Here is something for the PC gamers. Razer is keen on accelerating its expansion in India and Mr. Tan Min Liang, CEO, Razer wants to share the action-plan with you. To this end, they are organizing a little tea-party with us gamers in Bangalore and Mumbai. Besides getting a chance to experience Razer’s product line-up that includes the likes of DeathAdder, Mamba, Lycosa Mirror, Vespula and Destructor, this event will also provide you with ample opportunity to interact with the brains behind Razer’s product-design as well take home a goodie bag or two. Razer is keen to stress that the event is meant for their gaming audience and would love to have as many of us show-up as possible. Now if only they had decided upon a weekend event. Anyways, for those who can make it, the event details are after the jump.

Mumbai
Date: Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Venue:
Boardroom V- , Hotel Grand Hyatt
Off Western Express Highway,
Kalina, Santacruz (East)
Mumbai, 400055

Time: 4.00 PM

Bangalore
Date: Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Venue:
Business Center Boardroom,
Taj Residency
41/3, MG Road,
Bangalore 560001

Time: 2.30 PM

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 did it first and now Just Cause 2 has done the same; rack up over 2 million downloads of its demo. Nowadays it is very rare to have a demo for a game as most of the developers / publishers do not feel the need to expend any energy in making a demo for their games. Maybe they will give this strategy a re-think considering how well received some of the demos have been in recent times, boosting up the interest in the game as well as converting fence-sitters to day-1 buyers.

Besides chocking the bandwidth, Just Cause 2’s 35 square miles of the Panauan playground featured in the demo for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 has given us some interesting figures. Hit the jump to head to the trivia section and find out what gamers have been up to in the Just Cause 2 world since the demo hit the web on 4th March 2010.

Players have driven a distance equivalent to a trip from the earth to the moon and back four times.

Panau Island has lost almost 30 million of its population.

Approximately 2.5 million headshots, almost a million drivers hurled from hijacked vehicles and 27,000 Piñata kills.

Players have BASE jumped the equivalent of a freefall through the Earth’s core, pole-to-pole, twice!

Just Cause 2 will be available for the PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system, Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and Games for Windows® and will be released under the EIDOS brand portfolio. All formats will release in-stores from March 23rd, 2010, in North America and March 26th, 2010, in Europe, Middle East, and Australasia. More information is available on the official website.

Being a massive fan of the AvP universe, and having read all the novels in the series, I know I was waiting for this one. I wanted to play the story. I desperately wanted to see Machiko Noguchi kick ass, especially after seeing the first AvP movie make it so close to that story. I wanted to see Yautja battle with honor and the Xenomorphs tear through flesh and bone.

The AvP game of 1999 (which I consider the scariest game of all time), followed a standard movie based plot, while the follow up by Sierra wasn’t very memorable either. I was REALLY hoping that someone would finally go back to the novels and comics and do something different. However, this doesn’t really happen in AvP 2010. The story pretty much follows the AvP movie, throws in the predictable Weyland-Yutani capitalist-bastard angle and doesn’t leave much to remember.

11 years after AvP, Rebellion has reloaded the franchise with all new DirectX 11 based graphics that promises to scare the bejeesus out of you while your jaw drops in awe of the stunning visuals. So does AvP 2010 live up to the hype? Or is it one of those big-title releases that can’t put its money where its mouth is? Read on and decide for yourself.

The ANGRY Pixel received a press version of the game (via Steam), from our good friends at e-xpress Interactive. While the press version allowed us to explore the Single Player game in its entirety, sadly we were unable to look at the all-so-crucial Multi Player component (which I take as a personal tragedy). The game is a whopping 16 gig download, but firing it up and getting to the first playable section, makes it all worth the endless cups of coffee and compulsive staring at the progress indicator.

Visual Appeal:

So if we’re gonna be talking about the much awaited DX11 game, it’s just fair to start with the visuals. At least that’s what most games are reduced to these days. There’s no doubt – AvP is gorgeous! Lighting effects are awesome; textures are extremely detailed, right from the Predator’s skin, to the markings on temple walls. The game models are highly detailed and animation is fluid. Indoor environments look just as good as outdoor ones and particle / fire effects and lighting make for a very believable experience visually. The game also offers a DirectX 9 mode and the differences between the two are hardly noticeable to the untrained eye. So no matter what hardware you have (please meet the MSR’s), the visual experience doesn’t change much and will leave everyone satisfied. My first born will go to Rebellion, just because they have not missed a single thing from the AvP universe. The attention to detail is just immaculate.

That said, the game did find itself launched into massive flames because of the extreme bugginess, mostly directed towards the graphics. We personally experienced annoying glitches like game freezes/stuttering for no apparent reason, instant crashes when switching on the flashlight, psychedelic textures when playing as the Predator and so on. However, we were lucky in that most of these issues pretty much sorted themselves out. A quick visit to the ‘steampowered’ forums will however, still have a number of unresolved reports. As of this writing, a patch has been released, but again, the Press version will not allow us to actually see what this patch fixes.

Bottom line – if you manage to get past the bugs by installing the patch, updating drivers or just praying real hard, this game is a treat to look at.

Sound:

The most memorable thing about AvP, whether it’s the Alien movies or the first game; is the morbid beeping of your motion tracker. It’s funny that a small, single beep can strike dread and fear in the heart of a grown man in front of a PC, but it’s been known to happen. To a friend. Of another friend. AvP 2010 pays close attention to sound and whether it’s the hiss of a steam vent, the sudden crashing of a ventilation grille, the hiss of an alien or the voice lure of the Predator – Rebellion has paid attention, they know what scares us and they’ve thrown it all into the game. There isn’t a soundtrack in the missions and that adds to the aural psychology of the game. The main menu was most impressive, with no’ visible’ signs of music, but very industrial yet organic random ambient sound.

Gameplay:

The meat of the matter, so to speak. AvP is a scary game. It’s an FPS. It’s a scary FPS. You WILL end up frantically searching the shadows and you WILL run out of flares. You WILL stalk your prey and you WILL also collect human and Alien trophies. As any of these races, you will come across boss battles and you will be challenged in these fights. The game allows you to play it as a generic FPS, but also throws in elements of stealth. Enemies are fast, aggressive and heavily armed, and while this does give you a challenge to work with, it’s also beatable.

Unfortunately, the enemy AI completely failed to impress us. Enemies are either too stupid and they will completely run past you, or they will camp forever, and be 100% accurate if you manage to peek out for a quarter of a second. Playing as the Marine, you will encounter a number of situations where Aliens just run round and round walls. You’re tempted to fire at them coz you’re now bored, but you also need to conserve ammo! Playing as the Alien to a large extent is a joke when you’re up against Marines – but I’m not sure if you could count that as a game flaw. Not to mention, the Alien has the most awful controls across the 3 races. I mean for crying out loud – why do I need to press Mouse3 if I want to climb a wall?! The fact that I’m running into it should be a good enough hint. Playing as the Predator is almost too easy in indoor missions. So there’s definitely a few balance issues, but does this really come in the way of actually enjoying the game as a “game” and not just eye-candy?

Yes and No. Sadly, we noticed that playing as the Marine wasn’t as tough as one would hope it’d be. You see an Alien run towards you and your first instinct is to fall back and fire all you got. But then again, you can walk towards it, melee it, and put it out of its misery with 1 shotgun blast at close range! Play as the Predator, and you hardly ever need to use your Pred weapons. Melee does most of the dirty work for you anyway! So after a while, it gets into a rinse-and-repeat mode, but the missions are short, so you never feel like you’ve been whacking Aliens forever.

The cut-scenes keep you involved in the story and no-one mission drags on forever. Completing all 3 SP campaigns will leave you very satisfied, although you won’t be able to shake of the feeling that something was missing. The game has you for a while and then loosens its grip too soon. Horror games are supposed to squeeze your nuts into a new galaxy, but AvP doesn’t quite manage to get this down.

Overall, we liked this game. It’s a good incarnation of an old favourite and it’s definitely a looker. While gameplay is fun, it’s not very engaging and will not justify full-retail price. Multiplayer will give you a few extra days/weeks/months of juice out of the game though. Our recommendation – if you have the hardware to support this – go for the PC version. Being a big AvP fan, I REALLY want to get the PS3 version, but for some reason, I’m giving it a pass. Maybe it’s my cheapness, but it’s probably also the fact that I want an awesome game to play that’s good to look at, not a game that’s awesome to look at but good to play.

7.5 / 10
Review Copy Courtesy:

Wrapping up the adventure of Ezio that he set upon in Assassin’s Creed II, Bonfire of the Vanities is the second DLC for the game, which also happens to be the missing 13th chapter in the game. A corruption in the memory sequence meant that you jumped straight from chapter 11 to chapter 13 in the game. The two missing chapters were provided as DLC’s by Ubisoft, costing 320 MS points each. Battle of Forli (BOF) made up for chapter 12 and now Bonfire of the Vanities (BOTV) completes all the missing chapters.

BOTV sets the scene by introducing us to a tyrannical Luddite priest, Girolamo Savonarola. With the Apple of Eden in his possession, he takes control of Florence after the demise of the de facto ruler, Lorenzo de’ Medici and promptly passes a Taliban-like decree that the city can no longer have any of its vanities which include books, paintings, music, consigning everything to the bonfires. Now you just can’t sit around and watch so the task falls upon you to neutralize the priest and his nine lieutenants as well as recover the Apple of Eden.

To get to the priest, you will have to bump off his lieutenants first, which forms the meat of the game. Most of these high-profile targets will take a lot of sneaking around before you can get anywhere close to them to make the kill. In that respect, the DLC does take you back to the very premise of the game; to be a cold blooded assassin who swoops in unnoticed, makes the kill and then disappears into the crowd. Good enemy AI helps the cause as it doesn’t feel like you are steam-rolling through the game.

Much like BOF, this DLC doesn’t bring anything new to the table in terms of achievements, upgrades or new weapons to swing around. What it does manage to do is get the best parts of the game and compress it together into one single DLC. If you finished the game when it came out, then you will enjoy playing BOTV and re-living the experience of Assassin’s Creed II once again. It is better than BOF for sure but then again, we come back to the same question; why take two chapters out of the game and then sell them as a DLC when retaining them would have only made Assassin’s Creed II even better an experience.

Review Code Courtesy:

Enjoyed playing Batman Arkham Asylum? How about giving it another spin, only this time, you get to see the action in 3D! The Xbox 360 and PS3 version of Batman Arkham Asylum Game Of The Year Edition will feature Trioviz™ 3D implementation along with two 3D glasses and a host of new features. Hit the jump to see what all will be in the box.

Additional content from the GAME OF THE YEAR EDITION
• Scarecrow Nightmare Challenge Map: a combat map for expert players set in the Scarecrow’s nightmarish world where players will need to fight against hordes of skeleton henchmen.
• Crime Alley Challenge Map: a combat map set in this iconic location from Gotham City that has been overrun by The Joker’s henchmen.
• Totally Insane Challenge Map: a combat map set in the heart of Arkham Asylum where players will need to fight against waves of lunatics.
• Nocturnal Hunter Challenge Map: an Invisible Predator map where players will need to seize back control of the Prison Watchtowers from The Joker’s henchmen.
• X360, PS3: New and exclusive Trioviz™ 3D with 2 sets of 3D glasses included in the box
• PC: Anti-Aliasing implementation for ATI graphic cards and nVidia PhysX content featured in the game’s title update

Original game features:
• Utilize the unique FreeFlow™ combat system to chain together unlimited combos seamlessly and battle with huge groups of The Joker’s henchmen in brutal melee brawls.
• Investigate as Batman, the WORLD’S GREATEST DETECTIVE, by solving intricate puzzles with the help of cutting edge forensic tools.
• Face off against Gotham’s greatest villains including The Joker, HARLEY QUINN, POISON IVY, SCARECROW and KILLER CROC.
• Become the Invisible Predator™ with Batman’s fear takedowns and unique vantage point system to move without being seen and hunt enemies.
• Explore every inch of Arkham Asylum and roam freely on the infamous island, presented for the first time ever in its gritty and realistic entirety.
• Experience what it’s like to be BATMAN using BATARANGS, explosive gel aerosol, The Batclaw, sonar resonator and the line launcher.

Sony has done it again! First it was Killzone 2 and now it is God of War III that is being unleashed on gamers three days in advance of the US release date, six days if you take the European release as Indian release dates coincide with that. Sony realizes the huge demand for the third game in the series, so much so that imported copies have already started showing up on the Indian shelves, threatening to eat into Sony-India’s profits. So advancing the release date by six whole days makes perfect sense for Sony. Obviously gamers are not complaining. Those who have pre-ordered the game from their favorite retailers have already started getting the calls that the game will be available today. Those who haven’t booked a copy yet should better get ready to stalk out the game stores when they open in around another hour or so.

Mumbai seems to be getting dedicated game shops left, right and center. Just a few days back we had carried the story about E-Xpress Interactive stepping into retail marketing with their flag-ship store in Mumbai. Now Milestone too has joined the fray in all earnest with a slick-looking retail outlet, Game4u.

Situated at Mega Mall, Oshiwara, Mumbai, the store was formally inaugurated by Vijender Singh, bronze-medalist from the last Olympics and Suraj Gaggan who’s “Give Me Some Sunshine” from the movie “3 Idiots” are on everyone’s lips. Mr. Jayant R. Sharma, CEO/Chairman of Milestone Interactive was on hand to elaborate on his plan to expand the stores presence to multiple cities with a minimum of fifty stores.

Visitors on the store can expect to find demo-kiosks, a pretty neat looking Rock Band setup to have an impromptu jam session and even section just for the girls, called Game4Girls! Besides stocking up on the games, Game4U will also be offering Blu-Ray movies to add to your fledgling collection of hi-def movie library. Hit the jump to see some of the pictures from the event and the shop floor. Better still, visit Game4U and tell us what you think about it.

IMAGE GALLERY

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E-Xpress’s monthly list of scheduled releases is in and it is packing in quite a lot of games this time. PC gamers will finally get a chance to take Assassin’s Creed II for a spin along with stepping into the shoes of a submarine commander with Silent Hill 5, the sub-sim. A word of caution: both the titles are coming with new the DRM system implemented by Ubisoft that would require you to be connected to the Internet at all times to be able to play the game. Metro 2033 and Just cause 2 are both looking good with the latter’s demo out on Steam for you to try and buy. Both are Steam Works games so you can have them permanently added to your Steam games list.

Most of these games will be popping up on the consoles as well along with Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY edition coming for the Xbox 360 and the PS3. We cannot tell you yet what’s there in the package because of an embargo but we can assure that it is good. Google around if you can’ wait to know as some of the sites have divulged the information. Hit the jump to see the whole list of titles and their price. Don’t forget to tell us what you think about them in the comments section.

PC (Games for Windows)

Aliens vs Predator 699 SEGA Action
Nepolean Total War 999 SEGA Historic Real-Time Strategy
Sonic & Sega All Star Racing 699 SEGA Kart Racing
Assassins Creed II 999 Ubisoft Action Adventure
Silent Hunter 5 699 Ubisoft Action Adventure
Supreme Commander 2 999 Square Enix Sci-Fi Real-Time Strategy
Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising 499 THQ Real-Time Strategy
Metro 2033 699 THQ Sci-Fi First-Person Shooter
Just Cause 2 699 Eidos Modern Action Adventure

Playstation 3 (PS3)

Sonic & Sega All Star Racing 2499 SEGA Kart Racing
Final Fantasy XIII 2499 Sqaure Enix Role Playing
Yakuza 3 2499 SEGA Modern Action Adventure
Batman Arkham Asylum GOTY 2499 Eidos Action
Just Cause 2 2499 Eidos Modern Action Adventure
Resonance Of Fate 2499 SEGA Role Playing

Microsoft Xbox 360

Sonic & Sega All Star Racing 2499 SEGA Kart Racing
Final Fantasy XIII 2499 Sqaure Enix Role Playing
Metro 2033 2499 THQ Sci-Fi First-Person Shooter
Batman Arkham Asylum GOTY 2499 Eidos Action
Resonance of Fate 2499 SEGA Role Playing
Just Cause 2 2499 Eidos Modern Action Adventure

PSP

Shaun White Snow + POP ‘Rival Swords’ PSP Pack 1299 Ubisoft Compilation
Driver ’76 + Prince of Persia 3 Revelations PSP Pack 1299 Ubisoft Compilation
Brothers In Arms D-Day + Rainbow Six Vegas PSP Pack 1299 Ubisoft Compilation
Splinter Cell Essentials + GRAW 2 PSP Pack 1299 Ubisoft Compilation

Silent Hunter is all ready to set sail for the fifth time, harnessing the raw power of the modern day PC’s to deliver a richer and more life-like experience of what it feels like to be the commander of a hulking mass of bullet-shaped steel and sail right under the nose of enemy ships. Silent Hunter V has a bevy of improvements lined up of the previous iterations of the game. The most important one all these changes is that you no longer can change stations just at the flick of a switch. So now, if you want to go from the gunner’s station to another section of the ship, you will have to actually walk through the submarine, brush against other crew members and slid through port-holes to get to your destination, all in a first-persons view.

Thankfully, the realism factor can be toned down at will, keeping the game accessible to both the causal gamer as well as a true submarine-warfare sim fanatic. So if you are one of those who would rather prefer to have a third-person view of their submarine or just let loose a salvo of torpedoes on the enemy battle-ship, you can do just that by bringing the realism a notch down. Thankfully, by doing that, the game doesn’t turn into a cake-walk and still manages to throw enough challenges at you to keep you hooked.

One of the major hooks of the game is the dynamic campaign generator. This feature was much loved in the earlier Silent Hunter games and the developers have understandably thought it was wise to carry it over to Silent Hunter V as well. This ensures that no two situations will play out exactly alike. This simple feature in itself adds tremendous replay value to the game. You can spare hours at end playing the same missions without it getting boring or tedious. In any case, the main campaign allows you to replay historic battles straight out from the history books and see for yourself if you could have managed to do things any different.

Everything in the game is rendered in exquisite details, right from the cramped quarters of the insides of the submarine, to the surface vessels that you are stalking quietly. Being able to walk and see the interior of the sub from end-to-end means that more detailing has been put into the submarine’s interiors itself. Little touches like crew-members squeezing past each other sideways in the narrow corridors make you release you are actually inside a submarine. The water effects are top-notch in the game. Considering you will be spending all of your time in there, it makes sense to have invested time in making all those waves lapping on your periscope and the whitecaps look beautiful.

Silent Hunter V is shaping out to be an awesome title for all the submarine warfare sims out there. The only doubt that I have is Ubisoft’s plans to tack on the new DRM system onto Silent Hunter V which requires you to be online at all times to be able to not only play the game but also be able to save it. While it is understandable that the publisher is worried about the lost revenue because of PC piracy, this feature looks like it will be inconvenient for the genuine users. With the kind of internet connectivity available in India, I shudder to think what kind of loops we will have to jump through to play Silent hunter V and future Ubisoft’s games.

Just a quick update from E-Xpress regarding the Indian pricing of Aliens vs Predator for the three platforms. The PC Games for Windows version understandably is the cheapest of the lot at Rs. 699 only while the Xbox 360 and the PS3 versions are priced at Rs. 2499 each. So if you have a fairly good PC, the Games for Windows version would turn out to be the best deal or else, just pick up a console copy based on your preference of your console.

So while we were busy tending to our day-time jobs, The ANGRY Pixel crossed a major milestone. Now we have ten thousand plus feed subscribers; 10,016 to be exact. It is gratifying to know that there are people out there who want to check out what The ANGRY Pixel has to say.

Yes, we do realize this is a fickle number that will keep shifting around but even then, it is a major milestone for a small and independent gaming blog run from India. We thank our readers for sticking with us even after our posting schedules went haywire on account of most of the core team of TAPians getting hitched last year, yours truly included.

TAP will bounce back and soon. In the meantime, you keep cheering for us because that is what matters the most to us!

P.S. Our friends at IndianVideoGamer had a milestone moment of their own when they crossed 5000 members mark recently. Cheers to them as well!

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.

Starting right off where chapter 11 ended, the DLC picks up the story in form of the till-now-missing chapter 12. Battle for Forli starts with you visiting some friends that made a brief appearance earlier in the game. The challenges that you face in this chapter are all familiar ones; escort mission, assassinations, rescue, defend etc. All of these will be familiar territory for anyone who has finished the game. All of these events are compressed into an hour long experience. You also get to take the Flying Machine for a spin once again if you fancy so though you don’t get to use it in any of the game missions.

Besides filling up the gap that was chapter 12, Battle for Forli doesn’t do anything else for the game. There are no added tweaks, no new weapons or enemy types to battle and no refinement of the Assassins Creed II experience that you had back in November. Infact, unlike most DLCs, this one doesn’t come with any extra achievements / trophies for you to unlock though you could use this as an opportunity to pick up one or two of the missed achievements without having to play through the entire game again.

That brings us to the question again: Did Ubisoft really needed to have this as a paid DLC? Fans of the game would not mind paying the small entry fee (320 MS Points) to have another short romp in the world of Assassins Creed II. The others however will continue to question the rationale behind first dropping two chapters from the game and then bring them back as paid DLC.

Review Code Courtesy:

e-Xpress Interactive just sent in there release schedule for the month of February, 2010 along with the console on which they will be available and the hit that you will have to take on your credit-card. The list has a few eagerly anticipated games, like Bioshock II, Aliens Vs. Predator and Napolean Total War, that has been on the must-buy charts of many gamers. And here we were thinking that just maybe, this month would come as some respite for our already maxed out credit cards!

Sob-stories aside, have a quick look at the list after the jump and decide which platform would be the best for you. Those in Mumbai have an even better option of walking into India’s premier game shop; Games: The Shop, again, a great initiative by e-Xpress Interactive. We hope we will get to see one in our namma Bengaluru. Find the press release for this as well after the jump.

List of Releases:

PC Games for Windows:
Vancouver 2010 Olympics 699
Bioshock II 699
Aliens vs. Predator 699
Napoleon Total War 999
Sonic & Sega All Star Racing 699

Playstation 3:
PS3 Vancouver 2010 Olympic 2499
PS3 Bioshock II 2499
PS3 Star Ocean IV : Last Hope International 2499
PS3 Aliens vs. Predator 2499
PS3 Sonic & Sega All Star Racing 2499

Xbox 360:
Xbox 360 Bioshock II 2499
Xbox 360 Aliens vs. Predator 2499
Xbox 360 Sonic & Sega All Star Racing 2499

PSP:
PSP Ben10 : Alien Force Vilgax Attacks 1499

PS2:
PS2 Ben10 : Alien Force Vilgax Attacks 1299

Press Release for Game: The Shop

Mumbai, 25th Jan 2010:- Game Shop Retail Pvt. Ltd. has its first video game specialist store under the brand name “GAMES THE SHOP”, at R-City Mall, Ghatkopar, Mumbai, in August 2009.

“GAMES THE SHOP” provides shoppers a never before experience shopping delight. This specialty store carries a wide range of products catering to game lovers. Shoppers have the option to choose from a wide array of games in every genre ranging from Action, Strategy, Stimulation, First/Third Person Shooter, Racing, Sports, Puzzles, Adventure, and many more, on platforms like PC, PS3, PS2, PSP, Xbox 360, Wii & Nintendo DS under one roof along with retailing of console hardware & gaming accessories.

Commenting on the launch Mr. Anand Khemani, Chief Executive (“GAMES THE SHOP”) said “The Shop will give the customers unmatched Value Proposition. Our vision is to create customer delight by delivering world class games with wide choice at best prices”. Being a group company of e-Xpress Interactive the leading distributors of games in India, “GAMES THE SHOP” would leverage on its Strong Brand equity, Prime location, Supply Chain Strength & CRM. The Shop provides unique value added services like, hands on Experience of games on Consoles (i.e. PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, etc), On Floor Gaming Specialists to assist customers, information about New Arrivals & Top Charts to keep Casual Gamers updated. At “GAMES THE SHOP”, customers can get the best of offers & discounts on games. “GAMES THE SHOP” is the first Retail outlet to provide its customers Pre-order booking. The design of “GAMES THE SHOP” has been conceptualized keeping in mind the taste and preferences of the Indian Consumer.

Mr. Anand Khemani also quoted “The launch of “GAMES THE SHOP” is a step forward to delight our customers with international standards of service, product range quality and shopping experience. Unparalleled in India it will be the Gaming destination store for Families, Gamers & everyone”.

“GAMES THE SHOP” plans to have a PAN India presence by opening over 15 such specialist stores across metros and mini-metros within the next 12 months.

With the above initiatives Games The Shop is all set to create new industry benchmarks in the Game specialist retail space and the biggest beneficiary shall be the end customer after all he remains “The King”.

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.

The first thing that you notice in the game is the gorgeous visuals. Running on the highly realistic Dunia engine (the one that powered FarCry 2), the game brings to life the make-believe world of Pandora in all its glory. Swaying trees, dense jungles, floating mountains, beautiful waterfalls, vertigo inducing heights, you name it and the game has it. The game manages to closely mimic what we got to see of Pandora on the theater screen and that is no mean feat. Infact, if you are the proud owner of certain brand of HD-TV, then you can enable the same 3-D effect in the game as available in the theaters. The best part is that load times are almost negligible; you can travel for miles on end and will hardly see the game pause to load the next region. Ubisoft Montreal has done an awesome job of taking the Dunia engine and crafting Pandora in it.

Smothering the graphics whore in us, we turn our attention towards the story and this is where the game begins to falter. To be truthful, the movie itself has a wafer thin storyline to begin with. While the game could have used that as a base to add more meat to it, instead it chose to go with a new character and a story. Starting five years prior to the movie timeline, you are dropped on Pandora as an army grunt. The first couple of hours of the story ensure that you get to spend enough time as a human being and as an avatar, in form of the genetically engineered N’avis. As soon as you have acclimatized yourself to both the forms, the game throws the choice at you. A predictable turn in the plot places you on the cross-road, either side with RDA, hell bent on mining Pandora for its mineral, Unobtanium, disregarding the N’avi in the process, or side with the blue-skinned, 10 foot tall, peace loving Na’vi and fight of the evil humans.

Once you have made your momentous decision, the story pushes you from one event to another, giving you one random task after the other. It doesn’t help that these tasks really do not have any thing common between them except for go from point A to point B, kill N’avi or RDA soldiers and accomplish the objective. Each task can be triggered off by talking to one of the NPC’s on the map. While the mission objectives remain pretty much the same, whether you play as the N’avi or as RDA, how you play differs. With the RDA, you rely more on weapons while N’avi concentrate on melee combat with the occasional bow and arrows. The game fails to balance this as the RDA weapons emerge winners here owing to the fact that it is much easier to mow down hordes of N’avi with guns and mechs rather than play as N’avi and be forced to get real up-close and personal before you can actually deal some real damage. There is a basic combo system for the N’avi but it doesn’t real go any further than unleashing a special attack after reaching a five combo strike.

Along the way, you gain XP for taking down the enemy and even for shooting random things in the forest. These XP combine to unlock special weapons and power-ups that range from calling an air-strike to fast mobility and even the ability to disappear. Calling these power-ups however is clunky enough for you to ignore them for hours. The long cool-down time before you can use a power again doesn’t really help the case either. The word clunky can also be assigned to the vehicle controls and the accompanying camera angles here. The camera sways all over the place every time you decide to board a vehicle (of which there is quite a good selection). It gets quite a bit tiring after a while after you have manually reset the camera for the umpteenth time. Quite strangely, you can only go up to a certain altitude in the game using the helicopter and that height is lower than the floating rocks; you can only fly around them which really suck.

It is a mixed bag with the sound department here. Quite like the movie, the game also features a great sound track that compliments the luscious visuals that we get to witness on the screen. The orchestral score here is top-notch and gets the job done. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the voice-acting. While Sigoury Weaver and Antonio Giovanni Ribisi voice the same characters that they play in the movie, the voice-acting quality falls flat. With singularly un-inspiring characters, it doesn’t help that the voice-acting doesn’t even try to be above mediocre. Lines are delivered in the worst way possible, as if everyone is just going through the motions, without any interest in what is going around their world. It is a shame that while the music of avatar delivers, it is betrayed by the shoddy voice-acting.

The multiplayer mode of the game seems to be tacked on to the final game as an after-thought. The gameplay is even more unbalanced with the scales tilting heavily in favor of the RDA faction. The same issue dogs the N’avi players here; dodge the incoming lead and get really close to the enemy before you can do anything worthwhile, which in any case, is quite late by then. An issue that slipped a mention earlier was that the hit-detection is shoddy at best. Sometimes you just have to spray bullets before one actually hits something worthy of being hit. Something else that is quite baffling is that why can’t we zoom with our weapons especially when they have a nice, big scope on it?! While the game supports the Xbox 360 controller, the on-screen prompts do not change to show the controller buttons.

Avatar comes out as a mixed bag of sorts. Fans of the movie would love the amount of knowledge the can gain about the world of Pandora from the very exhaustive and detailed Pandorapedia, an in-game store-house of anything and everything that is Pandora. James Cameron has created a fabulous world of Pandora, with its beautiful forests and strange yet fascinating creatures. The game offers the gamers a chance to interact with this world beyond the movie. But for just a casual gamer, this doesn’t translate into the game’s UPS and this is where Avatar as a game fails. Recommended only for the fans of Avatar, the movie.

6.5 / 10
Review Copy Courtesy:

With 2010 just around the corner, our mailboxes have started recieving press-releases of games that we will be getting to see in the early months of the new year. Leading the pack will be Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell: Conviction. E-xpress Interactive have sent this press-release indicating that the game will be in India in February 2010. Though no concrete Indian release date has been mentioned, we are hoping that we get to play this game on our PCs and Xbox 360s on the same day as rest of the world i.e. Feb 20th, 2010.

It’s a shame that after being such a great year for gaming, 2009 has to end on such a sour note. Just when we are ready to head out for our Christmas weekend celebrations, Redington dropped a price-hike bomb on us. Sample this list of games and their tentative price.

EA Catologue Titles – Old MRP – New MRP (Tentative)

Fifa 2010 – 2499 -> 3299
Nfs Shift – 2499 -> 3299
Brutal Legend – 2499 -> 3299
Dragon Age – Collectors – 2699 -> 3999
Saboteur – 1899 -> 2699
Left 4 Dead – Classic Edition – 999 -> 1699
XBox 360 Game CD Left 4 Dead 2 – 2499 -> 3299
XBox 360 Game CD NBA 10 – 1999 -> 2999

Keep reading to know more.

Upcoming titles (all prices are tentative)

Army of Men – 40th Day 3499
Mass Effect 2 – Collectors 3999
Mass Effect 2 – Standard 3499
Dante Inferno – Collectors 3999
Dante Inferno – Standard 3499
Battlefield 2 Bad company – Collectors 3999

(Thanks to Consoul for the list)

At first there was general panic about whether other ditributors like e-Xpress Interactive and Milestone Interactive will follow suit considering the reason for the hike is being attributed to increase in import duties. Good ol’ Sam from IndianVideoGamers got in touch with them all and here is what he has to say:

HundredProofSam writes:

I spoke to Redington and the price increase is real, although the amount of the increase is still tentative (or so they say). They say that they’re “fighting” with EA to keep the price down and they’re officially saying that its due to an increase in customs duty. But I think this is Redington’s internal decision because more than anything else because:
1. No other distributor is incresing prices so there definitely isn’t an increase on duties. If there is, only Redington knows about it, which is very unlikely.
2. This isn’t EA’s decision, otherwise there would also be a similar increase in PS3 game prices, which Milestone says there isn’t.
I’m still finding it hard to believe that EA would allow Redington to increase prices to a point where they’re literally inviting people to buy from grey or pirate.

Since Redington also distributes MS first party games I also asked them that wil there also be a similar increase in MS games (since the alleged increase in customs duty would affect all), and I got a very vague “no comment”, which further leads me to believe that this increase on EA Xbox 360 games is Redington’s internal decision. And they did also admit that the price increase is partly also an internal decision.

I’ve also spoken with WWCDROM and E-Xpress. Neither have heard of any customs duty increase, nor are they incresing their prices. E-Xpress has already set prices for their games for as far in the future as March.

So there you have it guys. Something is not quite right with Redington at the moment. Lets wait and hope that common sense prevails.

With the holiday season almost upon us, what could be a better time to spread some Christmas cheer, take home some awesome goodies home and tea-bag a few guys in CoD4? Ok, so maybe teabagging is not possible in CoD4 but we were not lying about that goodie bag that Santa has brought for us a bit too early.

Blur, Chennai’s finest, nay, India’s finest gaming cafe is organising its annual Christmas day CoD4 tourney and you all are invited. This time around, Razer, the fine folks behind all those drool-inducing PC gaming peripherals, get to play Santa and bring a sackload of stuff for you to win. In addition to the Rs. 60,000 worth of prizes to be won by Razer, Blur would be throwing in more cash and free game time to sweeten the deal.

If that’s not an incentive enough maccha, then I don’t know what else is! Now is the time to bring out the Quick Gun Murugun’s in you and take the fight to a more pesonal level at Blur. Click here and here to know more about the prizes and rules.

Be there, I say.

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?

Before getting into that, there are a few things to consider, as well as a fair warning. For anyone who’s never been accustomed to Western-style RPGs, pack your bags and seek for another place to gain a proper foothold. Dragon Age: Origins, for the most part, isn’t something you’d only spend playing in a few moments at any given time, nor will it have nearly have as much patience as the next game. Despite its linear nature with how quests are dolled to you, there are multiple situations where a number of options can be given to you when least expected, and nothing you can say or do will result in a “bad choice”, so long as you and your party members are able to persevere. But if you’re still inclined to experiment, you’ll be happy to know that there’s a difficulty setting that can toggled at your own leisurely pace.

For the rest of you number-crunching, pocket-protector wielders, Dragon Age can feel like a boon at times. The amount of customization to character classes and races, while nothing especially ground-breaking or new for us, is well appreciated and thought-out. Even better, once you’ve reached to a certain level and fulfilled the right requirements, you’ll be entitled to choose two from four specializations. And the fact that each race you choose will yield a different “Origin” story (which can take as much as an hour to complete at a time) only adds to the package. While the lack of multiplayer support is frowning, Dragon Age does give you a wide range of characters integrated into the story for you to play around with and assign commands to. It can be a lot of micromanagement, sure, but there’s a certain satisfaction to be had when donning party members the right skills to help compliment your play-style.

Unfortunately, and this is where the PC comparisons start taking their toll, everything is not as robust as it seems. While Dragon Age definitely goes out of its way to try and cater to an audience weened on more action-oriented experiences (which can’t be any more evident than the third-person perspective driven camera controls), there are times where you can’t help but feel that something was missing in the translation. The lack of any option to zoom-out in combat is a bummer, especially at times when a narrow corridor packed with enemies can easily obscure your view by a good degree. This isn’t nearly as troublesome as it sounds at the first few initial hours, but after a couple of intense battles later, it becomes all the more apparent when trying to maintain your fighting ground. Factor in the absurd difficulty spikes and framerate dips, and this tactical disadvantage only piles up from there.

Thankfully, there’s more to Dragon Age than just the combat. Bioware took special care in crafting a world that’s full of political intrigue and characters that you’ll either come to love, like, hate or downright despise. How you choose to engage in conversations with these fictional muppets is upto you, but whether you take the role of the dashing boyscout or the hardened douche bag, playable characters will react accordingly to your actions and won’t be ashamed to share their feelings toward you in a handy little Approval Rating meter. It might break the suspension of disbelief if you’re trying to woo a lady (or man!) in bed, but for the most, your party members carry a heavy personality and history that can be further peeled, if you so decide to probe deeper. If anything, it’s amusing in itself to hear Allistair and Oghren banter about polishing their swords. Hey-o!

The wealth of time and energy spent into manifesting the game’s lore is attributed to the interesting art direction found in the wide variety of vistas you’ll explore, as well as the hefty script of spoken dialogue. There are some technical issues that can mar the visual experience. Aside from the aforementioned overuse of blood splatter during conversations, spell effects like fire and ice are kind of a hard thing to miss during these instances too. Some scenarios will see your characters locked up in an animation before returning to combat, and no matter how remarkable the areas you visit may look, your movement is actually a lot more limited to what’s shown in your compass. Being accustomed to more sandbox-y games sorta has that effect, I suppose. But at least I can have dimwitted enemies chase after me while my mage casts spells from afar. Who needs abilities like Taunt when you got advanced pathfinding like this?

Its not the prettiest girl I’ve laid my eyes on, but for all the extra silicon required to do make it one, a smothering of polygons and shaders wouldn’t matter to me. At the very center, you have a 40-plus hour journey that, while certainly unforgiving, presses you to play on and on. For those willing to invest their souls and partake in an adventure with a grand finale sitting on the other end, Dragon Age: Origins won’t disappoint. Heck, even when everything is over and done, you can still do it all over again with another newly created character, or cozy up to the encyclopedic Codex in your spare time.

9.0 / 10

Review Copy Courtesy:

Distributor: Milestone Interactive

Come January 5th, 2010 and you will get a chance to step into the shoes of War, the first Horseman of Apocalypse and mount his steed, Ruin as you take on angels and demons alike in your quest to find and destroy the ones that tricked you into bringing the world to a premature end.

E-xpress Interactive, in association with THQ, are all set to unleash the wrath of War as he lets loose his devastating supernatural powers and his potent arsenal of weapons; angelic, demonic and earthly as he battles his way through hordes of demons and angels to take down Destroyer, the harbinger of Armageddon.

Darksiders will be available on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 on the 5th of January, 2010 at a MRP of Rs. 2499.

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!

That said, Brütal Legend is a game that has been inspired by the struggle and endurance of heavy metal. Psychonauts creator Tim Schafer stated that the concept for Brütal Legend came to him some fifteen odd years ago; he also credits a Megadeth roadie named Tony, who had suggested the origin of the main protagonist. Schafer also mentioned that the landscape was been inspired by lyrics and album covers of heavy-metal bands. One look at the game’s environments, and you’d be hard-pressed to disagree. There are over 80 distinguishing characters in addition to the main protagonist ‘Eddie Riggs’, with the likeness of Jack Black and Glen Danzig, based on the Iron Maiden mascot ‘Eddie the Head’ and its creator ‘Derek Riggs’. The score is comprised of a variety of heavy-metal tracks from the 80’s to present day Metal core. Ironically, there are no tracks from rock legends Iron Maiden. Favorites of the heavy-metal community such as Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy Kilmister, Lita Ford, Rob Halford and Kyle Gass of Tenacious D contribute of the voice talent in the game.

The game starts off which introduces Eddie Riggs setting up the stage for the band Kabbage Boy. Eddie is seriously injured and knocked unconscious while trying to save the imbecilic lead guitarist from a fall. While Eddie lays unconscious, his blood lands on his belt buckle which actually turns out to be an amulet of Ormagöden (The Fire Beast/Cremator of the Sky/Destroyer of the Ancient World) – transporting him into the past and leading him to join forces with a small group of human rebels – Ophelia, Lars and Lita, hailing from the town of Bladehenge. Killmaster (Lemmy Kilmister), The Fire Baron (Rob Halford) and the Amazonian Rima (Lita Ford) soon become allies as the game progresses and to join the fight against General Lionwhyte (Rob Halford) and Emperor Doviculus of the Tainted Coil (Tim Curry).

The game progresses as you would expect a normal sandbox-type game to go. Your arsenal consists of three armaments of mass mayhem. An ancient axe appropriately named “The Separator”, a Flying V named “Clementine” and a sweet Hot-Rod called “The Deuce” AKA ”Druid Plow” (Funnily enough, you only get to ‘plow’ druids in the beginning of the game as they don’t make any further appearances for the most part). The side missions are repetitive, barring two or three out of which end up being unique and quite funny actually. The game also introduces you to ‘Fletus’, a comical demon who wants nothing but to beat you… in a RACE! Sadly though, Fletus will be your ONLY competition in the game, if you’re into racing.

Brütal Legend separates itself from other sandbox games and ventures out into creating a new type of play-style, which attempts to implement different genres into its core mechanics. The Stage Battles often shift from open-world action-adventure to a real-time strategy. Although not for the hardcore RTS patron, this does offer an interesting experience (especially to those who are new to the genre). What may get annoying is telling friend from foe. Until you defeat General Lionwhyte, the enemies you meet will remain the same as your allies. The only distinguishing features will be the apparel of your allies who are dressed more ‘metal’, as opposed to the enemy who are dressed more… disco/transsexual. Exploration in the game has its own advantages, collectibles are spread throughout the world and players are rewarded special abilities/stats for completion of these challenges. The game however does not explain how to achieve these goals. Without a proper introduction, it’s quite possible that a player could pass these by and not even know they exist, and that’s assuming even after taking a gander at the manual. A lack of an on-screen map or a more practical waypoint system can also hinder the experience for those who are simply trying to get from Point A to Point B, and then back.

Brütal Legend is NOT perfect and does have its flaws; however, the humor and overall content will have you more indulged than you would care to be (the Main Menu screen is testament to that). The controls are smooth and there are hardly any issues with car handling in general. The voice talent is phenomenal, kudos to Jack Black, Ozzy and the entire crew for unleashing Metal Hell on the gaming community. Fellow headbangers, you owe it to yourself to pick this up. For anyone else, a definite “try before you buy.”

6.5 / 10

Review Copy Courtesy:

Distributor: Milestone Interactive