Loading ...
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.
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.
Picking up a game based on a an animated movie to review may not seem like a terribly smart thing to do, especially with so many movie-based games having bit the dust in recent times. Examples of such atrocities always seem to leap up at you and having endured a few ourselves, we tend to agree with them to some extent. Videogame adaptation of movies has never really managed to get the cash register jingling. But in a world where anything and everything comes in with a million and one tie-ins, merchandise and what not, a videogame adaptation of a movie is almost a foregone conclusion. We have studiously ignored them in the past but this time we decided to take a plunge. Helping us build our resolve was the fact that the game is based on the movie by same name from the wizards at Pixar. Could the sheer brilliance of a Pixar movie translate into a fun game as well?
Love it or hate it, but you certainly cannot ignore cricket, especially if you happen to be an Indian. With a billion strong populations as a fan-base, you certainly cannot go wrong with a cricket game. Yet, cricket as a video-game has not managed to catch the gamer’s imagination as it should have. While games like golf, football, rugby, ice-hockey etc have had countless iteration, a cricket game would pop in once in a while and then disappear for extended periods of time. And every time it appeared on the horizon, fans of the game wishing to live out their six-sixes-in-an-over fantasies would be waiting with bated breath, hoping against hope that this would be the one that would be the cricket game. EA has tried it before and Codemasters are no strangers to the sport either, with their last cricket game, Brian Lara Cricket 2007 being the latest one in the series. Now Codemasters is back after a hiatus with a new cricket game, in tandem with Transmission Games. We took the game for a spin and see if this is the deliverance all the cricket fan had been waiting for.
Not to be outdone by its fellow Sony-platform developing brethren, Washington-based Sucker Punch Productions finally gets its chance to show off Playstation 3 owners what it’s been cooking for the past several years. But rather than sticking to its anthropomorphic animal parade of cel-shaded thievery and macking-it-up with police officials in quick-time ballroom dances, Sucker Punch brings an altogether new IP to the mix. inFamous is an open-world action thriller drenched in heavy comic book tones and one hell of an opening sequence. After waking up from a cataclysmic event, delivery boy Cole McGrath ends up in a hospital and learns that he’s the sole cause and survivor of an immense explosion in Empire City, caused by a package he was asked by an anonymous sender to unwrap. To put it in Zero Wing broken Engrish, somebody set up him the bomb. With his entire hometown (what’s left of it, anyway) tossed into mass hysteria, McGrath takes the center of public blame. All this trouble, and for what? Just for a silly plot-device to net Cole some killer electrical powers?
Actually, wait. That sounds quite the bitchin’ compensation deal.
Gamers worldwide leapt in joy at the news of Capcom decision to bring Bionic Commando to the Hi-Def era with a sequel. Not only would the game be a continuation of the original story, but would also take the game out from the limiting 2-D plane to glorious 3-D. While we wondered how the game and more importantly, the bionic arm work in the three dimensional world of the new Bionic Commando, Capcom went ahead and wowed us with videos of Nathan “Rad” Spencer, saving the world yet again with his trusty arm. But like so many other games before this, do the promises made actually make it into the game? Do you actually have as much fun as the guy in the trailers and videos seems to be having? We got to find out for ourselves as we swung our way through the ruins of Ascension City.
I remember my childhood obsession with airplanes very well – spending hours in a large wardrobe where I’d painstakingly “recreated” the cockpit of a fighter aircraft as realistically as I could at the age of 12 – exquisitely detailed HB-pencil and Crayola renditions of flight instruments, avionics and multiple bogeys, twelve o’clock high – where I’d sit for hours with a motorcycle helmet and a cricket bat serving as my HUD and my control stick, engaged in vivid imaginations of life-and-death dogfights at twenty five thousand feet. My poor parents assumed their kid was probably going to grow up to become an ace fighter pilot (or at the least, fly for an international carrier), that is, until television, videogames and an insatiable lust for pastry made sure my vision nosedived while my midriff went in the opposite direction.
With my flying career aborted before take-off, I found my lust for taking to the skies satisfied by the likes of Dale Brown’s tales of aerial derring-do and games such as Falcon 4.0, Jane’s Combat Simulations, Crimson Skies and Blazing Angels before being welcomed into the experienced embrace of Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator, IL-2 Sturmovik, Ace Combat and the unparalleled Lock On: Modern Air Combat, incidentally another Ubisoft IP. After having suckled at these teats for the better part of a decade now, Ubisoft dangles a brand new pacifier in the form of Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. – a game that challenges Ace Combat to a 1:1 dogfight in its own airspace – toting an all new graphics engine, pick-up-and-play mechanics and a roster of aircraft that puts Fires of Liberation out to pasture. The real question is – can it deliver?
What do you get when you thrust a controller into the hands of an FPS veteran and push him into the ring to square off against some of the world’s deadliest fighters, both real and virtual?
A palpitating heart?
Cold sweat?
Numb fingers?
I would say all of these and much more, for that is exactly how I ended up once our Editor-in-Chief thrust the latest addition to the Street Fighter franchise into my hands and barked out an order to review it. Now saying I am a newbie to the genre would be putting it very mildly. Having been a PC gamer for the better part of my life, I have always given fighting games a wide pass. So when Street Fighter IV was announced a while back, I wasn’t one among the hordes of fans cheering, fainting or singing hallelujah in the streets, accompanied by frenzied high-pitched screams of “Shoryuken!”, “Tiger Fist” and other guttural noises. Which kinda neatly explains how I’ve remained untouched by all the hype surrounding the game, until the review copy landed in my lap one fine morning.
More than half a year after its arrival in arcades, Capcom’s Street Fighter IV has finally come home to console owners (and hopefully PC ones, too). You’d think after 20 years of playing Street Fighter games, as great as they are and still till even now, that numero quarto would seem like the same song and dance all over again. We won’t argue with that, but Street Fighter IV (SFIV) reinforces everything you’ve ever wanted in a fighting game, things you didn’t expect to enjoy, and things that you didn’t want or knew existed – all in one extremely well-executed, polished package. To put it bluntly, it’s a hard dish to not to fall in love with all over again.
E3 2005 – the defining moment when Sony and Guerilla Games (GG) almost convinced me to pick up a PS3 as soon as the shiny piano-black console with the Spiderman font would become available, southbound credit lines be damned. The now-infamous trailer blew the collective gaming world away – jaws dropping and tongues doing a very wet red-carpet routine with the realisation that the sky will soon be the limit, thanks to the almost-mythical power of the Cell processor quietly purring away under the hood of the sexy black beast. Unfortunately, heartbreak soon followed with the disclosure that contrary to what Sony had claimed, the trailer was, in fact, prerendered CG, created to show off what would it should look like when it would finally launch, provided things didn’t get screwed six ways from Sunday from now till then. Most PS3 fans felt cheap and used after all the emotional trauma they suffered at the hands of the Xbox 360 and Wii fans after defending the trailer across message boards all over the internet – sort of like marrying the gorgeous girl they’d dated for ten years only to find out she was a transvestite on the wedding night. Soon after, Grand Theft Auto 4 hopped on top of the Xbox 360 bandwagon and before long, I was putting my money on the Redmond giant’s offering, signing the contract in blood without reading the fine print about how it would occasionally keep reminding me of a reddish hell, which would happen, predictably, when I found myself completely getting drawn in by some game.
Fast forward to late 2008: GG and Sony jump-start the hype train once again with preview builds of Killzone 2 starting to show up on game-show floors all over the planet. This time around, PS3 fans, confident in the knowledge that the PS3 finally had its “killer app” squarely in its sights, pulled up their pants, reset their passwords and stormed forums and message boards worldwide with a new found vigor. The following months saw me wading through N4G-melting previews and an acute overdose of animated GIFs explaining visually why Killzone 2 will be the second coming of Jesus and how GG was all set to pull off a Kratos by kicking God out of His Almighty Throne and setting up a bitchin’ LAN party right there in the middle of heaven. Whoa, did I back the wrong horse there by siding with the Xbox 360?