GameGuide

Ok, let me first say that I think I may have played with a PS2 installment of Final Fantasy, got bored of it real quick and moved onto something different. So it’s safe to say I’m not a fan of the series. In fact if it wasn’t for the publisher sending me a review copy, I would never have played Final Fantasy XIII. It’s just not my style of game.

But hey, I was sent a review copy, so I feel like I should give the series another go, who knows, it may be totally different from the PS2 days.

But lets first look at the premise of the game:  Read the rest of this entry »

Heavy Rain is Quantic Dream’s follow up to 2005’s acclaimed Fahrenheit, one of my favourite games on the original X-Box. From the point I discovered that Quantic were revisiting the gameplay they invented five years ago, with what was being described as a dark, immersive and emotionally-engaging noir-thriller where decisions are charged with importance and actions can have drastic and unforseen consequences, I was ready to sell my soul and embrace the dark side; to play Heavy Rain I would have to obtain a PS3.

Money’s a bit tight but I managed to borrow a mates PS3 for a couple of weeks, and as such, I’m going to be writing this review diary style, so to speak. I’ll be adding my thoughts over the next couple of weeks until I’m ready to give the game a rating and an overall conclusion.

So after hooking up my loaner PS3, I inserted the disk. The game wanted me to install it on the hard-drive. Well, not exactly wanted, demanded. I went away and got something to eat, ate it, returned and it was almost finished installing.   Read the rest of this entry »

No modern FPS can stand up to be counted without being compared to the juggernaut that is Modern Warfare 2. Whilst it may be hard – near impossible some might say – to knock MW2 off it’s perch as the best selling FPS, with the blandness of the relatively short single player campaign, making a better FPS might not be such a stretch.

Certainly not for the team behind Battlefield Bad Company 2, the sequel to 2008’s Battlefield Bad Company, a game that has only been in my possession for two days, but a game that has already got my considering that I might put MW2 away and forget about it.   Read the rest of this entry »

Back in 2005 I picked up a game in a bargain bin in Whitcoulls for the original XBox. That game was Doom 3. Because I had young kids and a wife who didn’t want me playing it in front of her, I had to play it late at night with the headphones on. What the hell I figured, may as well go the whole nine yards and play it in the dark. You know, just so I can immerse myself in the game.

I lasted less than an hour before the XBox was off and I was in bed. The game was so freaking scary that I put it on Trade Me the next day.

I’m a little bit older now, though I’m not sure if I’m any wiser. Especially seeing as I repeated the same process with Aliens Vs Predator as I did with Doom 3. Minus the headphones ’cause I’ve got a decent sound system hooked up to my ‘Box.   Read the rest of this entry »

Available for 400 MSP from XBox Live Arcade, Chime is the first game released by the OneBigGame charity group, and more than half of the cost of the game goes to various children’s charities around the world.

That’s a noble idea, but is the game any good? At it’s core Chime is a simple single player puzzle game, clearly inspired by Tetris and played to some catchy electronic music from various artists like Moby and Philip Glass. You get to place the familiar Tetris pentominoe shapes on a flat board, trying to fill in rectangular areas which Chime calls ‘quads’. Once you create at least a 3 x 3 quad it starts to fill in. Until it fills in entirely you can expand the quad by adding more pieces, then you get scored for it. The catch is that filled quads remain in place, blocking placement of new pieces, until the sweeping ‘beat bar’ passes over them. The aim of the game is to try and paint the entire board with completed quads.   Read the rest of this entry »

There it was.. MAG.. The game that was going to host 256 concurrent players. The skepticism was high, Very High, and with a slight hint of Modern Warfare 2 burnout i approached the game carefully.

Sony’s Latest release was packed full of promise for those seeking the ultimate MMO first person shooter. And clearly from the outset this is a game that’s all about Massive Multi player Online. The only offline game you could play is the training sessions and there is no single player or story mode.

Based on some new server architecture MAG can allow up to 256 players online. The players are split up into squads of 8 each with a single team member assigned as the leader. There are then 4 squads formed together as a platoon, and then 4 platoons are formed to make a company. So that forms up to 128 players per side.   Read the rest of this entry »

The original Bioshock was one of those rare games that was universally acclaimed as a masterpiece. It’s success wasn’t so much in its gameplay (which was solid but not amazing), but instead in its originality, its narrative, and its dripping sense of atmosphere. As pretentious as this risks sounding, Bioshock was a game that truly deserved to be called art.

Sadly, news of Bioshock 2 has not been greeted warmly, right from its first announcement. Things just seemed to be stacked against it. For a start, it was handled by a different developer (2K Marin). And then it was announced that multiplayer was being tacked on, a stupid decision for a game which isn’t really about the shooting mechanics (which aren’t nearly as crisp as some games in the genre).   Read the rest of this entry »

Inferno (Italian for “Hell”) is the first part of Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century epic poem Divine Comedy. It is followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. It is an allegory telling of the journey of Dante through what is largely the medieval concept of Hell, guided by the Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is depicted as nine circles of suffering located within the Earth. Allegorically, the Divine Comedy represents the journey of the soul towards God, with the Inferno describing the recognition and rejection of sin. [wikipedia]

So what does the greatest literary work ever composed, written by an Italian poet teetering on the edge of sanity have to do with EA’s latest hack and slash game?

To be honest, other than the overall concept, not a lot. Does this matter? Not really. Visceral Games have taken the concept of the circles of hell, but rather that having the main character a boring poet, they’ve given the honours to a veteran of the Third Crusade who has returned to find his partially naked girlfriend dead, and being taken down to hell by the devil. Such is his love for his Beatrice that Dante decides to face his own sins, his family’s past and his war crimes, as he pursues his love though the many circles of hell, dispatching of as many demonic monstrosities as he can on his way.   Read the rest of this entry »

Vancouver 2010 is the official game for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and as such, sees you competing in four of the actual venues where the games are being held. Whilst the event listing (14 events) might seem a little on the small side, the range of events gives a pretty good mix of what we should witness if we watch the Winter Olympics this year.

With only 20 countries represented, most Kiwi’s will automatically cry fouls as the closest thing to national pride is pulling on an Aussie jersey. But that’s a minor oversight in a game that delivers the goods to this tried and tested genre.   Read the rest of this entry »

Mass Effect 2 is billed as the dark second act of a sci-fi epic, the Empire Strikes Back of this space trilogy. It’s that, and so much more. Where the original game was clean and bright – all iPod whites and colourful locales – Mass Effect 2 is dark and gritty. The shadowy, neon-lit landscapes bring to mind Blade Runner.

It’s all sensory overload for a sci-fi geek; a brilliantly conceived world.

The original Mass Effect was one of my favourite games, and it’s gripping narrative, dragged me along relentlessly. However, it was also a game with many flaws, which became even more apparent to me on my second play through. The frame rate was atrocious, the texture load time was horrible, and the general feel of movement and combat simply lacked something.   Read the rest of this entry »