn
Grade: 85

It has been a while since I've done a review. Nuclear Dawn is a game which comes with five maps and four character classes and for the price, that's a good deal. As a soldier, you can play as the Assault Class, Exosuit Class, Stealth Class, and Support Class. If you've played Team Fortress 2, the classes will click into place. The maps are pretty fun but there's a reason why this game got a B+ instead of a C.

The game is also a RTS.

One player on each side will be selected to be the Commander. The Commander, using resources generated by resource points captured by soldiers, will build power plants, turrets, armories, and relays which extend his range. The game is usually decided by whoever can get in the building range of the other team since then, you can build a whole bunch of turrets right in their main base.

The Commander has to juggle building relays, forward spawns, supply stations (regenerate ammo and health), power stations, and not getting killed. Killed? Yes, killed. The Commander isn't a god, he's in a Command Bunker in the base and if a Stealth player with knives or a remote charge sneaks in...well, the team goes without a commander for a little bit.

The game balances the need for skilled soldiers and skilled commanders pretty well. If you have a lackluster or NO commander, your team has no chance of winning because the other team will have forward spawns and MGs all over the place sooner or later. On the other hand, if you have no soldiers, you have no resources and no way at destroying enemy structures other than your own base defenses, which costs resources (see the pattern?).

Assault Class

Assaulters are armed with either an assault rifle or a sniper rifle. The Assault Class's special power is the Visor which allows them to see cloaked spies at the high cost of being able to make out anything else (the power is togglable). Once the commander researches Advanced Kits, Assault Class soldiers can grab the Grenade Launcher kit.

Before I go on, let me explain Advanced Kits. It's basically a researchable tech during a round that allows special weapon kits to be used. For Assault players, it's the Grenade Launcher kit. For Exosuits, it is the Siege Kit. For Support, it is the BBQ Kit. Stealth Class doesn't have an Adv Kit. The thing about Advanced Kits is that they expand the roles a player can take, but doesn't replace them. For instance, an Assault player can stick with the Assault Rifle instead of the grenade launcher while a Support player can stick with being a Medic of Engineer instead of a Pyro (with tasty poison grenades).

I've logged hours into this game. I've yet to see the GL be called the "noob tube". It's handy for taking down structures and with it's somewhat rapid fire, it is a makeshift artillery weapon and it's my favorite weapon in the game. It does have it's drawbacks (some maps can really get to close and personal combat wise).

Exosuits

Think Heavy from TF2. These guys are slow and armed with a heavy chaingun. Their special ability is to plant themselves in the ground and become like turrets (it disables movement and greatly increases accuracy by narrowing the cone of fire). Their number one enemy are Assassin Stealth players since they can't see them if they're cloaked and Exosuits move pretty slow.

The Siege Kit replaces the chaingun with either a railgun or rocket launcher depending on the faction. As you may have guessed, both have slow rates of fire but powerful against structures. In a pinch, they're good anti-infantry.

Stealth

Stealth is divided into the Sniper Kit, Assassin Kit, and Saboteur (Sapper Kit). Besides the use of cloaking, all three play different.

Snipers cloak, get behind enemy lines, and snipe. Because they can cloak, they can cloak right after firing and move. If you kill a a soldier or two and force a few Assault players to come after you, you're doing your side a favor.

Assassins are armed with armblades. It's like being a Spy in TF2 only much harder it seems. Maybe it requires a lot more skill. Assassins are pretty useful are killing enemy commanders.

The Sapper Kit is armed with Remote Charges. If you're working alone, you're best bet seems to be to find enemy forward bases (forward bases usually have a supply station and a spawn point called a teleporter). You find these, plant a few charges, cloak again, and blow up enemies trying to heal. I haven't tried this yet, but if you're working with a partner, effectiveness goes way up and attacking relay stations becomes the name of the game.

Relay stations are the things that expands the enemy's build range so destroying them would be beneficial in many ways.

Support

Support is divided into Medic, Engineer, or BBQ. I admit I haven't played the first two much. The Medic is like the Medic from Battlefield Bad Company. Drop a med kit, surrounding people get healed. You tend to be useful because forward supply stations sometimes suck at healing health and sometimes, the commander doesn't build forward supply stations.

The Engineer is dedicated to repairing structures. I think it's a thankless job but one that needs doing because if a forward spawn point is under heavy attack, how long you delay the assault can be the matter of winning, losing, or tieing up the game. Also, and this is where things get fuzzy for me, I think the Engineer is armed with an EMP grenade. The EMP grenade can be used to blind targets for a very short period of time and disable structures.

The BBQ Kit, in my opinion, doesn't fit the previous two. You're now armed with a flamethrower. The weapon has a short range which, in my opinion, is horrible a lot of times but for destroying structures and close-combat, it does have its uses. I think my most used weapons are the grenades. The BBQ Kit comes with three poison grenades and three frag grenades. Poison grenades, when applied en masse, are the devil. In this game, getting damaged slows you down so poison grenades poison and slow you down (hurting your further). If the enemy is fighting at a bottleneck, three poison grenades followed by three frag grenades can do more to hurt an enemy defense or advance than anything. However, poison grenades can only be replenish at an armory (which commanders tend to only build one of and usually back at the main base).

Final Verdict: B+

Sometimes, I wish there were 60+ player servers but the max seems to be 33. I think the game would also benefit if the teleporters could teleport in between spawns instead of just being spawn points.