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Archive for the ‘Review’ Category
Ever since the concept of Downloadable Content (DLC) gained popularity within the gaming scene, we have been offered everything as a DLC in games; right from new islands (Burnout), brand new single player campaigns (GTA IV) to new multiplayer maps (COD4, COD:WaW, BF:BC) and even something as inane as horse armor (Oblivion)! Infact, now it is assumed that any new game will eventually have a DLC for it.
Anything that would extend the life of a good game is always welcome but if a couple of chapters in-game are dropped in order to be sold to us later on, then that raises certain doubts in mind. Battle for Forli, the first DLC for the brilliantly made Assassins Creed II manages to raise a few doubts of its own. Fans of the series will love the fact that Ubisoft is releasing two additional chapter (the second DLC sometime in February) missing from the main campaign, which purportedly would have delayed the game. Leaving the questions aside for a while, let’s see what the DLC has to offer.
After being in development for close to 15 long years, Avatar, the movie finally saw the light of the day a couple of weeks back. After having smashed all box-office records with Titanic, Avatar happens to be James Cameron’s next movie which all but guaranteed that the hype-wagon will steam-in, full blast. As it goes for any new high-profile Hollywood release nowadays, it is almost mandatory to have a video-game tie-in and so did Avatar, except that, this time around, the game was released earlier than the movie hit the theaters. Did letting gamers scour the make-believe world of Pandora on their PCs and consoles actually work in favor of the movie by generating an even greater buzz? Or the decision to craft a parallel story-line rather than following the one in the movie resulted in Avatar, the game falling flat on its face? Let’s find out.
You have to hand it to those guys over at Bioware. Whether its intentional or not on their part, the times at which a player is presented a particularly dicey scene right after jumping into one of the developer’s games at the very first chance they get can either be highly arousing or terribly underwhelming until enough hours have sunken. For me, it was pretty amusing right from the get go when I chose to play it safe as a Male Warrior. While walking into a kitchen where my soon-to-be-possessed pup was found stirring up a bit of conflict with the local Nanny, a gang of rats had ambushed us in the pantry. Rats! You can’t imagine how underpowered we were for this battle, even if it was a mere 1/10th of an entire nanosecond. Regardless, we took those grimfaced bastards back to the Maker. One of my party members takes the time to reflect on the situation through a dialogue tree, while looking absolutely smeared in rats blood. Clearly, this was no ordinary encounter. This was goddamn war.
Right, so maybe it wasn’t completely intentional on their parts, but I couldn’t help laugh. For all the grandiose I’ve witnessed through their trailers of epic tease and those previews of journalistic gloat, it was clear that Dragon Age: Origins (a role-playing game that’s been in the making for some time) had some hefty +2 DEX boots to fill in. Returning to their roots, Bioware once again proves that it knows how to work the fantasy realm, and that some fancy-schmancy Dungeons & Dragons ruleset wasn’t going to make or break it for anyone’s who come to love the Baldur’s Gate series. But how does such an experience fair on the mighty world of console gaming?
It was a cold winter in New York and I was one of the unlucky few that had to go to work. It had been snowing all morning, and by 2 PM, we had 12 inches of snow. Business was done, and my co-worker and I were sent home. Getting home was not a problem for me since I lived a few blocks away, but my buddy Andrei was totally screwed. So as a gesture of concern I invited the guy over for a cup of coffee. By the evening, the roads had cleared and buses resumed service. Andrei went home but forgot his goodie bag, and out of no fault of my own, I was compelled to open the plastic bag only to come upon something which would change me forever. Andrei had forgotten his very new and very precious copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I popped that bad boy in and that was it, my first sandbox-style Action-Adventure.
Being a true metal-head and a gamer, I always felt that video games need more metal, which is probably why I loved Quake II – one of my favorite tracks till this day is “Quad Machine” by Sonic Mayhem. Although Vice City did have ‘V-Rock’ and those splendid tracks by Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth, it kinda left me craving for more. “Couldn’t they have more Metal,” I would ask myself. And then after all that time, here is Brütal Legend!
Coming close on the heels of the blockbuster The Dark Knight featuring the late actor, Heath Ledger’s amazingly spine-chilling portrayal of the Joker, fans could be forgiven to assume Batman: Arkham Asylum to be just another attempt to cash in on the success of the movie with a video-game tie in. Thankfully, for both gamers as well Batman fans, not only is Arkham Asylum a superbly executed game in it’s own right but also a great chance for fans of the series to romp through the grounds of the iconic Arkham Asylum as the caped crusader.
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Surprises come in many shapes and sizes but we certainly were not expecting one to resemble a pint-sized Ninja. Having been waiting for months now for any news of IO Interactive’s bald assassin, we sure had our collective eyebrows raised, when instead of Agent 47, IO decided to spring a completely brand new game, Mini Ninjas at us. Shoving away the piano wire quickly in our back-pocket, we set down to see if this undoubtedly kid-friendly looking game would keep us distracted until IO Interactive decided to let the bar-coded assassin loose. And oh-boy, were we distracted or what!
There is something fundamentally scary about simulation games that keep me from getting anywhere close to one. Be it a driving sim like the Gran Tourismo series where I just am not able to figure out when to brake or the Microsoft Flight Simulator series, the controls of which I could never understand, managing to land my plane belly up even before even taking off. Besides the steep learning curve and the higher-than-normal difficulty factor, I have almost always considered them to be lacking in the fun quotient. This however reflects on my preferred kind of game genre and the afore-mentioned games have such huge fan-base of their own.
There is always something nice about having your favorite game from childhood arrive on your next-gen consoles in an all new avatar, complete with a shiny new paint job, updated graphics and new features. The year of 2009 has been especially good in that regard when it comes to the fighting genre. First it was Street Fighter 4 wowing long time fans with its jump to the HD age. Now was the turn of King of Fighters XII (KOF XII) to appear on our PS3s and Xbox 360s. After having successfully maintained a huge fan following on multitude of consoles and arcade machines over a period of fifteen years, all eyes were on KOF XII to see if it could recreate the same magic that has sustained it over so many years.
On September 22nd, Microsoft India hosted a launch party for the latest and much anticipated addition to the Halo saga, Halo 3: ODST, formerly Halo 3: Recon, was set up to be different from the previous installments, with a new concept, a different look and even a new protagonist. Many excited gamers assembled at the PVR Select Citywalk theater to view the unveiling of the latest Microsoft/Bungie masterpiece, and boy, as always they did not disappoint us . Even Bollywood celebrities could not keep themselves away, as Dino Morea and Aftab Shivdasani made an appearance and checked out the scene; however, the Bollywood glam wore off when one of the actors casually asked one of the gamers, “How much does an Xbox go for these days…?” Yes, I was speechless. But putting that aside, I was fortunate enough to receive a copy and review the game.
Although I might be jeered for admitting this, the Nintendo’s DS never appealed to my FPS-MP sensibilities. Over years of forum discussions and interactions with rabid fans, I never ceased to wonder what exactly these guys found so riveting on the tiny, pixilated screen. Why would any sane person pass the graphical goodness of the PS3 or the multiplayer mayhem on an Xbox 360 in favor of hunching over the tiny screen and poking it with a stylus? I had never imagined that my determination to stay away from the little rascal would be so thoroughly shattered on a rainy Sunday night while I furiously punched in words and plowed through a gem of a game called Scribblenauts!
In a time when all new game titles come with a boatload of hype in form of “Halo Killer”, “System Seller” and “Game of Forever”, I have studiously avoided the hype-train. Doing so for Scribblenauts was easier because of my previously mentioned misplaced hostility towards the DS. So while I knew that there was a soon-to-be-released game around called Scribblenauts, I was wholly unaware of the fact that the game was practically hogging all the attention at the E3 2009 floor and was the fan favorite even before it got released. Spared of all the hype, I journeyed through the world of Scribblenauts, all on my own. What a journey it turned out to be!