Game Seeker

GTA: Liberty City

2010-04-22T15:04:00.004+07:00

If you've already played through 2008's Grand Theft IV, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect in the formerly Xbox-360-exclusive Episodes from Liberty City. Also unchanged on the PC, sadly, are the frame rate issues that--like those in the PC release of GTAIV--are apparent even on rigs that exceed the recommended system specifications. Regardless, if you enjoyed GTAIV you're sure to enjoy these additional episodes as well, and even if you passed on original protagonist Niko Bellic's adventure completely, there's no reason you can't have a great time with new boys Johnny Klebitz and Luis Lopez. You definitely get more from these episodes if you play GTAIV beforehand though, because nods and winks to that game are scattered liberally throughout.

For the same reason, you'd do well to hold off on playing The Ballad of Gay Tony until after you've beaten or at least spent a good amount of time with The Lost and Damned. The two episodes have been released simultaneously on the PC, but on the Xbox 360, The Lost and Damned was available as a download some eight months earlier. In that episode, you assume the role of Johnny Klebitz--a high-ranking member of the Lost biker gang who regularly disagrees with its trigger-happy leader, Billy Grey. Klebitz, who isn't a particularly likable protagonist, sees no need for the gang to go to war with rivals The Angels of Death, but anytime the two gangs clash, you end up doing most of the killing anyway. New weapons added to the existing GTAIV arsenal in The Lost and Damned include a grenade launcher, pipe bombs, and shotguns, which come in both sawed-off and assault flavors. These weapons are very much in keeping with both the episode's subject matter and its gameplay. And because Klebitz spends so much time riding motorcycles, you can use some of them while in the saddle--which wasn't possible in GTAIV.

Another neat feature introduced in The Lost and Damned, which also made it into The Ballad of Gay Tony, is a mission checkpoint system. Some of the missions take a long time to beat, and a good number of them involve riding or driving to locations that might be a good distance away before the action really gets under way. In GTAIV it could be frustrating to fail these missions, because doing so meant restarting them from the beginning, but the checkpoint system addresses that problem by giving you the option to restart from the last checkpoint that you made it through successfully. Unlike the more inventive and varied missions in The Ballad of Gay Tony, the missions in The Lost and Damned rarely deviate from the original GTAIV formula. You get to ride alongside your gang brothers occasionally, and you can call for backup from them during certain missions, but playing as Klebitz feels a lot like playing as Bellic for the most part.

If you've played through a good portion of GTAIV, it should come as no surprise that Klebitz's and Bellic's paths cross occasionally. Sometimes it's as subtle as the pair simply having a mutual acquaintance, but in one mission the two characters briefly work alongside each other, and if you remember said mission from the original game, it's great to see the events unfold from a second perspective. The Ballad of Gay Tony does an even better job of referencing characters and content from previous Liberty City outings and actually kicks off with a cutscene set during one of Bellic's most memorable missions. Lopez has a very different group of friends and acquaintances than the other two protagonists, but he's a killer-for-hire and he dabbles in drug-dealing, so he inevitably ends up moving in some of the same circles--or at least looking at them down the barrel of a gun. Again, you get to see a handful of missions play out from a second or even third perspective, and given Lopez's penchant for parachutes and the prominence of helicopters in his episode, his view is often very different.

Parachutes are perhaps the most obvious new feature introduced in The Ballad of Gay Tony, and while there aren't many missions that use them, those that do are definitely some of the episode's best. You can use parachutes outside of story missions as well, and the controls while falling are easy enough to grasp that you'll be hitting the centers of targets, gliding through rings in the air, and landing on moving vehicles in base-jump challenges in no time. Other activities that you're introduced to during Lopez's never-a-dull-moment story include dancing and drinking minigames, hitting golf balls at a driving range, and competing in and betting on cage-fighting tournaments. You're not likely to spend a whole lot of time with any of these optional activities, but they're fun to check out once or twice, and they compare favorably to the arm wrestling, air hockey, and hi-lo-card games introduced in The Lost and Damned.

When you're not trying to progress through one of the episodes' stories or killing time with optional activities, you might like to put your skills to the test online in games that support up to 32 players (up from 16 in the console games). Each episode comes with its own multiplayer modes. The Lost and Damned has seven, and in addition to the requisite Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Race options, there are some really inventive ones. They include Chopper vs. Chopper, in which a player on a bike has to race through checkpoints while a player in a helicopter gunship tries to stop him, and Witness Protection, which casts one player as a bus driver that a team of police must protect from a team of bikers. Club Business is a lot of fun as well, since it lets you and up to seven other players play as a biker gang and complete missions cooperatively.

The Ballad of Gay Tony, on the other hand, has only four multiplayer modes, and they're all enhanced versions of modes from GTAIV. The Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch modes benefit from the inclusion of new weapons like sticky bombs, an advanced sniper rifle, and an automatic shotgun with explosive rounds. Meanwhile, Race and GTA Race modes feature new street courses and now give every driver access to a nitrous tank that gradually refills after every boost. This multiplayer content can be a lot of fun if you get in with a good group of people. However, it can be tough to find people playing some of the modes, and it's unfortunate that to move from one episode's modes to the other's you have to go back out to the main menu, load up the other episode, and access the multiplayer options from the in-game cell phone again. A single multiplayer lobby that combines content from GTAIV and both episodes would be much more convenient.

Another caveat with Episodes from Liberty City, other than the fact that The Lost and Damned, while great, is clearly inferior to The Ballad of Gay Tony, is that getting these episodes to run at acceptable frame rates means making some compromises on the visuals. On multiple rigs that exceeded the recommended specs and defaulted to a mixture of high and very high graphics settings, we had to knock everything down to medium to keep the frames per second around 30 in The Ballad of Gay Tony and to prevent dips below 20 in The Lost and Damned--irrespective of whether the latter's visual noise filter was turned on. The episodes still look very good on medium settings, but while the inconsistent frame rates don't hamper the gameplay significantly, they're noticeable enough to be jarring.

Even if you choose to ignore the multiplayer and most of the optional activities and side missions, there's a good 20-plus hours of fun to be had with these episodes. The stories are compelling, the memorable characters are too numerous to mention, and the gameplay is still top-notch. It's unfortunate that PC owners have had to wait so long to get their hands on this content, and even more unfortunate that the episodes don't perform any better on the PC than GTAIV did, but that's certainly no reason for you not to enjoy them.

In additional information, the game can run good with system requirement Intel Dual Core cpu E5400 @2.7 Ghz or higher, 1 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 8600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher like dirextX 10 compatible, No more time! go and buy the DVD game install it and play it.....

Prison Break: The Conspiracy

2010-04-16T22:25:00.004+07:00

Prison life is difficult to emulate within the realm of video games. Because you always have the choice to turn off a torturous game and move on to something more fulfilling, the feeling of being locked away in a suffocating cell with no hope for freedom is hard to accurately convey through digital media. However, Prison Break: The Conspiracy does an admirable job of making every moment within its world mimic the utter hopelessness one must feel when trapped behind bars. This claustrophobic reenactment of the now-defunct television series never even reaches the level of tolerable. There's no reprieve from the boring fist fights and tedious stealth missions that constantly assault you throughout these eight-hours of grueling monotony. The story may appeal to fans of the series who long to interact with virtual representations of their favorite characters, but even the most ardent Prison Break fanatic should stay far away from The Conspiracy.

The Conspiracy cannot even give fans of the show the pleasure of controlling one of their favorite characters from the television series. Instead, you assume the role of Tom Paxton, a character created just for this game. Although he appears to be an ordinary prisoner--one convicted of first-degree murder--he is really a covert agent working for The Company. Your job is to do some sleuthing around the big house to figure out why Michael Scofield is really behind bars and ensure that his brother, Lincoln Borrows, goes through with his electric-chair execution. The various alliances and under-the-table dealings you must engage in may pique the interest of those who are intrigued by the shady lives of convicts, but the abrasive voice acting and stilted animations make it difficult for the uninitiated to be pulled into the layers of underhanded partnerships.

At the beginning of the story, a surly prisoner snaps “I’m not here to make friends,” but you run odd errands for everyone who asks in a desperate attempt to get on people's good side. Most of your time in The Conspiracy is spent on mind-numbing, stealth-based fetch quests, shuttling you from one dreary section of jail to another as you scrounge around for whatever random tool your mission requires. You do have a modicum of freedom within the prison walls, but there is little reason to venture off the well-worn path. Weight-lifting and bag-punching exercises encompass the worst aspects of minigames. Not only are these incredibly easy, requiring neither skill nor concentration to complete, but they also offer minimal reward; thus, your efforts are not worth the drudgery. There are also underground fights to be put to sleep by and a tattoo parlor to class up your convict, but since there's no fun to be had in any of these endeavors, it's best to march obediently to your next objective without stopping to explore.

But it's not as if the story missions are any more interesting than the dull side quests. The majority of The Conspiracy comprises a series of stealth-based missions, but reality has been stripped completely away and replaced by situations that are so contrived they are almost laughable. The AI is as artificial as it gets. There are guards and delivery men scattered everywhere, but it is impossible to predict how they'll react to your presence. Sometimes, they can spot you from across the room, even in low light with pillars and walls blocking their view. Other times, you can walk right in front of them in broad daylight, yet they look right through you. Their patterns are also inane and illogical. A delivery man will ask where he should drop off a package; when told where to go, he will begin to walk aimlessly around the room, turning robotically at odd intervals and generally acting like a man without a brain.

Dealing with incomprehensible AI is bad enough, but it's so much worse when you can't even see your enemies. The camera in The Conspiracy is way too tight, giving you a stunning view of Paxton's back but little ability to see the environment. This is inexcusable in a stealth game. If you're seen by man or camera, your game ends and you must restart from a checkpoint. But because it's so difficult to get a good look at everyone who poses a threat, you'll fail missions until you memorize where everything is situated. But even after you have everything committed to memory, you'll still fail because the AI so frequently breaks its own logic. This is a terribly frustrating game, and even when you finally overcome a situation that has been aggravating you, there is still no satisfaction to be had because luck and enemy incompetence are the keys to success.

If you think lousy AI and a see-nothing camera are bad, just wait until you try to control Paxton. He moves as if he's trudging through a lake of molasses with a 20-ton squid on his back. There is no sense of urgency, so you can only scream for him to shimmy up that pipe faster because there is no way to make him move like a normal person. You can run while on the ground if you want to move faster at the risk of being loud, but the awful AI ruins any strategy this option could have presented. Guards may end up hearing you when you're creeping or play deaf when you start sprinting, so you just have to guess and hope for the best. Furthermore, button presses don't even register half the time. The difference between success and failure is frequently less than a second, but it can take four or more button presses before you finally get into cover or drop off a ledge from which you're hanging. On top of that nonsense, Paxton drifts like a Tokyo racecar. If you remove your hand from the analog stick, you'll watch in horror as he slinks slowly out of cover and into view.

If those mechanical problems weren't enough to steer you far away from this anger-inducing game, there are loads of immersion-breaking touches everywhere you look. The reaction of the guards when you're caught is stunning in its ineptitude. The camera will zoom to their expressionless faces, but they won't shout or even try to capture you. Instead, your game just ends, with the camera still stuck on their stoic faces. Surveillance cameras line the walls, but you can just tap them from below, tilting their lens skyward, if you want to walk right by them. Don't worry; no one will notice that they're filming the ceiling. To get around the prison, you enter man-sized air ducts that no one bothers to guard, which is certainly stupid, but the toilet that doubles as a secret trap door is even more implausible. And because you're a covert agent, you need to update your employers frequently. You do this by either dialing out from one of the many payphones that line the yard or you just speak into your finger-sized recorder mere feet away from the people you're trying to fool.

The stealth elements are painfully tedious and frustrating, but at least they elicit some emotion. You get to punch dudes in the face when you aren't matching wits with the bumbling guards, but these fist fights can only conjure a hearty yawn. You need only slam on the punch buttons (one weak and fast, the other slow and powerful), block occasionally, and watch your hapless opponent crumple to the ground. It's exceedingly simple, but there are even problems present here. The controls are once again awful, barely registering as you mash madly on the button. Once you knock your opponent to the ground, your weak punch turns into a kick, but you will frequently punch air instead of nailing your downed opponent in the stomach. When you drain an opponent's life away, you have to perform a finishing move to end it. The animations on these takedowns look less believable than professional wrestling. During one, you toss your opponent on his back and leap on his chest, but the haymaker you throw that's supposed to knock him out doesn't even make contact.

The one mildly interesting element in the entire game occurs when you have to pick locks. It's not the most novel mechanic in the world--align the pins in the right spot--but because you're frequently rushed to do this while a guard ambles slowly toward you, it is the only time in The Conspiracy when you actually feel tension. Of course, these instances happen infrequently and last only 10 seconds at a time, but they are the standout moments within the game. Quick-time events appear with the same sort of regularity, but whereas picking locks added a brief reprieve from the suffering, these only add to it. The most common action is to rapidly tap a specific button, which seems harmless enough, but this is almost always followed by a solitary tap for a different button. There is no pause between these two commands, though, so you will often mess up because you were still slamming on that first button.

There is also an offline-only Versus mode in The Conspiracy, pitting you against a friend in first-to-three fights, but this is every bit as lackluster as the single-player combat. The controls are stiff and unresponsive, and the iffy collision detection further hampers any chance of enjoyment. It's extremely difficult to line up a punch correctly, making this novelty good for no more than one attempt. It's even more difficult to try to find a way to enjoy this game. With unsatisfying stealth, puzzling logic, and simple-minded combat, there is almost nothing in Prison Break that is actually fun. That the lock-picking minigame is the highlight just shows how lousy the other aspects truly are in this game. People who have never watched the show should stay far away, but fans should stay even further away. Playing the Conspiracy can only tarnish your memories of the source material.

Additional information, this game can run good with system requirement Intel Pentium dual core cpu E5400 @2.7 Ghz or higher, 2 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 8600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher like dirextX 10 compatible, No more time! go and buy the DVD game install it and play it.....

Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West

2010-04-16T19:11:00.004+07:00

If the phrase "Wild West" conjures images of rootin'-tootin' cowboys and no-good varmints shooting each other full of holes at the O.K. Corral, then Lead and Gold might be the game for you. This multiplayer-only shooter pits two gangs of up to five players against each other in familiar game types like Team Deathmatch, Territory Control, and Capture the Flag (or sack of gold, as the case may be). There are no weapon unlocks or persistent ranks to earn here; each game is a stand-alone affair. The crisp action is fast and well-tuned, and the levels provide plenty of ways to flank your enemies, gain high ground, or go for a direct assault. The only significant twist is that you play as one of four character classes, each with its own unique gun and special ability. This creates some interesting tactical variation that can lead to exciting and satisfying matches. Unfortunately, the player population is quite low a week after the game's launch, and it can be tough to find a full game. There are also occasional lag issues to contend with, and the lack of dedicated server support leaves players powerless to provide their own remedies. Finding a solid match may require patience, but once the bullets start flying, Lead and Gold proves its mettle.

While the actual Wild West was home to a veritable smorgasbord of bandits, desperadoes, lawmen, pistoleros, brigands, and stickup kids, Lead and Gold features only four distinct varieties. Every class sports a unique weapon, a sidearm revolver, and a special ability with a cooldown period. The gruff, tin-helmeted Blaster carries a double-barreled shotgun and slings dynamite, while the coonskin-capped Trapper has a high-powered scoped rifle and can lay bear traps to ensnare her foes. The masked Gunslinger packs a heavy revolver and has the ability to fire rapidly while sacrificing some accuracy, and the dapper Deputy wields a repeater rifle while boasting the ability to tag an opponent, placing a skull mark over him that the Deputy's entire team can see no matter where the tagged enemy goes.

All characters have unlimited ammunition, so your only concerns when firing on a foe are your gun's effective range and how long it takes you to reload. When you hit an opponent, there's a satisfying thwack, and a number pops up registering the damage you did. If you land enough shots, your target falls down and pulls out his sidearm in a desperate last stand. Nearby teammates can pick up their downed comrade if you don't finish him off, and if you're close enough, the fallen cowboy might even get lucky and take you out. But if you do enough damage the first time through, he won't even get a second chance.

Killing enemies and accomplishing objectives earns you experience points, which in turn gain you ranks. Ranks are tracked only within matches and are reset once a new match begins, but while they last they earn you a slight boost to your synergy effect (in addition to bragging rights). Each character radiates a synergy effect to nearby teammates that gives them buffs to damage, armor, accuracy, or critical hits. These effects register with a pleasing "ding!" and reward teams that stick together as well as teams with diverse character choices (three Gunslingers does not mean three times the accuracy buff). You can switch your character every time you spawn, though there is no way to know what your teammates' initial spawn choices are, which can hamper your starting strategy. Lead and Gold does not support voice chat, so communicating with your cowboys-in-arms is a bit of a hassle. You have to use the in-game text chat window if you want to taunt your opponents or whisper some strategy to your team.

The game modes are fairly standard, though the maps offer a good amount of variety. There are variations on standard Team Deathmatch, Territory Control, Capture the Flag, and Destroy the Objective. The latter two require you to carry bulky sacks of gold and kegs of gunpowder respectively, slowing you down and making you vulnerable. Keg-heavy matches feature yellow-colored destructible objects, including bridges and doors that can be destroyed to help your team or hinder the enemy, and sheds that, once blown open, create a new source of the powerful explosives. These strategic wrinkles add some welcome variety to your gameplay objectives, which are otherwise very straightforward. The different map locations include a mine, a homestead, and a wagon camp (to name a few), and they are generally complex enough to support a few different strategies. The bright colors and realistically styled environments make attractive locations for shoot-outs, and the sharp character models animate smoothly and look great.

When the action begins to heat up, Lead and Gold can be pretty darn exciting. Deputies cover alleys and streets, giving gunslingers a chance to advance while trappers pick out perches with long sightlines. The six-shooters light up at the first encounter, and the defenders hold their line until a flanking blaster scatters their ranks with some well-thrown dynamite. Having blown open the forward keg spawn, the attackers harry the defenders with explosives until finally the safe is cracked. The first prospective gold stealers are rudely met with bear traps and quickly dispatched, but the trapper gives long-range cover as the team begins the slow, gruesome trek back to their base with their illicit gains. All the while teams are targeting the one individual who carries their enemies' mobile spawn point, hoping to kill him and send it back to their base, temporarily staunching the flow of enemies. Bullets fly and blood spills in these hectic struggles, and to the victor goes the glory.

Unfortunately, it can be tough to find games that play out satisfactorily. There are rarely more than a handful of servers to join because the player population is low. Perhaps because the tutorial is listed as "practice," many players seem to lack a good understanding of how the game works, so expect to have some teammates cruise right by you instead of reviving you, or to find yourself alone in pursuing the actual objective. Lopsided conflicts seem to be more frequent than they should be, and many players experience intermittent lag that is deadly in a fast-paced game like Lead and Gold. A recent patch removed the problematic quick match feature, and support for dedicated servers is on the list of promised fixes, but these issues can make your gameplay experience rougher than it should be.

For the most part, however, Lead and Gold provides enjoyable, straightforward, fast-paced shooter action. Exploring the different classes is fun, and finding your groove with one during a heated match is immensely satisfying. There are issues to contend with, and you may need to exercise some patience before you can scratch your itchy trigger finger. Yet at $14.99, Lead and Gold is a reasonably priced way to romp around an attractively styled Wild West.

Hot information, this game can run good with system requirement Intel Pentium dual core cpu E5300 2.6 Ghz or higher, 1 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 8600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher like dirextX 10 compatible, No more time! go and buy the DVD game install it and play it.....

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

2010-04-11T22:28:00.004+07:00

Like its predecessors, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat is all about stretches of chilling stillness and thick dread, punctuated by the tense thrills of menacing mutants and the rush of discovery. If you've played either of the first two games of the series, you know that The Zone is a harsh mistress, and exploring it requires patience, thoughtful planning, and plenty of ammo. But it's also erupting with rewards as long as you know where to look. This shooter/role-playing hybrid oozes ambience by the bucketful, whether you're traversing marshes or skulking through dark crevasses, and the dread that accumulates makes encounters with all sorts of grotesque freaks feel all the more suspenseful. These compelling moments don't inspire every aspect of the game, however. The story does little to draw you in until the final hours, and the visuals are showing their age despite some welcome improvements to the graphics engine. But Call of Pripyat is an excellent return to form after the uncomfortably buggy, awkwardly paced Clear Sky. Prepare, once again, to face impossible odds as you trudge your way across one of the planet's most dangerous expanses.

In the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series' third installment, you play as Ukrainian security agent Alexander Degtyarev. A number of military helicopters have crashed in the region devastated by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster--known as The Zone--and you're sent to investigate. Call of Pripyat tries a bit harder than its predecessors in the storytelling department; the camera pans around your character in cutscenes, the writing is more straightforward, and the climax ties back to Shadow of Chernobyl, the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game. The plot gets a bit interesting in the final few hours as you find out more about what's going on in Pripyat, the abandoned city closest to the nuclear plant. Unfortunately, there's little to get you invested before that, and the awkward scripted scenes don't communicate a sense of drama as much as they highlight the aging visuals. A few characters, such as an alcoholic technician who will upgrade your weapons only after you give him enough vodka, are interesting or entertaining enough to make you care about their fates. But for the most part, you'll care only about surviving--and thriving--in such bleak, lawless environs.

And what environs they are. Shacks dot the grassy landscapes, cracks open in the earth's crust, and the famed Pripyat Ferris wheel looms beyond a barbed-wire fence. Storms rage across the skies, and frightening radioactive emissions spread across The Zone, threatening the small pockets of human life that populate it. You encounter groups of bandits fending off mutant attacks or huddled around a fire, camped near a radioactive anomaly. This is a tense, unpredictable, and sometimes scary place where the next step could invite danger or bring respite. You get some forewarning of some attacks, such as the frenzied barking of mutated dogs before a pack of them descend upon you. But other times, the darkness hides a shocking surprise, like a new enemy to the series called the burer. These misshapen dwarves are like mutant poltergeists, flinging objects at you and even telekinetically yanking your weapon out of your hands. A sinister encounter with one of these creatures in the center of Pripyat near the end of the game is one of several nail-biting highlights.

Another highlight is a nighttime ambush of another newly introduced beast called the chimera. Night is wholly black in Call of Pripyat, not the dim facsimile that so many other games provide. Not knowing when this terrible beast might bear down upon you in this blackness makes this just one of many petrifying sequences, though even most mundane encounters will have you sweating bullets. Call of Pripyat is not an easy game, so you need to aim well, know your weapons' strengths and weaknesses, and conserve ammo. Human opponents put up a tough fight, so running in guns blazing is a quick ticket to the afterlife. There are times when the AI's ultraproficiency seems a little too obvious. Human enemies facing away from you have the uncanny ability to notice when you peek out a window behind them and are remarkably good shots in the dead of night, even without night vision scopes equipped. But despite a bit of cheating, Call of Pripyat rarely feels unfair. It features none of Clear Sky's lame choke points and mission design issues, and the economy and weapon upgrade systems have been tweaked in sensible ways. So while you'll still make use of the quicksave and quickload keys, you never feel like the game devolves into frustrating save-game attrition.

These aren't the only improvements Call of Pripyat makes over its precursors. This is by far the most stable S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game out of the box; we didn't experience a single crash or corrupted save file, and the graphics engine performs better than ever (if not quite perfectly), even when you turn on the new DirectX 11-specific options. This update doesn't thrust the game into the forefront of cutting-edge visuals, but while low-resolution textures and clumsy animations may betray the engine's age, carefully crafted environments and all sorts of atmospheric touches make this a case in which art trumps technology. Other welcome improvements include flexible hotkeys,along with important gameplay additions, from preventative medications to the ability to roam The Zone freely once you've finished the story.

Outside of the main story, there are plenty of side quests to pursue. You'll eliminate bloodsucker nests, search for a fabled corner of paradise, and, as before, hunt for incredibly valuable artifacts hidden in the midst of various anomalies. Gathering artifacts is as tense and exciting as it ever was, requiring you to venture into a deadly anomaly that may pick you up into the air and throw you around, burn your skin to a crisp, or zap you with jolts of electricity. All the while, you must follow your detector's signal to pinpoint the artifact's location. The search is frantic, and the risk is high, which makes success oh-so-sweet. All these tasks are wrapped into a free-form package, allowing you to explore The Zone under your own terms. In fact, the vague instructions you receive from some mission providers require you to thoroughly explore every nook and cranny, from abandoned schoolhouses to derelict fuel stations. Don't expect a specific mission waypoint with every job you undertake. This is frustrating if you let it be, but it's an authentic part of Call of Pripyat's bleakness. The Zone does not allow you to tame it without a struggle.

The game isn't always so open ended, and some story missions funnel you through a few extended, linear sequences, though Call of Pripyat falters slightly here. The game spends a lot of time setting up Pripyat as home to unspeakable dangers, and a protracted journey through a long, dark series of tunnels is so nerve-racking that the reward for the effort--the city of Pripyat--is a bit of a letdown. There are fewer opportunities for boundless exploration here, fewer surprises to discover--and no typical vendors, which might lead to some unavoidable travel back to the game's two other major regions. Thankfully, this is when the story missions start to get more interesting, moving from mundane to there’s-something-freaky-going-on-here territory.

Call of Pripyat's multiplayer options, just like those of its predecessors, are routine and slightly clumsy, because the game's shooting mechanics don't work so beautifully when isolated from the context that makes them successful. But it's the chilly ambience and lifelike ecology that should lure you to the newest S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, not the ordinary online play. Well-constructed environments and superb sound design make The Zone as cheerless and ominous as ever. But it's also rich with resources, begging you to cultivate its secrets and withstand the hostilities. Series fans and newcomers alike should don their protective gear and journey forth.

For Information, this game can run good with system requirement Intel Pentium dual core cpu E2180 2.2 Ghz or higher, 1 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 7600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher like dirextX 10 compatible, No more time! go and buy the DVD game install it and play it.....

Dawn of Discovery: Venise

2010-04-11T22:17:00.005+07:00

Last year's Dawn Of Discovery was a complex but tremendously absorbing game of exploration, city-building, and resource management. Now, a new expansion called Venice seeks to entice you to return to the high seas of the early 1400s. Before you set sail with visions of canals and gondolas filling your head, you should know that this isn't quite the full-featured Venetian experience you might be hoping for. Still, while most of the additions are relatively minor, Dawn of Discovery fans will appreciate the ways in which Venice fleshes out the game's competitive aspect and will enjoy the opportunity, finally, to test their skills against human opponents.

The title for this expansion is a bit misleading. You won't be building any Venetian cities yourself, and with the exception of a few entirely new building types, the appearance of the cities you create is unchanged from the core game. Venetian trading ports are now present, but they're always maintained by the AI character of Giacomo Garibaldi, and although the architecture that makes up these ports is beautiful, the changes are purely cosmetic and aren't even onscreen that often. The new ship types available from Garibaldi are useful, but the Venetian element is just a bit of seasoning in the overall mix of the game, not the prominent element you might go in expecting.

Instead, the most significant features in this package are the competitive and cooperative multiplayer options that were conspicuously absent from the original game. Multiplayer games support up to eight players and are as deeply customizable as their single-player counterparts, allowing you to establish victory conditions that include population size, completing quests for AI characters, or being the only surviving player. Dawn of Discovery doesn't lend itself to quick and convenient action, but multiplayer competition can be richly rewarding if you're willing to put some time into it. Depending on how you set them up, multiplayer sessions of Dawn of Discovery can last up to ten hours or more, so it's just as well there's an option to save games in progress. If you know others with the game and can coordinate times to play, you're more likely to have a good experience than if you're hopping into the lobby and hoping to play with strangers. And the cooperative option is different from typical team-based play. Rather than team members each controlling their own ships, cities, and resources, each member of a team has full control of all the team's assets. This requires excellent communication and coordination to ensure that everyone is working toward the same goals. If you enjoy that kind of close collaboration, it can be great fun.

Along with the implementation of multiplayer, Venice enhances the competitive element of Dawn of Discovery by introducing sabotage and city politics. A new building type called the base of operations lets you send spies to hide among the populace of a competitor's city. Once your spies are there, you can direct them to commit acts that disrupt the economy of your rival, such as arson or sending out false prophets who compel people to stop paying taxes. And the introduction of city councils gives you a chance to take over a rival's town by buying off the majority of council seats and purchasing the key to the city. The original Dawn of Discovery didn't offer you many ways to try to make life difficult for your opponents short of launching a military assault, so the opportunity to covertly muck up the works for your rivals or buy your way to power is most welcome. And if for any reason you want to play without city councils or the threat of a rival sending a belly dancer to your city's marketplace, these elements can be turned off.

There's no new single-player campaign in Venice, but there are 15 new scenarios that run the gamut from breezy ship-racing competitions to society-building challenges under the most grueling conditions. These scenarios are diverse, and most of them are quite good, capturing an intoxicating spirit of high seas adventure. But while they serve to introduce the expansion's new gameplay elements, they don't do a good job of familiarizing you with them. For instance, when you're told in an early scenario to use spies to commit specific acts of sabotage, it's not clear which enemy houses you need to infiltrate to make specific acts of sabotage available to you, nor is it stated in the flimsy manual for this expansion. You're often left to just fumble around with things to determine how they work, and given how tremendously complex and daunting this game can be even when you're deeply familiar with it, the fact that it doesn't take steps to clearly explain how these new elements work is frustrating. Of course, a steep learning curve is nothing new to Dawn of Discovery, but it's disappointing that this unnecessary and unpleasant challenge hasn't been refined a bit.

With the exception of those moments you spend trading in a Venetian port (or just admiring the architecture in one), Venice is visually indistinguishable from the core game. Dawn of Discovery is still breathtaking in its evocation of an idealized historical setting, and the Venetian elements feel right at home in this gorgeous, bustling world. Similarly, the new music introduced here is a perfect addition to the score, as rousing and sweeping in scope as the compositions included in the original game.

Venice is more a modest collection of enhancements than a full-featured expansion. But while the emphasis on Venice in the title and marketing for this package may be disingenuous, the world of Dawn of Discovery is as captivating as ever. Those who have sunk countless hours into the core game and who relish the thought of spending many more facing off against human opponents will certainly find their $20 well spent.

Hot info, this game can run good with system requirement Intel Pentium dual core cpu E2180 2.2 Ghz or higher, 1 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 7600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher like dirextX 10 compatible, No more time! go and buy the DVD game install it and play it.....

Silent Hunter 5

2010-04-11T21:29:00.007+07:00

Have a lot of spare time on your hands? If so, Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic might be the game for you. The latest addition to Ubisoft's venerable submarine simulation franchise is so confusing and unfinished that it would be less of a hassle to join the Navy and get firsthand experience underwater than to figure out what's going on here. While the game has strong points and shows potential if you want to wait for developers and modders to (hopefully) fix the current problems, at present you have to do everything the hard way. The opening tutorial mission teaches you nothing about how to captain a sub. Key functions have been stripped from the interface in favor of clumsy commands and giving orders to the crew in person. The new morale system for crewmen is broken. And let's not forget the generous assortment of design quirks and bugs, which are joined by an obnoxious copy-protection scheme that requires you to be online at all times. There are a few glimmers of hope, but much of the time this is one of the most grueling experiences below the waves this side of Das Boot.

Like its predecessors, Silent Hunter 5 is a thorough World War II simulation of life spent hiding under the waves in a German U-boat. Just about everything can be configured, so you can go for total realism or take advantage of crutches that make it easier to spot enemies, shoot torpedoes, and so forth. And it's a good thing that you can dumb everything down, because Ubisoft has made it tough on rookies. The early hours are frustrating, largely because the tutorial mission is a waste of time and the 35-page on-disc PDF manual covers virtually none of the core concepts you need to understand. It's absurd how little you're told. The tutorial sees you do nothing but sink sitting-duck cargo ships and use the map screen to plot a course, while the manual spends more space on cheesy bios of your crew ("Emil is usually very quiet and somewhat nerdy") than it does on the nuts and bolts of the sub operations necessary to get everybody home to Hitler. Even worse, the manual has been scanned at a low resolution, so you can't zoom in on maps and illustrations without them turning into blurry messes. First impressions don't get much worse than this.

If you can get over this steep learning curve, you'll find a full-featured game awaiting you on the other side. You assume the role of a U-boat captain in the lengthy single-player campaign, as well as in the handful of one-off historical missions where you do things like protect the Bismarck and sail down the St. Lawrence River to attack the Canucks. Most of these historical missions are brief and flavorless, wrapping up fairly quickly after you fulfill basic objectives, such as sinking a specific enemy vessel or sending a set amount of cargo tonnage to the bottom of the sea. Multiplayer (LAN or online) offers a more intriguing hook with co-op teams of up to eight U-boats working together to hunt ships in the eight included scenarios. Objectives range from simple quick strikes against small convoy groups to large-scale assaults on task forces that include dozens of merchant ships along with battleships and even a carrier. Modders are already making missions for the multiplayer, which should give it a long life span. Unfortunately, the online game suffers a lack of players, partly because this is a niche sim and partly because of connection problems that force some users to manually open a handful of ports on routers. At least you can try multiplayer missions solo, so you can get a taste of how they play even if you can't connect with anybody else.

Campaign missions start as the war begins. Your first assignment is to play the first officer aboard a sub patrolling the Polish coast during the German invasion in September 1939. From there, you are promoted to captain and given your own boat to guide through a branching series of assignments that take you into 1943. Oddly, the campaign can be sort of a snore. Patrol objectives seem arbitrary and dry. Your directives are sensible and usually involve taking down a couple hundred thousand tons of merchant shipping in the North Atlantic or sinking specific Allied ships by set deadlines, but the way they're presented leaves a lot to be desired. Aside from short briefings on maps at the start of scenarios, the rationale for missions is never explained. It's a little too much like you're clocking numbers, hoping to win the war if your sunk-ship totals wind up higher than the other guy's. At least these goals are situated in a way that makes you feel like you're part of the war. You pitch in to help with the greater German war effort every step of the way, fighting the British blockade during the phony war, aiding in the invasion of Norway, hammering UK shipping after the surrender of France opens up rather convenient new sub harbors, helping Il Duce in the Mediterranean, and going toe-to-toe with the Royal Navy when the tide begins to turn against Germany in 1943.

Regardless of these lukewarm patrol assignments, combat is challenging and the mood is dark and ponderous. Playing an underwater assassin stealing across the ocean on starry nights is addictive. It's incredibly satisfying to stalk enemy vessels, whether you're zeroing in on a convoy of wimpy cargo ships or creeping into a task force of destroyers and launching a salvo of torpedoes before slinking off into the deep. It's like you're playing a nautical chess game. You have to think a couple of moves ahead, assessing the risks involved in revealing yourself long enough to fire torpedoes or even taking your boat to the surface and finish off wounded prey with the deck gun. You're always tempted to try something outrageous, like sliding into the middle of a task force and sinking a battleship. So situations can get very crazy, very fast. One moment you're admiring a kill, and the next you're running from a pack of destroyers that are trying to crack your hull open with depth charges. And as the war moves along, the Allies get smarter, throwing more warships, more escorted convoys, and better sub-hunting tactics at you even as your Mark VII line of U-boats improves through a couple of new model iterations.

Still, as much as you want to get immersed in the reality of life as a U-boat boss, it's easier said than done. There are loads of problems. The biggest is with the overhauled interface. So much has been streamlined that key features have been removed entirely, in particular most of the gauges that gave the earlier Silent Hunter games a WWII-era atmosphere. Now when you're on a periscope screen, all you see is a black background dotted with the Tactical Action Interface minimap--which looks a lot like a GPS--and some modern-looking icons. This is definitely more realistic in some ways (look through a real periscope and you don't see gauges all over the place), and the black makes it easier to spot enemies at night, but this screen remains awfully blah. At a glance, you wouldn't know if the game was set during WWII or today. Many functions have been ditched, such as the compass that allowed minute course alterations. Now you have to plot all course changes on either the main map screen or the minimap, which isn't fun in tight moments when you're engaged with a convoy or fleeing from warships. There isn't even a way to check your depth under keel. Fan mods are already starting to address some of these deficiencies, but still, it's incredible that Ubisoft removed such vital parts of the interface.

Silent Hunter 5 has moved to fully 3D sub innards and a first-person point of view where you see your boat through the eyes of its captain. Now, instead of commanding in a Fuhrer-like fashion, you run to different parts of your boat and give orders via dialogue trees. At first, giving face-to-face commands adds to the realism and makes you feel like you're the captain of a real sub. Telling the XO to go to silent running sure gives you a rush. It's also amazingly intense in the corridors of your boat while under attack, watching as the Atlantic sprays in from bursting seams, causing water droplets to run down the screen. But then tedium sets in. Having to race around giving commands is annoying. It's impossible to do it effectively during combat, because by the time you get back to the engine room to tell your engineer to overcharge the diesel, you're on the bottom of the ocean. Doing so much in person is a bit nonsensical, too, given how real U-boats featured onboard voice tubes that let officers boss around the great unwashed (literally--U-boats didn't have showers) from a distance.

Crew members now come with personalities and skills. The former is represented by morale and the latter by abilities that can be boosted to provide passive bonuses to operations, such as greater speed and deeper diving, as well as active abilities you have to select, such as revealing hidden enemies and preheating torpedoes. All seem over the top. Having to look after crew morale is just a bother. You won't care about how Dieter's wife and kids are doing back home or how Wolfi's brother is handling life on board the Bismarck, but you'll ask, because otherwise the lads feel neglected and their morale plummets. Skills make more sense and can be useful in battle, if you can get to the crewman in question and give the order before it's glub-glub time. Still, it's one thing to try to get more efficient tracking abilities out of the sound guy, but it's another having to goose morale by ordering the cook to prepare a special meal. Also, the whole system doesn't work right now. Individual morale sometimes goes down even after you engage in small talk, and the entire crew's morale frequently plummets to zero for no reason. When morale flatlines, a crewman stops accepting orders, making it impossible to give face-to-face commands. Boosting some skills messes up gameplay. If you improve the talents of your torpedo man, you get longer-running, faster torpedoes that aren't correctly tracked by the targeting system, causing shots to miss. Unfortunately, right now you're stuck with all of this, because there's no way to shut crew abilities off.

And there are many other glitches. Enemy vessel intelligence is all over the place. At times, Royal Navy patrols seek you out. Enemy planes pass overhead when you surface or get spotted by a merchant vessel, and whammo, here come the destroyers. Warships can track and sink you like rabid killers. On other occasions, you can stalk and destroy Allied vessels, and they won't get perturbed about it. An effective hunt can result in your sinking an entire task force. You can nail a couple of enemy ships instantly at periscope depth and then pick off their buddies when they come looking for you. Even when you are targeted and seem destined for a watery demise, you can often crash-dive and hang out at 40 meters for a few minutes until the coast is clear. The Royal Navy leaves ports undefended. You can occasionally cruise up to docks and unload torpedoes on merchant ships at anchor. Both allied and enemy ships along coastlines appear to be helmed by utter morons. Cargo ships ram into docks until they catch on fire. Ships of all sorts move back and forth like prison guards across the narrow straits opening into harbors. As a result, friendly ports can be the most hazardous locations in the game. Heading into Wilhelmshaven is like running a gauntlet, with other German ships constantly darting in front of you. Nothing says "epic fail" quite like getting sunk by your own navy on the way home from a patrol where you took out an enemy task force single-handedly.

The digital rights management copy protection now featured on Ubisoft PC titles is incredibly intrusive. It requires that you be connected to the Internet at all times while playing, which causes outages if you have problems with your ISP or if the main Ubisoft servers go down, which has already happened on a couple of occasions since the game's release. Even your saves have to be synchronized from the servers every time you start a game, which is an issue that can cause delays of a few minutes or more. The wait gets longer as you move through the campaign and accumulate more save files. Sometimes saves don't sync up properly. You can save with torpedoes in the water, watch them hit an enemy vessel, then load the save and see them miss by a mile. Or you can save a game during a calm, starry night and load it up to find waves swamping the bow of your boat. Loading a save at the start of play typically takes around two or three minutes, too, although it's impossible to tell if this is because of DRM or because the game is just slow.

Visual and audio problems are common. While Silent Hunter 5 looks great--if jarringly modern instead of authentically WWII-ish in its menus and maps--performance leaves you wanting. Even though there is an incredible amount of detail both inside your sub and across the rolling ocean through the periscope and when you're up on deck, with exploding enemy ships sure to bring a smile to your eyes (especially when they crack in two), you pay a high price for the prettiness. Frame rates can plunge to the single digits or teens, especially with time compression on during long trips. This sluggishness, plus the annoying hitches where the game freezes momentarily when you move suddenly, can make it difficult to navigate both inside the sub and on map screens. Other times the graphics don't work right at all. Icons turn into white blocks, making it impossible to tell what's what. The docks and sub pen at Wilhelmshaven routinely vanish from the maps, leaving you to navigate in and out of port from the conning tower. If you look closely at enemy vessels that you have just torpedoed, you can see crewmen casually wandering around the flaming, exploding deck. Audio causes more trouble. You'll wish you could turn off the stuttering course change announcements and the "Would you like to plot a new course, captain? Perhaps a search pattern?" lines that come up just about every time you reach the end of a series of waypoints.

It's going to take a lot of patches and user-made mods to get Silent Hunter 5 into a playable, satisfying state. Ubisoft's track record with this series and the incredible dedication of the game's fan base mean that this is likely going to happen, sooner or later, but for the time being, you would be well advised to get your submarining fix from Silent Hunter 3 or 4, two extremely impressive games that have been well seasoned with patches and mods. Right now, despite the undeniable promise and more than a few moments where excitement and tension make you forget about the many bugs and design flaws, the fifth edition in this series just isn't ready to be released from the drydock.

Additional info, this game can run good with system requirement Intel Pentium dual core cpu E5300 2.6 Ghz or higher, 1 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 9600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher like dirextX 10 compatible, No more time! go and buy the DVD game install it and play it.....

Art of Murder : Card of Destiny

2010-04-08T11:01:00.005+07:00

It seems that The Joker, the famed Batman villain who loved to kill with a smile, was ahead of his time. In the latest edition to the Art of Murder series, Federal Agent Nicole Bonnet must track down a serial killer who, like The Joker, appreciates a good tease. He plants clues, selectively and cleverly, that’ll bring the feds – particularly Ms. Bonnet – to the scene just before the crime unfolds. If she looks closely enough, she’ll find one obvious connection every time: a playing card.

These mysterious murders are the catalyst for Art of Murder: Cards of Destiny, a game that happily follows the point-and-click playbook. Players will be expected to click on just about everything; doors, windows, pictures, maps, pens, notepads, evidence bags, cameras, keys, keyholes, tables, counters, and so on. The list is virtually never-ending.

Cards of Destiny does not discriminate against objects that are completely useless – in fact, it uses numerous objects, clickable parts of buildings and other worthless elements to distract the player from the most important parts of the environment. This forces you to investigate (and often re-investigate after leaving the area, talking to someone, and then going back to where you started) absolutely everything.

While this certainly adds a degree of real-world drama to Cards of Destiny – let’s not forget that there are endless possibilities for what a real FBI agent may encounter at a crime scene – it is also the beginning of the game’s biggest problems.

In Circles

Unlike a real crime scene, where anyone can touch anything and take whatever they want at any time, Cards of Destiny forces you to do everything in a specific order. If you come across a camera and some evidence bags, it should be obvious that they’ll come in handy at some point. Realistically, Nicole should be perfectly in synch with the assumption the player is currently having – after all, this isn’t her first murder investigation. But in this scenario (and many more than I can count), Nicole tells you that she doesn’t need the items, that she isn’t going to take them right now, or responds in some other way that’ll make you want to pound your mouse until it breaks.To obtain (unlock) the items, you’ll need to run around, talk to various characters and examine several areas. Then, once the necessary items are in your possession, you’ll have to go through the motions once more, and re-examine many (sometimes all) of the same areas you just took a look at.

Let’s Go Crazy

Cards of Destiny is overflowing with items that need to be combined in order to do something important. Ex: using a spray bottle (item one) and paper towels (item two) to clean off a dusty projector window. That makes sense. Likewise, it was easy to see that a glass (item one) full of Alka-Seltzer (item two) could be used to clean a rusty bolt (item three), which must be cleaned in order to read the inscription on it.

Most players will also realize that a bucket (item one) full of heavy bricks (item two) can act as a weight to hold down a crank that wants to spin out of control. As the combinations get more expansive – who knew that a copper tube, a brick, and the top of a manhole could be used to make a door-opening device? – fans of point-and-click adventures will appreciate the developers’ creativity. Even simple combinations (like using a fork and some old gum to pull a key out of a metal rod) could fool you.

There is one catch, however: in most every case, the items must be combined in a specific order. Remember the spray bottle/paper towel example? My first attempt failed because I tried to combine the paper towels with the spray bottle. Instead, I must first select the spray bottle and then select the paper towel.

Law and Order? No. Trial and Error? Yes.

While this might sound like a minor grievance, it becomes a serious issue when you start to second-guess the solution to a particular puzzle. You’ll examine the same group of areas – or click all over the screen until something works – with the hope that the current dilemma will come to an end. However, as soon as it does, another one presents itself, creating a game of never-ending barriers that the player must overcome.Furthermore, many of the puzzle hints and solutions are hidden within the story. That might sound like a great idea, but Nicole’s dialogue is atrocious; with weak reactions and bad catch-phrases (her most common: “Nothing doing”), she can turn the most suspenseful scenario – like a murder she just witnessed – into something awkward and annoying.The other characters (who she must interact with frequently) are even worse. I wanted something to compare them to and wondered if Wikipedia had an entry for a “wet paint” sign. Sure enough it does, and reading that page was somehow more fun than listening to these characters speak.

This game can run excellent with system requirement Intel Pentium dual core cpu E5300 or higher, 1 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 7600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher like dirextX 10 compatible, Nothing more to waste your time! go and buy the DVD game install it and enjoy it.....

The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom

2010-04-08T10:33:00.004+07:00

The little workers that follow your orders in The Settlers 7 are a tireless lot. They mine for coal, shear sheep, chop wood, and smelt iron yet ask for so little in return. In fact, if you don't have anything for them to do, they might cry out for a little work to ease the burden of their own laziness. And when you play this economy-heavy strategy game, you'll be just as busy--and content--as these tiny computer people. The latest in the long-running Settlers franchise is as charming and enjoyable as past installments, though it's hard to escape on-again, off-again online troubles that have plagued the game since release. Even if you are only interested in The Settlers 7 for its single-player features, you have to be connected to the Internet and signed into Ubisoft's online portal to play. Unfortunately, server problems occasionally make the game inaccessible for hours at a time, which is an issue that does not appear to be improving as the weeks pass.

If you're the patient type, however, you'll probably want to put up with the ongoing connectivity issues simply because The Settlers 7 is fun to play. It isn't as complex or as varied as similar offerings--Dawn of Discovery, for example, or even previous Settlers games--but it has a mesmerizing flow that has a way of pulling you in. The game is all about setting up supply lines by building appropriate structures and abodes in the appropriate places, and then balancing the stream of resources that your settlers then automatically collect. Then you expand your realm across the map by taking over connected settlements, whether they be neutral or already taken by an opponent. The campaign starts you off slow, introducing you to concepts one by one, but in time, you discover just how complex the economic web can be. For instance, you need wood to make planks, which are in turn used as a basic building material for standard structures. Your armies require fancy food, which means you need to build lodges near forests teeming with wildlife or build piggery extensions onto your farms. Then, you need to make sure to attach a butcher annex onto a noble house--which itself requires regular food to operate.

This sounds complicated, but it's easy to get the hang of, and the game does a good job of pointing out gaps in your economic chain. If your mints aren't pumping enough gold into your coffers because you are low on the coal they need, a little icon will appear over the building in need to let you know. Matches can be challenging nonetheless, and resource imbalances may require you to approach things a little differently every time. For instance, you might need to gather wood on barren land. In that case, you need to add a forester annex to a lodge, and because main structures can only have three additions attached to them, space restrictions can become a concern. If you find there aren't many gold mines to empty, you can make beer to sell at your tavern, though then you are redirecting a resource used to attract clerics to your realm. You're constantly forced to make adjustments throughout the course of a single match, and failing to pay attention can have disastrous consequences.

There are times when you'll wish the game made it easier to keep track of things. In a typical match, you'll start expanding your kingdom quickly, and space restrictions might require you to place important structures in settlements other than your primary one. In time, it can become a burden to keep track of a stronghold (for creating troops), a church (for producing men of the cloth), and an export office (for hiring traders). Hotkeys or icons that let you quickly jump to these crucial buildings, along with your all-important tavern, would have been incredibly helpful. As it is, you need to remember where you placed such structures, and when you scroll to that settlement, you must be able to visually identify the structure in question so you can click on it. Other interface improvements would also have been welcome (being able to click on the icons in the build queue to jump directly to that structure, for example), but some flaws aside, it's easy to get around the map by scrolling or clicking on various nodes on the skeletal minimap. If you scroll all the way out, you'll switch to a helpful bird's-eye view that shows you where resources are located, the status of the opposition's expansion, and other helpful tidbits.

Armies provide the most straightforward way of expanding, and you'll easily crush the neutral armies that protect most unconquered settlements. There's nothing complex about combat; you just click on an army, click on a sector to attack, and off they go. Battles are an automated affair that comes down to sending enough of the right types of troops. Once you've gotten your economy going, you might have multiple armies moving about, each led by a different general, but military might doesn't mean easy triumph. You can win by vanquishing your enemies' primary hubs, but most of the time, you'll overcome your foes by earning a set number of victory points. You might earn a victory point by having more gold than your adversaries, earning more prestige (accumulated by placing prestige structures like statues), or capturing specially designated villages, for example. This system provides flexibility and a bit of unpredictability, and the resulting tug of war is tense and enjoyable.

You'll want to start with the campaign, which helps you get up to speed on all the economic intricacies. The straightforward story is buoyed by Princess Zoe--and her excruciating French accent--who must yank the land of Tandria from the clutches of some flamboyantly histrionic enemies. Missions begin with lovely pop-up storybook updates, occasionally punctuated by impressive and colorful cutscenes. These highlights help make up for the not-so-subtle plot development you'll see coming from the beginning, though the campaign is really just an extended tutorial for the more substantial multiplayer and skirmish modes. In skirmishes, the AI provides a decent challenge and does a good job of adapting, and while there aren't a whole lot of maps, you can edit them in various ways (change victory conditions, for instance), which keeps things somewhat fresh. If you want even more adaptive competition, you can head online, where both ladder (ranked) and unranked matches await. Online play is smooth and matches are of a goodly length (often over an hour), but you might have trouble finding games online.

Vibrant colors and a somewhat goofball art design make The Settlers 7's lush forests and ghost-ridden swamps leap right off the screen, and the animations make the game as fun to watch as it is to play. The exaggerated movements of your miners as they hop into a mining car are delightful; even constructors exude endless charm as they bound toward their destination. There is a distracting blur effect used on more distant objects, though it seems more noticeable at certain resolutions and can be hard to get used to. The wonderful soundtrack provides a nice complement to the sun-drenched visuals, featuring light orchestral fare, a bit of harp strumming, and even some Celtic-inspired vocal warbles.

Some of The Settlers 7's more interesting features are the peripheral ones. You can customize your castle with different ornaments, windows, flags and such. An integrated achievements system lets you post your accomplishments to your Facebook profile if you so wish, while you can call on another player for assistance with the click of a button. The flipside of this social friendliness, of course, is the inherent unfriendliness of an unstable online-only copy-protection scheme. That drawback and others aside, The Settlers 7 offers something for everyone, whether you're an experienced armchair economist or just like watching little virtual people run up and down the roadways carrying pails of water.

This game can run excellent with system requirement Intel Pentium dual core cpu E2180 or higher, 1 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 7300GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher like dirextX 10 compatible, Nothing more to waste your time! go and buy the DVD game install it and enjoy it.....

Major League Baseball 2K10

2010-04-02T21:59:00.003+07:00

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Somebody must have scribbled that cheesy old catchphrase on the wall at Visual Concepts sometime in the past year, because the developer has made Major League Baseball 2K10 look and feel a lot like recent entries in the Sony-only MLB: The Show series. Ripping off the competition seems to have been a great idea, too. The result of this copycat-itis is the most fully featured and realistic entry in the decade-long history of 2K Sports' baseball franchise. Gameplay isn't as clean as it could be, especially in the new My Player career option that lets you guide a rookie from the minors to the majors and with some wide-ranging glitches that make the PC port a much more troublesome game than its Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 cousins. Still, this remains a passable re-creation of the national pastime that--bugs aside--stands head, shoulders, and batting helmet above its predecessors.

Where MLB 2K10 most resembles its crosstown rival The Show is in the addition of My Player mode, an option that lets you create a rookie and take him to the bright lights and big cities of the Major Leagues. You create a rookie phenom, pick a fave franchise to be drafted into, and then set off to try to become an MLB legend. Skill points are awarded just about every time you slip into your spikes. Hit a single, and you get points for hitting. Make a putout or record an assist, and you get points for fielding. Cross home plate with a run, and you get points for baserunning. Strike out the side, and you get points for pitching. And so on. Special objectives and clutch situations provide additional points. You might be called upon to record an out in under five pitches, for example, or work a hit-and-run when standing on first. You take part only in the plays that your player is involved in, which allows you to zip through entire seasons while manually playing nearly every game on the schedule.

How much action you see depends on the position you choose, of course. If you play a pitcher, you're right in there with every toss from the mound, and you can even get called up to the majors after making a measly five starts in AA. If you assume the role of a third baseman, you just take your at-bats and step into the field every now and then to snag liners or catch pop-ups at the hot corner. So it can be a little dull playing a position player, unless you're totally committed. Still, the role-playing aspect is superb, and you'll find yourself feeling a real team vibe, cheering for your buddies when they're at the plate while you're on base, and being satisfied however you contribute to a win. You know you're in a special baseball place when you get a thrill just laying down a bunt to move a runner into scoring position.

Addictive doesn't even begin to describe how compelling My Player can be. Getting hooked is unavoidable if you're any sort of a baseball fan. Games unfold as though you're recording turns in an RPG or a strategy game, so you find yourself stuck playing just one more over and over again as the time flies by. Trying to get your Cooperstown wannabe buffed with the skill points and striving for his success at the plate, in the field, or on the rubber becomes a total compulsion. You can see yourself getting better with every game, improving both manually as you become more adept with the controls and automatically as your skills improve.

Intermission... Just information this game can run smooth with system requirement Intel Pentium dual core cpu E5300 2.6 Ghz or higher, 2 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 9600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher like dirextX 10 compatible, No more time! go and buy the DVD game install it and play it.....

That said, My Player is a grind at first for non-pitchers. This is a freshman effort that needs some tweaking. Player progression for anybody who doesn't spend half of a game playing with a rosin bag is tedious. Criteria for being called up to the big leagues is set in stone, so you need to hit targets for things like average, slugging percentage, and games started, as well as reach plateaus in skill ratings such as contact hitting and speed on the basepaths. This presents a problem, because these standards don't account for what sort of player you're trying to build. There is a serious issue with how skill points are awarded to position players for baserunning. For example, to get that phone call from your favorite GM, you need to clock a speed rating of 65, which is all fine and dandy, because Major Leaguers need to move better than the average couch potato. But what if you want to create a lumbering power hitter who might swipe a dozen bases in his career? It's also tough to earn running points no matter what kind of player you're trying to build. Skill points for running are handed out only for things like successfully taking second on hit-and-run plays called by the computer or crossing home plate, all of which is random. It can take a couple of minor league seasons to get up to speed with your running skills, even if you're trying to develop a lead-off Rickey Henderson type.

Another potential issue with My Player is the starting ratings for hitters when it comes to contact and power. Getting good wood on the ball and muscling it into the outfield is not easy during the first two or three years of your career. Rookies are woeful, even for AA ball, with very little pop. You need to time a swing just about perfectly to hit the ball with some authority, and even then your efforts are typically wimpy dribblers that barely make it to an outfielder before dying. If anything, you feel like you're overmatched in the minors, not some future phenom everybody is talking about. Skilled twitch gamers might not have a gripe here. But players who aren't as talented will find themselves either dropping down to rookie difficulty or tweaking the slider settings that determine things like hit power and contact on the default pro difficulty to allow for more oomph at the plate. Neither is a great option, however. Rookie jacks up offense to near-stupid levels (if you don't hit .750 here, check your pulse), and dialing down pro shuts off the ability to unlock player cards in games. It would be great to see this issue addressed with a patch that adjusts the initial hitting contact and power ratings in pro. Even a slight boost to power would make things a lot better.

Global Agenda

2010-04-02T21:40:00.003+07:00

In a future where resources are scant and an oppressive worldwide government endeavors to extend its controlling grip around the whole planet, there are those who resist. Banding together in disparate factions, elite soldiers use their diverse talents and quick reflexes to carve out their place in a world where the land you fight and die for is the only land you control. Powerful alliances emerge and leverage their gains to create weapons of war, elevating the scale of conflict and heightening the drama of battle. Or so Global Agenda would have you believe. Though there is hectic, satisfying combat to be found in this large-scale third-person shooter, the game is rarely as exciting as the premise purports. You must grind though hours and hours of dull, repetitive missions to level up to the point where you can be competitive in player-versus-player action. PVP skirmishes can be exciting and well matched, though they are just as often lopsided and frustrating. Joining an agency and fighting for hexes on the persistent world map will make you more invested in the action, but even the best matches struggle to justify the hours of grinding needed to find them. Global Agenda satisfies the minimum requirements for a solid class-based shooter, but it takes a long time to fully reveal itself and, even then, the results aren't particularly impressive.

You begin by choosing one of the four classes. Assault players wield chainguns and rocket launchers, making them powerful tanks when supported by medics. Recon specialists sneak about and snipe foes with long-range rifles, while robotics players can deploy turrets, drones, and stations to aid their allies or defeat foes. Gaining levels unlocks new weapons, gadgets, special abilities, and points that can be allocated toward three different skill trees. These trees allow you to specialize within your class so, for example, medics can develop more effective ways to poison enemies or just focus on healing allies that much better. Because there is no cost to reallocate your skill points, you are free to spec your character on a game-by-game basis if you so choose, selecting the skills that will suit your play style. There's some intriguing diversity among the classes that creates the possibility for some dynamic interplay, both cooperative and competitive. Developing different strategies to support your allies and more efficiently destroy enemies is neat, and seeing other players in action is likely to pique your interest in playing as other classes.

Unfortunately, it takes so long to fully level one character that your interest in trying other classes may shrink at the prospect of repeating that grind. There are two main types of combat: player versus environment and player versus player. The latter does not separate players based on rank, so jumping in as a low-level soldier is a great way to get steamrolled by players who have better characters and more knowledge of the game. Getting the hang of the basics in Global Agenda is easy, but it takes a while to master your role. Each player has a melee weapon, a jetpack, and a special ability that can be used to give his or her teammates a temporary boost. You also sport two primary devices (for example, weapons, healing gun, repair tool); each with an alternate fire mode (for example, aiming down the sights, improved healing). These devices, along with the jetpack, are fueled by your regenerating power pool. Finally, each player can equip three off-hand devices (for example, temporary buffs, turrets, mines) that operate on a cooldown period. During combat, you must keep an eye on your health and power pool while using your devices effectively. While the run-and-gun action is pretty straightforward, there is strategic subtlety to be found in which devices you choose and how you use them.

In order to access this strategic element, you need to level up. (The level cap is 50, though you unlock every device and skill point by level 30.) PVP is generally dominated by higher level players and getting roundly defeated doesn't offer much in the way of experience rewards, so your best choice for effective leveling is to run PVE missions with a team of three other people. These missions take place inside enemy facilities that range from mines to labs and back to mines again. Despite the fact that there are four tiers of PVE difficulty, there isn't a lot of environmental variety. It doesn't take long before you've seen all the maps and every corridor, warehouse, and rooftop looks familiar. The bland art design doesn't help matters much. Though there are a few nice flourishes (pools of molten rock and soldiers in breeding tanks), the austere futuristic setting is largely uninteresting, serving as little more than geometry for you to traverse and use as cover.

Submission... Just for rememmber this game can run good with system requirement Intel Pentium dual core cpu E5300 2.6 Ghz or higher, 2 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 9600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher like dirextX 10 compatible, No more time! go and buy the DVD game install it and play it.....

Though they may be dull, the environments themselves aren't your enemies. That role falls to the robots. Laser-wielding androids are the foot soldiers of Global Agenda; they are generally content to soak up your gunfire while shooting you unenthusiastically and occasionally fleeing. They are accompanied by deadlier rocket- and grenade-launching automatons, as well as elite soldiers that mimic the assault, recon, and medic classes. Each PVE mission is capped with a miniboss fight, though as you move up the difficulty tiers, minibosses start showing up in corridors, leaving the end-of-level fights to bigger, badder bosses. Even with these tougher foes, the enemy population is almost as repetitive as the level design. While they don't offer much in the way of excitement, these missions can be reasonably challenging, depending largely on how well your teammates fulfill their combat roles and support each other. Players are generally smart enough about what they should be doing, and the game supports voice and text chat should you feel the need to offer helpful suggestions.

Victory brings the inherent satisfaction of a job well done, but even this is dulled by the repetitive nature of these missions. On top of that, you don't gain much in the way of concrete rewards. You earn experience points, credits (Global Agenda's currency), and raw materials that can be sold or used in crafting. Neither comes in much quantity, however, forcing you to grind for hours on end to make any significant progress. Crafting requires the aforementioned materials, as well as blueprints, which can be purchased from a store in the hub city (or, rarely, earned in PVE missions). This allows you to construct personal upgrades for your soldier, but the improvements they offer (for example, +1% ranged damage) feel laughably small. Though you can stack a few of these to get a somewhat less-meager bonus, learning to make the good stuff requires that you craft hundreds of items yourself. You may be able to find someone to sell you premium items, but you can bet they are going to come with a premium price tag. Accumulating worthwhile crafting skills and upgrades is tough in Global Agenda's economy, where both credits and materials require you to slog through hours of repetition.

If you do manage to amass some material wealth, there are plenty of places to spend it in one of the Dome City hub worlds. Body armor and a helmet are purely aesthetic improvements, but these suits are definitely the visual highlight of Global Agenda. The cool futuristic designs range from sleek to outlandish and can be customized with a wide variety of dyes to create some striking looks. There's also an auction house (buy and sell things at subpar prices), a mail center (send or receive messages and items C.O.D.), a virtual combat arena (hone your battle strategies), and locations you must visit if you want to craft items or assign skill points. Navigation is straightforward, thanks to the abundant kiosks offering directions. In addition to visiting the various stores and workshops, Dome City is a good place to seek out party members, join an agency, or just admire armor sets.

Though PVE combat is a good way to prepare for PVP, you'll still have to deal with a significant learning curve. PVP combat is hectic and fast paced, demanding dexterity, battlefield awareness, and preparedness. The fraction of a second it takes you to activate one of your off-hand devices can mean the difference between life and death, and attacking or defending without the support of your teammates is a difficult proposition. Each of the five PVP modes pits two teams against each other. In Scramble, Breach, and Control modes, teams struggle to control specific areas of the map for a certain amount of time or until they gain a certain number of points. Payload is similar in its focus, but the area in question is actually a large object that moves along rails as one team tries to guide it across the map. Finally, Demolition charges each team with the task of escorting a mech carrying explosives into the enemy's base to blow it up. It's also worth noting that one PVE match type has some PVP sprinkled in it. Double Agent mode adds two human players to the AI team, making it tougher for the team of four players to complete its objective. While this mode offers a novel twist on PVE, it lacks the dynamism of PVP.

With so many abilities in play, PVP contests can get very busy, very quickly. Two robotics set up turret nests in the corners of a building to defend a point as their recon allies fly to the top of the structure to snipe incoming enemies. Assaults spin up their chainguns, triggering shields that draw enemy turret fire away from the medics that are keeping them alive. Grenades, lasers, and rockets fill the air and, in less than a minute of carnage, the enemy advance is scattered. If only the enemy recons had sabotaged the turrets, things might have been different. Just a microsecond more and that big chaingunner would have lost his medic, yielding the central position. And what might have changed if that robotic had a drone equipped, instead of a force field? Matches can hinge on such details, and when the two teams are in an even struggle for dominance, PVP can be exciting and tense. The thrill of a timely deployment, the satisfaction of saving your teammates from the brink of death, the joy of explosive slaughter…these are the rewards offered by PVP combat in Global Agenda.

Unfortunately, like in other areas, Global Agenda is stingy. You are far more likely to end up in a lopsided match than in an enjoyable contest. Ill-matched teams make for hollow victories and merciless defeats, neither of which is particularly enjoyable. Joining an agency is a good way to associate yourself with a regular group of players, and having a consistent team can help mitigate the number of bad matches you encounter. Agencies can join alliances in Conquest mode, giving them access to alliance-versus-alliance fights for control of resource-producing hexes in a number of persistent world maps. Resources gained here can be sold or used to craft weapons of war like mechs, dropships, and squads of androids to help your alliance in its quest for dominance. AVA combat is essentially PVP with higher stakes and high-cost battlefield machinery. These matches are more consistently well matched, though AVA is certainly not without lopsided debacles. Gaining access to this level of combat requires hours of grinding, PVP practice, and an invite to a competitive agency. But once you're there, the matches are some of the best the game has to offer, and because your territories are only open for battle during specific windows of time, you don't have to worry about all your progress being snatched away while you sleep.

Whether or not it is worth the grinding time to access this level of play depends on how many hours you have to spare. Whether it is worth the price is another matter. The $39.99 purchase price currently gets you everything that Global Agenda has to offer. However, Conquest mode, the auction house, crafting, player mail, other advanced features, and leveling past 30 are all designated as subscriber-only elements. This subscription (listed as $12.99 per month) was set to kick in at the end of March, but the developers have pushed that deadline back to the end of April. With no subscription fee in place, Global Agenda is reasonably priced. Only time will tell whether that remains true in a month.

Even with a reasonable price, Global Agenda is not easy to recommend. It demands tens of hours of dull, low-level play to access and enjoy the more exciting content. And even that content is not consistently enjoyable. While Global Agenda does offer a distinct breed of action in the world of massively multiplayer online games, its hectic combat is hidden beneath layers and layers of drudgery that only sincerely dedicated players are likely to enjoy.

Supreme Commander 2

2010-04-02T20:50:00.004+07:00

Supreme Commander 2 is a broad and bold real-time strategy game that might surprise fans of the 2007 original. Don't worry: If you loved Supreme Commander, the sequel still offers the tactical flexibility and enormous scope you were expecting, albeit tempered by a bit of economic streamlining. But SupCom 2's not just a retread of what's come before; it's a slick retooling of classic gameplay that happily and successfully embraces both complexity and user friendliness. This is an inviting package for both veterans and newcomers--intricate enough to keep your mind nimble but welcoming even to those daunted by the original's magnitude. Most importantly, it's great fun, letting you play with a variety of interesting units and giving you lots of room to experiment with all the tactical possibilities. The strategic joy doesn't go unhindered; pathfinding headaches and predictable AI keep Supreme Commander 2 from having the sharp cerebral edge of its predecessor. Yet, while not quite as special as its fantastic forebear, it still stands out for its fluid gameplay, excellent multiplayer maps, and the thrill of emerging victorious after an hour-long battle of wits.

One thing you'll notice right away is Supreme Commander 2's clean and slick aesthetic. The original was an astonishing technical powerhouse that rendered hundreds of detailed units at once, but it came at the expense of consistent performance. The sequel is clearly less visually impressive; sharp textures and rich lighting have been dulled in favor of stability and speedy frame rates. Yet, while your first impression might be how surprisingly dated SupCom 2 looks, you'll soon grow to appreciate how smooth and supple it feels to move about the battlefield. You can still zoom all the way out to get a godlike view of the proceedings, but you aren't likely to encounter any visual hiccups when you do. And, on three test systems, Supreme Commander 2 performed fluidly even at maximum settings. That the original looks better than the sequel makes the trade-off seem somewhat drastic, but the upside is silky camera movement and overall responsiveness. It's breezy and enjoyable to zip about the map, issuing orders and checking in on the skirmishes in progress.

The game may not push many polygons, but it does sport lots of personality and verve. You battle in misty mountaintops connected by a series of bridges and fend off hulking robots within towering industrial complexes, and the environments benefit from a distinct sense of place. The art design won't floor you, but Supreme Commander 2 has more style than its predecessor, which took a more matter-of-fact approach to its visual flourishes. The story also boasts added personality, following three military commanders that met during training after three warring factions--the United Earth Federation (or UEF), the Cybran Nation, and the Illuminate (formerly the Aeon Illuminate)--formed a coalition to destroy the invading Seraphim. The character models that appear in cutscenes and within talking-head story updates have a stylized, almost cartoonish look that sometimes seems at odds with the dignity and drama of the main story. (Some campy dialogue and hammy acting don't help matters, either.) Nonetheless, these characters provide an intimate view of the conflict that puts an end to the tenuous treaty, and they're appealingly scrappy, which makes it easy to root for them.

You get to know them as you make your way through Supreme Commander 2's good-sized single-player story, which features 18 missions--six for each faction. There's a nice sense of forward momentum to the campaign, which opens up features and units to you over time, but it does so without holding your hand every step of the way. The first couple of missions for each faction might take you 20 minutes or so, but the biggest ones might last well over an hour and keep you occupied on multiple fronts. It's an excellent campaign, getting you into the fray quickly and letting you focus on strategy rather than on the "take these few units over here" objectives that all too often invade real-time strategy games. It's a smart, top-level approach that highlights the game's strategic flexibility. If you play on normal difficulty, don't expect too much challenge until you reach the Cybran missions, however; the AI usually sticks to some noticeable patterns and rarely veers from its comfort zone. (Veterans should go for the harder difficulty straightaway.) However, there is always a lot going on, with some missions throwing enemies at you from the get-go and others forcing you to build a base from scratch.

Intermission.... For reference this game can run good with system requirement Intel Pentium dual core cpu E5300 2.6 Ghz or higher, 2 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 9600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher like dirextX 10 compatible, No more time! go and buy the DVD game install it and play it.....

Regardless of your mission objectives, Supreme Commander 2 is a whole lot of fun because it gives you room to play with the units at your disposal. Each faction's units are similar, but they aren't exact mirrors. For example, while the UEF boasts multiple land vehicles that meet specific needs, the catch-all antimissile/antiair Cybran adaptor fulfills multiple roles at once. The UEF and Cybran factions possess capable naval units--but Illuminate players do not get a navy at all, though their hovering ground units won't leave them landlocked. The differences are sometimes subtle, but they're palpable enough to make each faction feel unique. You won't find the factional variety of a game like Universe at War or even StarCraft, but the upside is that factions are beautifully balanced and don't require a complete shift of gears when moving from one faction to the next.

As before, each faction uses similar methods to accumulate resources: by collecting mass from predetermined nodes using mass extractors and by building generators to produce energy. There are some notable changes to the formula here. In Supreme Commander, your available resources didn't limit your build queue; you could essentially order up new units and structures "on credit." Now, you can only spend the funds if you have them, which is a change that may disappoint some SupCom loyalists. The other major difference is the complete removal of unit tiers. Units are upgraded via research points that you accumulate by building research centers; the more you build, the faster you earn those valuable points. Your research trees are divided into multiple categories (air, ground, structure, and so on) and follow multiple paths that let you unlock new units and structures, as well as improve existing ones. For example, you can add an extra barrel to your tanks and a personal shield to your gunships. Most significantly, you can also gain access to the all-important experimental units and, yes, the nukes that caused you so much joy and heartache in the first game.

The economic changes aren't for the worse or even necessarily for the better, but they do place the focus squarely on moment-to-moment battle decisions in favor of convoluted economic tweaking. You spend less time speeding up production times with engineers and more time spreading your units around and reacting to your opponents' actions. Matches might last for well over an hour, giving you a chance to play with different ideas and a reason to use every unit at your disposal. If you like turtling, shield generators and long-range artillery will buy you time to amass a large force. If you like harassing the enemy, stick to the air and put your bombers on a patrol route. Your base building isn't restricted to a specific region, and the research trees are generous and robust, so there's plenty of room to be creative. And this is where Supreme Commander 2 shines most brightly. The flexibility leads to a ton of fun because on the best maps, no game plays out the same way twice. An intense battle may erupt when you least suspect it, or you might foil your nemesis' plans with a well-timed artillery barrage. And if you can't decide whether to be conservative or aggressive, spread your forces quickly and be both at once. Imagination is often rewarded with shocking and exciting victories, though crazy strategies may naturally lead to soul-crushing defeat as well.

The game-changing experimental units give you even more flexibility and can change the flow of battle in awesome ways. Some of them, such as the UEF's returning (and slightly tweaked) fatboy and the gigantic King Kriptor robot, are offensive powerhouses and as subtle as a destructive blast to the forehead. Others, however, take a bit more skill and produce much more unexpected and enjoyable results. A well-considered placement of the Illuminate's loyalty gun will convert invading experimentals to your cause, so that a hulking Cybranosaurus might end up mowing down its previous comrades. The space temple teleporter helps you take your enemy unaware, and using it multiple times in a row may lead to several concurrent scuffles. If you want more dramatic invasions, however, you can build some ground units within the UEF's land cannon and shoot them across the map into enemy territory. It sure beats a boring old transport ship.

Rarely would you ever call Supreme Commander 2 boring, however. The net result of the changes--the adjusted economy, the speed at which you can earn experimentals and upgrades--is that you don't need to wait a long time to get the fun units in play. It takes time to unlock high-cost experimentals, but the less-expensive ones are fun to watch and fun to use, and you can put them in play early on. This is a game in which you can pit colossal robots and hulking metal dinosaurs against each other, and the pace of the campaign is excellent, keeping you excited to see what toys the game is going to give you next while making it fun to use the ones you have. The game's conventional but rousing soundtrack and excellent sound effects enhance this drive forward, and the resulting tension is constantly relieved by massive explosions and frenzied masses of tangling aircraft.

After you cut your teeth on the single-player campaign, you can easily jump into online play to challenge human opponents. The GPGNet interface has been jettisoned for a clean in-game multiplayer interface that lets you get into a match quickly or join and host games in a more traditional manner. There is a healthy number of great maps; some of them are pulled from the original Supreme Commander, and conflicts can include up to eight players. Online matches perform as smoothly as offline skirmishes and let you tailor the game using multiple specifications, from speeding up the tempo to removing nukes from the equation. Online play provides the game's finest pleasures, mostly in the broadly designed maps that smartly avoid a lot of chokepoints and narrow walkways. A seemingly staid opponent may suddenly launch nuclear death from above, teleport in a couple of powerful assault blocks, or take out all of your air units with a few antiair experimentals. Everything can go from cerebral to stimulating within a moment's notice.

The narrow walkways of other maps highlight Supreme Commander’s most notable problem: pathfinding. Ground units may have trouble figuring out how to arrange themselves or get through not-so-narrow gaps, even performing occasional dance routines as they attempt simple move orders. An experimental might get stuck on a defeated unit's charred remains or your armored command unit may wedge itself between structures, though most pathfinding flaws are far less problematic. These moments might happen even when you've taken care to avoid them, and micromanaging units just to get them to where you need them to go is not a welcome diversion. These frustrations aren't common, but they are noticeable nonetheless.

Whether you're a newcomer or a veteran tactician, you'd do well to overlook these flaws and enjoy Supreme Commander 2 for how entertaining and exciting it is. The game maintains a difficult balancing act, providing the scope and flexibility of the original Supreme Commander with a user-friendly makeover that lends some freshness and personality. This is the kind of game where you glance at the clock and discover that hours have passed and you're still waist-deep in assault bots and antiair turrets. Do yourself a favor and get lost in the fun and flash of it all.

Assassin's Creed II

2010-04-02T20:20:00.004+07:00

Assassin's Creed II is a gorgeous and impressive piece of work, unfortunately undercut by a few notable issues that intrude on the fun. Developer Ubisoft Montreal has addressed many of the original's flaws by filling its follow-up with fresh and enjoyable mission types while still retaining the joy of movement and atmospheric wonder that characterized the original. The game's vision of Renaissance Italy is astounding, delivering a world that you will love exploring and a sense of wonder that few games can so joyously deliver. The cohesive story and a terrific new character will draw you in, and traditional platforming sequences and other new additions pile on the fun.

Assassin's Creed II's most unusual attribute, however, is displayed in big letters on the front of the box: "A permanent Internet connection is required to play the game." This requirement wouldn't be so peculiar if it were an online-only multiplayer game, but Assassin's Creed II is a single-player, story-driven adventure. Whenever you play the game, you must sign into an online portal; if you aren't connected to the Internet, you cannot start the game, and if you lose your connection, the game will pause. Even your saved games are stored online, which is a boon if you plan on playing on multiple computers, but seems like an otherwise unreasonable mandate. This is a bold approach to digital rights management--and one that could unnecessarily hinder your enjoyment. If a storm knocks out your Internet connection, you're out of luck; if you want to play games on your laptop during an upcoming airplane journey, cross Assassin's Creed II off the list of possibilities. And even if you maintain a solid connection, you might run into a few problems. Twice we had the game shut down while it was saving, and we ran into short but noticeable delays multiple times while the game attempted to load our profile and download our progress. Other times, our attempted login timed out, or the launcher incorrectly informed us that we had used the wrong username or password. These issues hindered our playtime for hours, and sporadically affected European players for days.

Regardless of your view of this unusual copy protection scheme and the inconveniences it might visit upon you, Assassin's Creed II is still a hugely entertaining and occasionally transcendent experience. Like the first game, it occurs across two timelines: a modern-day chronology starring bartender Desmond Miles, and another featuring one of Desmond's ancestors. When you start the game, you'll catch up with Desmond right where the original left him, though as fans of the original can guess, the Abstergo labs are no longer a safe haven. You'll spend a bit of time with Desmond during the course of the game, though the shoes you most frequently fill are those of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, the charmingly impetuous son of a 15th-century Italian banker. Ezio is an instantly likable firebrand, as passionate about family and honor as he is about wine and women. When you first meet him, Ezio is living a carefree life and has not yet donned his assassin's robe, nor is he familiar with the creed. However, Ezio's devil-may-care freedom is soon cut short by murder and betrayal instigated by the assassins' greatest threat: the Templars.

Assassin's Creed's Altair was an interesting character, but only for the stealthy order he represented, not because you ever got to know the man under the white hood. Ezio is far more appealing, for he's not just quick with a secret blade, but he's a fully realized protagonist. He isn't at the mercy of the plot, but rather, the narrative evolves from his need to uncover the truth behind his sorrows. It's the personal nature of the narrative that makes Assassin's Creed II's story more compelling than its predecessor's. The few modern-day segments featuring Desmond pack a lot more punch this time around as well, and the conspiracies driving that story arc become a lot clearer and, as a result, more provocative. The two missions that occur just before the finale, and which were released as downloadable add-ons for the console versions, hinder some of the story's dramatic momentum. However, the ending itself is shocking and memorable, a nice improvement over the original's flaccid conclusion.

Ezio isn't Assassin's Creed II's only headliner. The Italy he inhabits is a character in and of itself, filled with visual and sonic details that infuse the world with life and elegance. The cities you explore--Florence, Venice, and more--are larger and more detailed than the environs of the first game. Citizens go about their daily lives, and they look authentic doing so. Merchants sweep the street in front of their shops; small groups stroll along, making conversation with each other; and courtesans smirk and cajole as you pass by. These folks aren't cookie-cutter character models. They are dressed differently enough from each other and are animated so expressively that it's as if the population would go about its business with or without your presence. More impressive are the cityscapes themselves as they unfold in front of you, inviting you to take in their splendor. This is an incredibly good-looking game: the lighting is sumptuous, the draw distance is vast, and textures are crisp. If you don't have a widescreen monitor, however, take note that the game is letterboxed--that is, black bars will appear at the top and bottom of your display.

Assassin's Creed II's sense of place and time isn't due just to its visuals, however. Its high-quality sound design is equally responsible, delivering a busy-sounding Florence while still allowing the little quips of citizens commenting on your acrobatics to shine through. There's a good variety of such dialogue now, so you won't tire of repeated lines, and because the citizen rescues of the original Assassin's Creed have been excised, you won't hear the monotonous whines of complaining peasants. There are a few scattered audio glitches, particularly during the Bonfire of the Vanities mission toward the end of the game. However, these are small flaws given the overall excellence of the audio presentation. Two aspects of the sound design are particularly noteworthy: the music and the voice acting. The game's splendid orchestral score is subtle and soothing when it needs to be, never intruding on the exploration and never manipulating your emotions with inappropriate musical melodrama. As for the voice acting, it is uniformly excellent. Not only is Ezio voiced with charm and energy, but the surrounding cast is mostly superb--though one particular line delivered by Ezio's uncle Mario might make you cringe.

The greatest beauty of Assassin's Creed II's exquisitely detailed environments is that you can run and jump across the rooftops with ease and climb the tallest towers to get a bird's-eye view of the game's glorious vistas. You control Ezio much as you did Altair, though movement feels a bit tighter and even more fluid than before. The game strikes an excellent middle ground between responding to player input and automating actions like leaping from one surface to the next, so it's simple to leap about the city smoothly without worrying that you're going to plummet to your death on the next hop. You'll still encounter a few awkward moments here and there: simply walking off a ledge onto a rooftop a few feet below can still be bit clumsy, for example. But these moments are few, and in fact, you'll pull off some awesome-looking moves without even trying. If you want to get the most out of your impossible leaps and dives, you'll want to plug in an Xbox 360 controller, which offers a somewhat more fluid experience. However, the keyboard and mouse scheme is a fine alternative, so if you don't have a gamepad lying around, don't worry: You'll have no trouble soaring across the roofs or slinking about hidden tombs.

Tombs are more intricate levels in which you must retrieve an important artifact (and if you collect all of them, you are in for a special treat). Some of them are platforming puzzles of the best kind, in which you must figure out how to get from your starting point to the destination, in the manner of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Ezio can't run on walls like the Persian prince, but he's incredibly agile nonetheless, and swinging and hopping about rafters and chandeliers within the tombs is great fun. A few tombs throw some additional challenges at you, such as a time limit in which to reach your goal. The best tombs, however, are those in which you pursue an enemy but run into obstacles that force you to give chase using an alternate route. The chases are excellent, and they require quick reactions, but not so quick as to be unreasonable. Flawlessly keeping up with your target without breaking your momentum is one of Assassin's Creed II's greatest thrills, and as long as you are paying close attention, you can pull it off on the first attempt.

For reference this game can run good with system requirement Intel Pentium dual core cpu E5300 2.6 Ghz or higher, 2 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 9600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher like dirextX 10 compatible, No more time! go and buy the DVD game install it and play it.....

Dawn of War II: Chaos

2010-04-02T20:01:00.005+07:00

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II - Chaos Rising is the first stand-alone expansion to Dawn of War II, 2009's popular real-time strategy/tactical role-playing game based on the Warhammer: 40,000 universe. Leaving core gameplay essentially unchanged, Chaos Rising adds a new single-player Blood Ravens campaign, the Chaos faction for multiplayer games, two new heroes for the Last Stand game type, and several multiplayer maps. Although you don't need the original DOWII to enjoy the campaign, you'll probably want both games for multiplayer, since Chaos Rising alone won't give you access to the original four factions in multiplayer matches. Even with this caveat, however, Chaos Rising is a gem of an expansion that shines on its own, thanks to immersive gameplay, robust cooperative play, and a delightfully evil tone.

The single-player campaign, which you can also play cooperatively, with a friend controlling half of your squads, brings back your party from DOWII. This includes characters such as Avitus, the rage-filled devastator squad leader, and Captain Davian Thule, whose disembodied spirit pilots a dreadnought battlemech. If you'd like, you can import your existing characters from DOWII, but be warned that they'll arrive without their best war gear, including their terminator armor, which has been damaged and can't be equipped until later in the campaign. Chaos Rising also adds a new character, Jonah Orion the librarian, a versatile and highly customizable spellcaster more at home on the battlefield than at the circulation desk. These simple but robust characters, combined with an intriguing storyline, varied battles, and the cooperative option, make the campaign the highlight of Chaos Rising.

Chaos Rising's campaign forgoes base building in favor of real-time battles, followed by breaks to customize your characters' skills and equipment, listen to intelligence briefings and determine which squads will deploy to your next mission, and (optionally) communicate with your team members and superior officers. In addition to experience points, your characters can now gain corruption points, which grant them access to corrupted war gear and twisted, magnificent new powers bestowed by the Chaos gods. Corruption comes from a variety of sources, including wearing tainted war gear, using Chaos powers, betraying the Empire or your Space Marine brothers, and prolonged exposure to dark energies. Similarly, you'll get plentiful opportunities to redeem yourself and earn the right to wear war gear that requires a pure spirit; however, being good gives you only one special ability per character, so the dark whispers of the void can be very persuasive. Another reason to give in to the dark side is that the "pure" ending cutscene has a tendency to crash to desktop. Although you'll notice in-game consequences for becoming corrupt and evil, sadly you don't get any additional missions as a result, which can be a bit of a letdown if you spend the entire campaign plotting to turn against your commanding officer and do battle with the incorruptible dreadnought Davian Thule.

Your band of intrepid Space Marines must do battle against the Eldar, Orks, and Tyranids over the course of the campaign, but the new Chaos faction is your primary antagonist, not just on the front line, but within the ranks of your own chapter. While fighting the forces of Chaos, you soon discover that one of your own has turned traitor and heretic, working to undermine the Blood Ravens from within. Consequently, your adventure focuses on both driving the Black Legion from Imperial space and unfolding the foul conspiracy infesting the chapter. In Chaos Rising, you'll revisit some of the planets from DOWII, but thankfully, you won't play the same map twice, which keeps the gameplay fresh and engaging. The downside is that the campaign is only about 10 hours long. However, it does have some replayability if you take a different approach to corruption, use alternative skill and equipment builds, or deploy different squads to the battlefield.

After you finish the campaign, you'll want to collect some "skulls for the skull throne" and try out Chaos in multiplayer or skirmish mode. Their units range from psychotic humans, such as the Chaos Space Marines, to grotesque demons, such as the monstrous Great Unclean One, who can fling enemy infantry to their deaths with his agile intestines. Additionally, you can customize several of your units by devoting them to different Chaos gods, who in turn grant unique blessings. For instance, Havocs, the Chaos version of Devastator squads, can earn a rate-of-fire bonus for their loyalty to Tzeentch, while Chaos Predator tanks blessed by Nurgle gain health at the expense of speed. Furthermore, each of the three heroes dedicates himself to a distinct Chaos god, granting you access to both special Chaos powers and the ability to build shrines to his master. The melee-heavy Chaos Lord favors the blood god Khorne, whose shrines periodically spawn powerful demons; the defense-oriented Plague Champion prefers Nurgle, whose shrines heal allies and reinforce your units; while the fragile but potent Chaos Sorcerer lets you build shrines to Tzeentch that shoot bolts of energy at incoming enemie.

For reference this game can run good with system requirement Intel Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz HT or higher, 2 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 8600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher compatible, there is no reason to wait, please buy the DVD game and enjoy it.....

Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight

2010-04-02T19:46:00.004+07:00

There's a good chance that Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight is not what you were expecting. This real-time tactical game shares some attributes with the Tiberium-fueled strategy games that came before it--flashy graphical effects, GDI and Nod forces pummeling each other, and a scowling antihero with a stare so intense his eyes pierce your soul. But Tiberian Twilight stands out not for its use of age-old series standbys, but for reinvented mechanics that have little in common with those of its predecessors. Base-building and broad strategizing have been supplanted by small-scale micromanagement; standard battles have given way to capture-point conquest. It's a bold shift for the apparently final chapter of the saga, though not always a positive one. The disappointing campaign ends in a conclusion unworthy of Kane's melodramatic legacy, and the moment-to-moment gameplay is too limited to be consistently engaging. And yet the multiplayer action and single-player skirmishes are good fun, if not remarkably so, and a system of persistent unlocks provides nice rewards across every mode. This may not be the exhilarating finale to Kane's exploits you had hoped for, but Tiberian Twilight is a pleasant diversion good for occasional grins, though not for riotous thrills.

Those persistent unlocks are central to the experience--one that takes place in an always-online environment. Even if you plan on playing only the single-player campaign and skirmishes against the artificial intelligence, you must always sign into an online portal first. This always-online approach to PC games is part of an unwelcome but growing trend, but at least the game provides some sensible context for it. Like most strategy games, Command & Conquer 4 offers a single-player campaign, offline skirmishes, and online battles; but unlike most strategy games, it rewards you with experience based on your activity in every mode. No matter which mode you play, finishing a match inches you closer to your next level. Gaining levels means new units, new powers, and new upgrades--goodies that you can then take with you into any of the modes. This persistency, along with the way you automatically join online chat and can create player parties from the main interface, contributes to a pseudo-massively-multiplayer environment. This isn't a massively multiplayer game, of course, so it's still a disappointment that you can't practice your skills or get reacquainted with Kane if a windstorm knocks out your Internet connection. Nevertheless, this focus on community and advancement makes the online-only requirement bearable, if not wholly reasonable.

Yet Command & Conquer has been just as much about hammy acting and over-the-top plot developments as it has about online competition. Actor Joe Kucan once again fills the shoes of Kane, the sociopathic leader of the Brotherhood of Nod--a messiah to a cult of blind followers seeking "ascension." Tiberian Twilight is the final entry in the series, at least where Kane's story is concerned; revealing too much here could risk spoiling some of the campaign's surprises. Melodramatic live-action cutscenes feature Kane and other key characters speaking directly to you, and as you'd expect in a C&C game, the actors chew up the scenery with broad body language and tragicomic line delivery. Yet this story takes itself somewhat more seriously than previous ones did. The sets don't look so low-budget this time. The lighting is dark and oppressive. The excellent (if sometimes bombastic) soundtrack enhances the darkness with poignant jabs from oboes and bassoons. Kane is even more intense, more frightening, and yet more vulnerable too.

The campaign's most interesting facet is that after a few missions that serve as a tutorial, you make a decision: side with Kane and join the Brotherhood, or stick with the more law-abiding Global Defense Initiative--that is, GDI. You are still able to play out the story from the other side of events no matter which faction you initially choose, and it's admittedly fascinating to experience events from both angles. Either way, however, it's hard not to be disappointed by the flaccid ending, which hardly grants Kane the grand send-off such an iconic and deliciously self-important figure deserved. Perhaps this lukewarm departure is disappointingly fitting, however, as the campaign itself isn't grand either, but rather occurs on a smaller magnitude than you may be used to in a Command & Conquer game--in terms of both length (the campaign will probably take you six or seven hours to complete) and strategic scale.

That smaller scale is Tiberium Twlight's most obvious change over its predecessors. Command & Conquer 3's lengthy campaign was notable for several exciting large-scale missions spread across multiple fronts. By contrast, C&C4 puts you in control of a relatively small force whose size is limited by a predesignated number of command points. You order up units from your mobile base, called a crawler. Each unit costs a certain number of points, so your unit cap depends on the units you create, with larger and more powerful units costing more to build than smaller ones. In the team-based, five-versus-five online skirmishes, this format has its limitations but still makes for battles that can be fun to manage. (More on this to come.) But the campaign feels restrictive. As a rule, you simply lead around the same control group from spot to spot as you complete your mission objectives. In this respect and in others, Tiberian Twilight shares some similarities with last year's Dawn of War II. But the campaign of Relic's Warhammer 40K-themed opus was notable for its compelling you-versus-the-hordes pandemonium and role-playing-style looting. By comparison, this campaign plods along on smaller maps, offering few thrills, no unit customization, and little sense of forward momentum. You can invite a friend to join you cooperatively, in which case two players lead their own lone control group around. This is one of the few cases in which adding a friend doesn't turn up the volume, end...

This game can run good with system requirement Intel Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz HT or higher, 2 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 8600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher compatible, there is no reason to wait, please buy the DVD game and enjoy it.....

Just Cause 2

2010-03-30T04:22:00.005+07:00

There's a story tying all of the craziness together, but it's about as believable as the crazy stunts you pull. As in the original Just Cause, you play as Rico, a member of a US agency called, appropriately enough, The Agency. The story is all silly fluff, standing out more for its so-excruciating-it's-almost-good voice acting and broad ethnic caricatures than for any intricate plot developments. (Don't bother looking: There aren't any.) You'll probably have more fun trying to figure out where different characters are from based on their insane accents than you will working out what exactly is going on or why you should care, but the tale still works well in light of the game's screwy attitude. Contradictory updates from the government-run news agency will have you giggling precisely because they're so crazy; Rico offhandedly dismisses the insane, supernatural events that occur after an eventful flight into a Bermuda Triangle-type region. Most importantly, the tale provides oh-so-implausible excuses to blow up gas stations, radar installations, and offshore oil platforms.

That's a very good thing because you'll be blowing up a lot of stuff. Causing explosions leads to chaos, which functions as a type of currency in Just Cause 2. To unlock new story missions and other goodies, you need to wreak as much havoc as you can, and you get lots of different, preposterous ways to do it. If you see a grouping of fuel tanks, you could just run in and shoot them with a machine gun, but that is one of the less dramatic ways to do it and will use up ammo besides. (And early on, the game is a bit too stingy with ammo, given the focus on making things go boom.) But why approach things in such a pedestrian manner? Instead, you could hijack a passenger jet, put it on a destructive path, and jump out at the last minute. Or you could steal a hulking tank, drive it to a central location, and unleash its cannon on everything that looks like it might erupt in a ball of flames. The dramatic approach can take a bit more time, but it usually leads to a good deal of entertainment. Yet, even if you do things the easy way and use a dinky pistol, the explosions are perfectly loud, big, bright, and obnoxious.

Just Cause 2 is ridiculous in the best possible way. In the space of a few moments, you can grapple to a hovering helicopter; beat up the pilot and hijack the chopper; blow up a cluster of fuel tanks; put the chopper on a collision course with an enormous antenna; jump out at the last moment; and watch the resulting explosion as you parachute to the ground below. But in the life of Rico Rodriguez, such events are just another day at the office, though in this case, the office is the gigantic island nation of Panau, where three gangs vie to wrestle control from a corrupt government. This is a big game that gives you a lot to do and a lot of crazy ways to do it. When Just Cause 2 gives you the freedom to do the things you want in the way you want, it shines in all its preposterousness and good humor. When missions and challenges shoehorn you into specific actions, however, the same loose mechanics that make the open-world exploration such a joy become a frustrating burden. Nevertheless, this open-world action game surmounts its conspicuous issues with liberal doses of ludicrousness; well, that, and the ability to attach corrupted cops to a buggy with your grappling hook and drag them around.

Panau is an impressive place to explore. Tall snow-covered mountains cradle ski resorts and military based between them. Beachside shacks dot the ocean shores. The capital city shows off a beautiful nighttime skyline. Should you plummet below the ocean waves, you'll admire the striking underwater views, which feature tropical fish and colorful coral reefs. Just Cause 2 is an attractive game and provides an excellent variety of vistas to marvel at, and the draw distance lets you take in a lot at once. If you look more closely, you'll notice seams between texture maps, and the lack of lip movement when characters talk outside of the pixelated cutscenes, but it still makes a good visual impression. The audio doesn't meet the same standard, but it does what it needs to do, with lots of energy if not much nuance. The booms of shotguns always have a lot of reverb as if you are shooting them in a tunnel, even when you aren't in one. An American friend speaks with a big yee-haw accent and gang leaders deliver their banal lines in a weird, halting manner and with unidentifiable inflections. Explosions look big and sound loud. It's all about broad strokes and big noise, and while not every aspect of the audio makes a good impression, the overall effect is fitting given Just Cause 2's over-the-top inclinations.

The game gives you plenty of reasons to visit all of these varied locations. The many villages dotting the geography harbor rewards like gas tanks to blow up and weapon and vehicle parts to collect. Those parts can be used to enhance the effectiveness of your guns and rides--you just need to call up the black market dealer and choose how you want to apply them. You can also call the dealer if you want him to drop off a weapon or vehicle or to quickly travel to a location you've already visited. The implementation of this mechanic could have used some tweaking. For example, you can't order up more than one item at a time (if you want both a shotgun and a chopper, you need to make two calls). But considering how easy it is to find weapons and how much fun it is to parachute around, you won't need the black market contact all that frequently. Even if you aren't apt to collect the scattered treasures, there's intrinsic joy in seeking out and blowing up propaganda stations and demolishing the statues of island dictator Baby Panay. Maybe that's because you can grapple one of those statues to a fire truck, hop behind the wheel, and pull the false idol down.

Amid all this free-form gameplay are loads of faction missions to perform for the three gangs you work with, as well as some longer agency missions that progress the story. Some of these missions are fun and varied, such as one in which you must defuse a series of bombs by stunt jumping from one vehicle to another. Most of them combine Just Cause 2's various mechanics in interesting ways, having you fly an aircraft, infiltrate guarded fortresses, and destroy specific objects in the course of a single assignment. But even when flaunting this kind of variety, some missions aren't very enjoyable because they magnify the small issues that barely register during your free-form travels. For example, the waypoint arrow gets confused with high altitudes, which is rarely an issue when you are just traveling to your chosen destination, but it's a bigger annoyance when a time limit is pushing you to find an exact spot. Heavily scripted escort missions saddle you with AI companions who think nothing of wandering into fire. And stronghold takeovers get monotonous because they play out more or less the same way every time. The game's loose mechanics make for freewheeling fun when you choose your own actions, but they can sometimes lead to irritations when the game pushes you down a specific path.

These aren't game-breaking flaws, however; certainly not in light of the huge world Just Cause 2 places at your fingertips. Even the glitches you encounter--Rico's limbs getting stuck in place, physics-related oddities like towers bending themselves back into position--aren't likely to be too bothersome. But Just Cause 2 stands out more for its joys than its blemishes. After all, you can grapple to a gas canister, shoot it, and fly into the air like a rocket. And if that sounds like fun to you, it's time for a vacation to the island paradise of Panau.

Just for additional information for gamer who wnat to play the game on your PC This game can run good with system requirement Intel Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz HT or higher, 2 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 8600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher compatible, what are waiting for go buy the DVD game install on your PC and play it.....!!!

Alice In Wonderland

2010-03-26T19:10:00.005+07:00

In the game, Alice has lost her mind due to a traumatizing childhood experience. To reclaim her sanity, she must fight for it through the perverse Wonderland of her imagination. In this way, the game basically has the same plot as in games such as Sanitarium, as well as this year's disappointing Earthworm Jim 3D - but in Alice, of course, you play as a girl instead of a worm.

Powered by id Software's impressive Quake III Arena engine, the game's fully 3D depiction of Wonderland is definitely its best feature. Many of the levels, especially in the game's first half, are remarkably well rendered. Though the art direction relies less on anything very shocking and a little too much on depicting what's essentially a dimly lit version of the conventional surrealism found in most platform games, the results are undeniably slick. A few of the levels - most notably the White Queen's black-and-white kingdom and an environment that features a realistic, normal-looking house perched atop a hellish mountain of lava and rock - are great looking and very original. However, some of the other scenarios, like a sequence of giant, rotating gear levels, settle for just being great looking. It seems that the designers' inspiration dissipated a little by the later levels, as many of these are mostly made up of traditional castle corridors that are simply tricked out with the occasional cockeyed door frame.

It isn't a huge secret that Lewis Carroll's Wonderland books, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, have a dark subtext of insanity and violence. Since 1907, the year the copyright lapsed, various artists have freely retold Carroll's fable while elaborating on the story's intrinsic darkness. Now, thanks to Rogue Entertainment, Electronic Arts, and lead designer American McGee, gaming has its very own entry in this time-honored practice that suggests, "Alice in Wonderland is actually kind of creepy!" The resulting game is polished and often looks really great, but American McGee's Alice is undermined by straightforward, uninspired gameplay sequences that detract from its overall appeal.

The character design in Alice is even better than its environments. From the effectively flat-looking card guards (whom Alice can rend into two bloody halves with her trusty dagger) to the ugly, baby-tossing Duchess and the giant monster you'll face at the end of the game, every character in Alice is unreal; yet, thanks to the incredibly fluid animation, every single one is believable. The skilled animators who created the characters even managed to bring chess pieces to life. Alice herself doesn't even look much like you'd expect her to. She's a sullen, doe-eyed, realistically proportioned teenage girl. It can be fun watching this relatively plain-looking character running through the game's strange environments. Since you'll be staring at her throughout the entire game, you'll be glad to know that she's as fluidly animated as the rest of the characters.The visuals are excellent, but whatever disturbing ambience Alice manages to create is due largely to the soundtrack by former Nine Inch Nails member Chris Vrenna. Among other things, it's a mixture of a toy piano, bells, and a girl's choir. It effectively punctuates - and often is all that keeps you reminded of - the atmosphere of dread the game strives for. The voice acting is also generally good, particularly that of the emaciated Cheshire Cat, who delivers his lines in the manner of Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs.

Just for additional information for gamer who wnat to play the game on your PC there are several system requirement that must meet with your PC such as Intel Dual Core E5300 @2.6 Ghz or higher, 1 Gb of RAM (2 Gb Recomended), Graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 8600GT or higher or ATI Radeon 9800PRO, Win XP SP2 or higher or Vista Ultimate Edition. Quickly double fast to go buy the DVD game install on your PC play it and enjoy.....

Metro 2033

2010-03-25T20:12:00.004+07:00

Beneath a frozen city ruined long ago by its own weapons of destruction, humankind clings to survival. In dirty overcrowded stations, women haggle for scraps at the market as old men mourn the world they lost and children run underfoot, knowing no life beyond their meager subterranean existence. The hardier souls stand at the gates, vigilant against the beastly offspring of Armageddon, while the bravest venture out into the tunnels to trade, scavenge, and scout the dark reaches of the man-made underground wilderness. This is the world of Metro 2033, where the oppressive atmosphere fills every corner and is so well cultivated that the relentless gloom can begin to wear you down. Yet your journey is a lengthy and intriguing one, full of dramatic moments and tense action. Particularly hectic encounters can stress the game's performance, but the richness of the environments more than makes up for any small hitches. The immersive world of Metro 2033 is not for the faint of heart, but those whose brave it will find a fresh and entertaining new adventure into the postapocalyptic future.

Though much of your adventure plays out in the subway, don't expect to see the same tunnels over and over again. Human outposts are cobbled together from scrap and salvage, but there's a big difference between a bandit settlement and an entrenched military outpost. Some areas you traverse belong to the beasts, as evidenced by chewed corpses and ominously narrow dirt tunnels. Still others belong to neither men nor mutants, and the eerie silence will make you wonder what has kept them away. And just when the endless tubes are becoming too oppressive, you strap on a gasmask and venture out onto the surface to pick your way through the frigid skeleton of Moscow. Thoughtful details make exploration tempting, as does the prospect of stumbling across a dead adventurer or ammo cache ripe for the looting. Metro 2033 rewards you for paying attention to the little things, not just with precious ammunition, but with thoughtful touches that make this dilapidated world truly come alive.

And make no mistake, this future is bleak. The aforementioned station-villages are dreary, but you'll come to regard them as welcome beacons of light in the pervasive darkness of the tunnels. As you venture away from the comforting firelight and busy soundscape of the crowded stations, you enter tunnels that echo with the howls of murderous beasts, where the only illumination is provided by glowing radioactive fungi or your own headlamp. Light, or lack thereof, plays a huge role in creating Metro 2033's engaging atmosphere. Passing through a dark, foggy tunnel can be harrowing, and entering the warm glow of an electric lamp can relieve the palpable tension, until you look down and see a freshly mutilated body at your feet. Grim scenes, inescapable shadows, and an omnipresent sense of desperation help create a powerful sense of gloom and doom. Though this world is not without hope, it is a dark one, and it can be overbearing at times. Soldiering on can be difficult, but sometimes all it takes is a worn out record player to lighten your spirits. Darkness can also be your ally, providing you have some night-vision goggles handy, allowing you to sneak past foes or position yourself for a silent kill. Lightscape is just as important as landscape in Metro 2033, because not only do they combine to create the rich subterranean atmosphere, but each is an important tactical consideration.

This game can run good with system requirement Intel Dual core E5300, 2 Gb of RAM, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 8600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, Windows XP SP2 or higher or Vista ultimate edition or Windows 7, DirectX version 9.0c or higher compatible, what are waiting for go buy the DVD game install on your PC and play it.....!!!

Pro Evolution Soccer 2010

2010-03-21T05:15:00.004+07:00

While Konami's PES team may not have addressed the animation adequately this year, one area that has clearly been focussed on is graphics. Without a doubt, the biggest improvement in PES 2010 comes in the form of its character models, which even better FIFA 10's on some occasions (Messi and Torres are certainly looking good) even though you'll still get the occasional 'Who the hell is he supposed to be!' player. It's an area where game critics and fans alike have been yearning for improvement over the past few years, so we've got to applaud Seabass and the team for delivering as promised this year.

In most cases with these Cards, you'll be asking yourself why you'd actually want to turn off these abilities in the first place. Unsurprisingly, we weren't particularly interested in stopping our star striker from being able to perform Marseille Roulettes, or our midfield workhorse from having both strong attack and defence abilities. However, there are some occasions when the Card system does make sense, such as turning off a winger's tendency to cut inside. This would obviously be undesirable if you're trying to play a wide game, and so the Card system does have its applications in parts, although we'll bet that most users will set the vast majority of them to 'on' nonetheless.

It's FIFA's huge strides forward over the last two years that has exposed PES' lack of answers. There's now nowhere to hide for the rusty AI, which operates in and around the box in a way that would make PE teachers shout, "Stop Bunching!" FIFA's forte over the past two games (player animation) also points out huge deficiencies on the PES side, with jarring animation that not only affects the visual appeal of the game, but the sense of control you have over a player as well. All too often, a simple change in direction results in a sluggish and jittery movement, while first touches are a lottery that doesn't appear to rely on your skill or the player's stats at all.

You'll also find a couple of curious additions to the basic player controls, such as the ability to take control of goalkeepers by pressing in the right thumbstick and left bumper button simultaneously. Controlling the keeper isn't exactly new to football games, although PES 2010 arguably offers the widest scope of control that we've seen yet by allowing players to switch to the keeper continuously while off the ball, move him around at will, and then prompt saves where necessary. Konami has also tinkered with the penalty controls this year, although the less said about that, the better. We're still trying to figure out the system, although we will say that the difference between shooting wide and on target does seem to be overly fine on the directional and power controls.

There aren't really any standout new modes in PES 2010 per se. The Master League has been spruced up with more managerial options and a Europa League license as well, although the Europa League isn't playable separately in the same way that the Champions League mode allows. This Champions League mode is largely the same as last year in that the tournament's official logo and video sequences have been dealt out lavishly, although the actual mode still lacks all the official club licenses and is limited to the regular array of unlicensed teams in the game (i.e. only Man Utd and Liverpool in the Premiership, although the rest of the European leagues do have considerably more licensed sides).

PES' Become a Legend mode - which surfaced last year and is essentially Konami's take on FIFA's Be a Pro mode - also remains largely the same as last year's effort. As with all things PES, it lacks the production values of its FIFA equivalent, but the more worrying absence is functionality that connects your player to other modes in the game. EA Canada managed this with the Virtual Pro features in FIFA 10, which tie your avatar's progression into every mode in the game (both on and offline) with impressive depth to match, although Konami's lack of innovation in this area means that the only outlet for your Legend is the 4 player online co-op once again.

As far as the new '360-Degree Control' for dribbling is concerned, we really haven't noticed any difference over last year's system. In fact, we'd say that both FIFA and PES have fallen short of the sort of fidelity boasted by their apparent 360 degree dribbling schemes, although at least FIFA 10 offers more subtle dribbling movement than last year with its new controls. Apart from the Konami marketing spiel we've received that promotes this feature in PES 2010, we'd be hard pressed to say that it even exists at all.

A final note on the sound: While the commentary duo of Jon Champion and Mark Lawrenson offers up the same level of punditry and analysis that we've come to expect over the last couple of PES games, the musical score is a huge improvement this year. Fully licensed tracks (most of which you will probably have heard before) are played throughout PES' various menus and, while some tracks are a touch outdated (e.g. Andrew WK's 'Party Hard'), there's no ignoring the significant improvement all-round.

To run this game properly on your PC there are several minimum requirement that must meet with your PC such as Processor Intel Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz HT or higher, 1 Gb System memory , graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 8600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, DirectX version 9.0c compliant, Windows XP sp2 or higher, and 6 Gb free space. if your PC has meet with the minimum requirement, what are waiting for? come on quickly buy the DVD game and install on your PC play it, enjoy it...!!!

Aliens VS Predator

2010-03-21T04:43:00.003+07:00

The Alien, on the other hand, is a completely original experience. Armed with only a dagger-like tail and claws, it views the world through a very nifty fisheye perspective patterned after the POV shots in Alien 3. Having no ranged weapons, it must get right on top of its prey to be effective. Luckily, the Alien moves like a rocket car, can fall from any height without taking damage, and climbs fly-like across walls and ceilings, making navigating levels a dizzying, and at first disorienting, business somewhat akin to Descent. Once mastered, the incredible sense of speed and freedom the Alien provides is exhilarating. Rebellion has taken full advantage of the surface-clinging play mechanic in its level design. The game's environments are loaded with twisty passages running off at all angles, forcing the Alien player to crawl everywhere and making wall climbing a central strategy rather than the underused gimmick it could have been.

Aliens versus Predator includes all the standard multiplayer options, plus several unique variations. The game advertises co-op play, but, rather than being the hoped-for cooperative romp through the single-player levels, it's actually a bastardized form of deathmatch, with the computer controlling wave after wave of kamikaze Aliens. The whole endeavor is rather pointless and quickly becomes tiresome. The designers have inexplicably eschewed the current trend of including a built-in Internet game finder, and have tragically relied on the baroque contraption that is Mplayer for match-ups. The best that can be said for this choice is that it affords the player plenty of time to spend in the Mplayer lobby discovering the many different ways to misspell "predator." The game also supports specific IP connections and, a feature missing from many modern action games, direct modem hookups. Once set up, the multiplayer game is both stable and relatively diverting. You won't be throwing out Starsiege: Tribes or the Quake 3: Arena demo just yet, but, as an addition to the package, it's a fun bonus, though locating a game can be unreasonably arduous.

Each of the game's three characters - the titular Predator and Alien, and the hapless human Marine - has his own plot, composed of six levels (five in the case of the Alien). The story portion of these campaigns, though, is virtually missing; the levels have little continuity between them, except for a vague sense that you are traveling from one connected place to another, and equipment acquired on one level does not carry over to the next. Luckily, a lack of coherent plot is not as much of a liability for Aliens versus Predator as it would be for almost any other game, because the history and motivation of each main character are understood implicitly, as they are simply part of the pop-culture landscape. The entire game is essentially a series of set pieces designed to evoke a mood of anxiety and lurking terror. And this Aliens versus Predator does very, very well. Emerging from a cramped hallway into total darkness, scattering a few flares around to discover that you've entered a five-story hangar containing a huge alien ship, then hearing your motion detector scream to life as something starts to move in the pitch blackness is an experience in horror unrivaled in gaming.

On the surface, Aliens versus Predator is a 3D action shooter of the old (pre-Half Life) school: Armed with a variety of weapons you doggedly, repeatedly move from point A to point B, killing anything in your way, riding on elevators, and flipping lots of switches. Where the game deviates from the norm, and succeeds beyond expectations, is in its rendering of three distinct viewpoints and its effective re-creation of the film series' unrelieved sense of dread.

f you're a typical game player, you already know the story and concept behind Aliens versus Predator. You've seen the movies, read the comic books, played with the toys, and maybe even helped Jesse Ventura become governor of Minnesota. In 1994, Rebellion software created what is generally considered to be one of the ill-fated Atari Jaguar's best games and the definitive use of the license to date, Alien versus Predator. Five years later, the company has remade the game for the PC, bringing half a decade of technology and gameplay advancements to bear on its previous effort, and the result is excellent.

Allthough to run this game properly on your PC there are several minimum requirement that must meet with your PC such as Processor Intel Dual Core E5300, 2 Gb of Ram, graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 8600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 9800Pro, DirectX version 9.0c compliant, Windows XP sp1 or higher, and 8 Gb free space. if your PC has meet with the minimum requirement, what are waiting for? come on quickly buy the DVD game and install on your PC play it, enjoy it...!!!

Crysis Warhead

2010-02-17T03:30:00.003+07:00

Psycho's brazen confidence does more than just establish a gutsy protagonist: It sets the stage for a more focused and intense series of battles that keep the pace moving more smoothly than before. Warhead still offers some of the same kind of sandbox levels, but thoughtful enemy placement and map bottlenecks keep downtime to a minimum. You can approach assaults on beachfronts and Korean encampments in a number of ways, so if you're a stealth enthusiast, you can employ your suit's cloak setting and sneak in, or attach a silencer to your sniper rifle and take out your human foes from a distance. If you would rather employ hit-and-run tactics, you can jump into the heat of battle, cause a ruckus, and use your suit's speed function to zoom away. However, Warhead is clearly focused on the guns-blazing approach, gently nudging you into full-on encounters with its mission objectives, character dialogue, and level design. When you reach primary and secondary destinations, you'll get besieged by large numbers of enemies, both human and (later on) alien. Given that human foes also don nanosuits, they're not necessarily quick to fall; as a result, these sequences are exciting and challenging, and you'll need to use your suit abilities and cover opportunities to your advantage. The easily triggered explosions of enemy vehicles and hazardous barrels further intensify these pockets of activity.

All of the claims you may have heard that Crysis could only run on nuclear-powered supermachines were greatly exaggerated. But if for some reason you worry that this stand-alone companion to the ultragorgeous first-person shooter will bring your PC to its knees, you should know that it's highly scalable and ran smoothly on a number of machines during our testing. It also looks better, with clear attention given to the game's artistic sensibilities and the lusher, denser environments. But rest assured, developer Crytek has enhanced more than just the graphics engine. Vehicles are more fun to drive, firefights are more intense and focused, and aliens do more than just float around you. More emphasis on the open-ended environments would have been welcome, but a more exciting (though shorter) campaign, a new multiplayer mode, and a whole bunch of new maps make Crysis Warhead an excellent expansion to one of last year's best shooters. Just information for who want play this game on your PC there are several minimum that must meet such as Processor Intel Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz or equivalent processor, Memory 1 GB of RAM, 512 MB graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 9600GT or higher, or Ati Radeon 9800Pro. well if you PC has meet with minimum requirement, what are waiting long for? go buy the DVD game and install on your PC, play it and enjoy the game until you play to the end of game....!!!

Fallout 3

2010-02-16T20:46:00.004+07:00

Fallout 3 remains true to the series’ character development system, using a similar system of attributes, skills, and perks, including the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system from previous games for your attributes, such as strength, perception, and endurance. From there, you can specialize in a number of skills, from heavy weapons and lock-picking to item repairing and terminal hacking. You will further invest in these skills each time you level, and you'll also choose an additional perk. Perks offer a number of varied enhancements that can be both incredibly helpful and a bit creepy. You could go for the ladykiller perk, which opens up dialogue options with some women and makes others easier to slay. Or the cannibal perk, which lets you feed off of fallen enemies to regain health at the risk of grossing out anyone who glimpses this particularly nasty habit. Not all of them are so dramatic, but they're important aspects of character development that can create fascinating new options.

These aspects keep Fallout 3 from being a run-and-gun affair, and you shouldn't expect to play it as one. This is because the most satisfying and gory moments of battle are products of the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, or VATS. This system is a throwback to the action-point system of previous Fallout games, in that it lets you pause the action, spend action points by targeting a specific limb on your enemy, and watch the bloody results unfold in slow motion. You aren't guaranteed a hit, though you can see how likely you are to strike any given limb and how much damage your attack might do. But landing a hit in VATS is immensely gratifying: The camera swoops in for a dramatic view, your bullet will zoom toward its target, and your foe's head might burst in a shocking explosion of blood and brains. Or perhaps you will blow his limb completely off, sending an arm flying into the distance--or launch his entire body into oblivion.

Although you can play from an odd-looking third-person perspective (your avatar looks like he or she is skating over the terrain), Fallout 3 is best played from a first-person view. Where combat is concerned, you will play much of the game as if it is a first-person shooter, though awkwardly slow movement and camera speeds mean that you'll never confuse it for a true FPS. Armed with any number of ranged and melee weapons, you can bash and shoot attacking dogs and random raiders in a traditional manner. Yet even with its slight clunkiness, combat is satisfying. Shotguns (including the awesome sawed-off variant) have a lot of oomph, plasma rifles leave behind a nice pile of goo, and hammering a mutant's head with the giant and cumbersome supersledge feels momentously brutal. Just be prepared to maintain these implements of death: Weapons and armor will gradually lose effectiveness and need repairing. You can take them to a specialist for fixing, but you can also repair them yourself, as long as you have another of the same item. It's heartbreaking to break a favored weapon while fending off supermutants, but it reinforces the notion that everything you do in Fallout 3, even shooting your laser pistol, has consequences. Atleast this game promising you that you as players will enjoy the heavy visual effect, great sound effect, and many more. But there are several minimum requirement that must meet with your PC, such as Intel Pentium 3.0 Ghz or equivalent processor, System RAM 1 GB (XP) 2 GB RAM (Vista), Direct X 9.0c compliant videocard with 256MB RAM (NVIDIA 6800 or better / ATI X850 or better), 8 GB of hardrive. come on quickly buy the DVD game and install on your PC play it, enjoy it...!!!

Bioshock 2

2010-02-15T23:07:00.006+07:00

Bioshock 2 presents you with a perfect blend of the first shooter, the story interesting and intense multiplayer.Genetically Enhanced Multiplayer - getting experience points during gameplay to gain access to new weapons possession, which Plasmids and tonics can be used to make hundreds of weapons with different combinations, enabling you to develop a unique character that can meet the needs of players playing style. Taken from the experience of civil war you will involve you into a civil war in the areas of conflict such as Kashmir Restaurant and Mercury Suites, even that this game give you good visualization so you won't able to leave your PC at shortly time because there are some visual effect that you can be adjusted every time you want to play it such as anti-aliasing, vertex shader, shadow, motion effect, and many more.

Well at all this game give us enjoying live in another world such as in galaxy, this is just some information for player who want to play this game on your PC there are several minimum system requirement that must meet, such as processor Intel Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz, memory 512 Mb (1 Gb recomended), 128 Mb graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 6600 or higher, or Ati Radeon X1300 or higher Sound Card - 100% direct X 9.0c compatible sound card, Hard disc space - 8GB free space. what are waiting for? fast go buy the DVD game and install on your PC play it, enjoy it until end of game, i am sure you won't regret it because this game are very-very good in some category such as in history, visual effect, sound effect, the main character's, antagonist character's and many more so please enjoy the game.

Mass Efect 2

2010-02-14T22:10:00.007+07:00

The Mass Effect is a sci-fi adventure with setting a broad universe filled with other forms of alien life dangerous. In the second chapter of this dark, devil Saren's and Geth army had just conquered, and humans, which is still struggling to make a mark on the stage of galaxies, is now facing a greater danger.
Mass Effect 2 takes the bleak vacuum of space and flushes it with color--the light of stars and galaxies, the red and violet swirls of far-off nebulas, and the glimpses of comets as they burn through the void. You’ll catch your first glimpse of this in the game’s intense and much-improved art design, but that dance of light and shadows is also an apt metaphor for bleak undercurrents in the story, as well as the moral quandaries and past indiscretions that haunt the main characters. More so than its predecessor, Mass Effect 2 possesses an identity, and most of the obvious changes and improvements over the original are beholden to the shift in tone. The shooting is more immediate and satisfying, which keeps the pace moving and intensifies the violence of each encounter. Rich characterizations invite you to look more closely at each crew member's personal stake in the sprawling galactic backdrop. Even the relatively predictable space opera that is the main plot has sinister moments, and you sense the characters struggling with that heavy burden. Mass Effect 2 is incredibly enjoyable, but it's more than just fun: It's a stellar package with a fierce spirit that makes it engrossing and unforgettable.

A race of locustlike beings known as the Collectors cast an even larger shadow, and the threat they pose is greater than may first appear. Cerberus wants you to assemble a formidable team to assist and provides you with two human officers of its own. First, there is the sexy Miranda. Then, there is Jacob, who seems initially reticent but allows his emotional fire to burn more brightly as the journey progresses. One by one, you build up your crew of specialists to complement them. Among them are a stoic but powerful Asari named Samara, whose ethical code is as unforgiving as it is inflexible, and Thane, a brooding assassin that belongs to the reptilian Drell race. These are great characters, as are other members of your team, though the Salarian scientist Mordin Solus is possibly the finest character in Mass Effect 2 and arguably the most interesting one seen in an RPG in some time. His ultracaffeinated, ultralogical delivery is often hysterical and always entertaining (his romantic advice will have you in stitches), but his moral misgivings and humaneness make him more than just comic relief. This diverse team joins you aboard a newly built vessel named, appropriately enough, The Normandy SR-2, with the ever-reliable and ever-feisty Joker at the helm. He's not the only blast from the past to cross your path in Mass Effect 2, but it's best to discover for yourself which characters from its predecessor (and what role they play in this trek across the Milky Way) you'll meet again.

Mass Effect 2's third-person shooting action is greatly enhanced over the original, making battles exciting and violent, which befits the overall shift in tone. Battles play out as they do in a typical cover-based shooter like Gears of War, with a few caveats (you can't tumble, for example). Sliding into cover is slick and easy, as is popping in and out to take potshots at the wide variety of foes that assault you. Action sequences still present a few rare hangups; you may suddenly rise a few feet into the air for no reason and be unable to move. Or you may get stuck on an invisible obstacle and jitter back and forth. Uncommon bugs aside, Mass Effect 2 works well as a shooter, and other changes to the combat reinforce the improvements. For example, your shields and health automatically regenerate as they commonly do in straightforward shooters, and you now pick up ammo from the battlefield. You can still pause the action to let loose biotic-powered fury, but combat remains fluid and stimulating. It helps that the two teammates accompanying you on your missions are much less of a burden than before--not quite brilliant, but certainly smart enough to stay out of your way and stay alive.

Well overall this game very good especially at visualization effect, anti-aliasing effect can be adjusted in option so this game make even better in visual effect, however there are several minimum system requirement that must meet with your PC if you want to play this game in your PC without problem, such as Intel Dual Core E5300 @2.6 Ghz, Memory: 1 GB for Windows XP / 2GB for Windows Vista and Windows 7, 256 Mb graphic card such as Nvidia Geforce 8600GT or higher, or Ati Radeon HD2600 or higher, OS: Windows XP SP3 / Windows Vista SP1 / Windows 7, Sound: DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card,DirectX: DirectX 9.0c from August 2008 (inclusive), so what are waiting for? quickly buy the DVD game and install on your PC, play it, enjoy it until end.

Ninja Blade

2010-02-13T18:43:00.010+07:00

High above the skyscrapers in Tokyo, Ken Ogawa and his team of trained ninja spread to destroy the infected monster pack, and root diseases are spreading. The problem becomes more complicated when Ogawa and his team betrayed by his own father. Having escaped death, Ogawa had to fight alone, and try to understand the motivation behind his father's betrayal.

Equipped with advanced weapons, special ninja weapons, tools including Ninja high-powered vision. Attack, the player must fight against the monsters and restore peace in Tokyo.

You should also prepare for more memorable moments than you can shake a katana at. Ken, the star of Ninja Blade, is so sensationally acrobatic that he makes Dante's antics in Devil May Cry seem practically mundane. During the course of the game, he'll sky-surf on missiles, perform gravity-defying stunts on a motorcycle, and ride a wrecking ball to glory, among many other gymnastic feats that would make even Ninja Gaiden's Ryu green with envy. These glitzy, cinematic scenes are laughably ludicrous, and yet they're an absolute hoot to watch and bound to get your pulse pounding. However, you aren't relegated to being a simple observer. Most of this visual insanity is accompanied by quick-time button events, which means that you'll need to keep your eyes glued to the screen even when you'd rather than sit back for a breather. A close-up of Ken's keen eye signals these events, so they'll never catch you off guard--and should you miss a button press, the scene will rewind (a cool-looking effect) and let you try again. Unfortunately, Ninja Blade's QTEs are all too frequent, taking up a huge chunk of gameplay time and all but requiring you to use a controller (hammering on keys and mouse buttons isn't very satisfying). These are fine-looking QTEs, but as well implemented as they are, the game relies on them so often that they become tedious after a while.

When an action game lets you dress up in pink pinstripes before carving up hordes of gruesome mutants, you know it doesn't take itself seriously. Ninja Blade is such a game, but it's so ridiculously over the top, so rambunctiously insane, that it's hard not to get a total kick out of it. It's an uneven product, both technically troublesome and derivative to the bone. And yet Ninja Blade maintains a breakneck pace while throwing you into one preposterous scenario after another until you need to catch your breath, simply because the onscreen action is so absurdly dazzling--or because you're laughing too hard. So don't expect deep combat, extreme visual prowess, or a finger-breaking challenge. Instead, just prepare for lots of good, frivolous fun that will keep you entertained in spite of some technical flaws.

You'll thankfully spend plenty of time wielding some powerful blades and wreaking havoc on the rooftops of Tokyo. Using the titular single katana, a pair of fast-acting blades, or a heavy but effective sword, you'll slice up a variety of mutated meanies as you seek to liberate Tokyo from a nasty epidemic of demonic, symbiotic worm thingies. Ninja Blade is a fairly straightforward button masher, so you can string your two main attacks, blocks, and jumps into various combos that you unlock as the game progresses. The combat system isn't terribly deep; you won't perform Ninja Gaiden II's wall-leaping slices or use Devil May Cry 4's numerous fighting styles. However, the action delivers a nice feeling of impact and fills the screen with a lot of flashy visual effects. It doesn't deliver much of a challenge, though, and you could finish the game without exploring some of the more snazzy-looking moves. That doesn't mean you can choose a single weapon and mash your way to triumph; some enemies need to be softened with your heavy blade, whereas the speedy dual blades are more effective against certain foes (and helpful when trying to block oncoming projectiles as well). Nevertheless, if you want a decent challenge, you should crank the difficulty up to the highest available setting from the get-go.

This kind of button mashing may seem par for the course, and it's derivative to the extreme, but what Ninja Blade lacks in originality, it makes up for with its snappy, enthusiastic pace. The action moves quickly from one scenario to the next, mixing in one boss fight after another and reveling in its gleeful cinematic excess. You'll fend off winged demons in freefall, operate turrets in a number of on-rails shooting sequences, and slice up ghastly fiends on the wings of a soaring airplane (don't ask how Ken defies the laws of physics--he just does). It's all larger than life, particularly when you face the various bosses liberally thrown your way. Many of these encounters are fun, or at least they are the first time around; you'll battle a few of them several times during the course of the game. Some of them, such as a beast-riding femme fatale, are even legitimately challenging. Others aren't tough but require you to whittle away at their health, testing your patience if not your skill.

Overall this game are so interest and for players who want to play there are some minimum requirements that must be met, such as the Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHz or higher, 1 GB of Ram, 256 Mb graphics card such as Nvidia Geforce 8600GT or higher or Ati Radeon HD2600XT or higher, compatible sound device with DirectX 9.0c, so quickly buy DVD game and install on your PC because you will not regret it this is cool game play it until the end.

Manhunt 2

2010-02-13T18:28:00.001+07:00

This is the newest game from Rockstar sequel, this game offers you the tension as the player of the beatings, murder, and murder committed by a sadist and would never imagined before, perhaps in our predecessor Manhunt game only has a mission to kill without a clear purpose, but in This new Manhunt game we do not only kill but the origin of our will carry out missions that are not just killed, a chest of rescue and survival of the enemy that confronts us, as additional information of this game really sadistic element to the visual appearance of this game, including games that are not so heavy to run on your PC, for own minimum requirements your PC must meet the following requirements, Win XP SP2 or SP3 or Windows Vista, Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz or higher, 512 Mb Ram (1Gb more smoother), 128 Mb graphics card like Ati radeon 9250 or higher or Nvidia Geforce 6600 or higher, with DirectX version 9.0c or higher. so what are we waiting for? hurry go buy DVD game and install on your PC, enjoy The Game play it until the end.

Manhunt 2 creates a terrible environment, which will be the guts and the ability to test you. An experiment at a secret research facility has been turned into a disaster. Daniel was sent to Dixmor Asylum, 7 years later when a strange storm that caused lightning seized power source, and destroy Dixmor Asylum. Leaving the shadow of death and horror, Daniel Lamb and Leo Kasper, only those who survived. Can they survive such a horrible place ...

The Saboteur

2010-02-12T14:23:00.003+07:00

The Saboteur is Pandemic's swan song. Since the studio was recently dissolved by its parent company, this is the last hurrah from the ambitious development house that brought us Mercenaries and Star Wars Battlefront. Like Mercenaries, The Saboteur is an open-world, sandbox game that benefits from an impressive scope but is noticeably rough around the edges. he difficulty of presenting an open world game is balancing a player's freedom of choice with a storyline that pushes them towards the main objectives. The Saboteur manages to do both very well. As Sean is introduced to bands of rebels, British agents, and devious black market weapons dealers they are marked on the on-screen mini map with initials. The character or location that must be reached to advance the story is always highlighted in yellow. In this way the objectives are neatly displayed and players always know where the next most important task can be found. But to complete these tasks players will need to purchase weapons, and currency is mostly obtained through the liberation of separate neighborhoods. Paris is filled with Nazi encampments like fuel depots and sniper pits. A well placed explosive will take out these targets and net the player some cash. The option exists to strictly follow the plot or go Nazi hunting across the countryside.The Saboteur has one of the more intriguing setups of any game this year. Players are thrust into Nazi occupied France and given the opportunity to turn the tide of the war one explosion at a time. The setting is both sexy and dangerous, with a colorful cast of characters that border on period-piece stereotypes. You take on the role of Sean Devlin, a hard drinking womanizer with a past who has fled his native Ireland to try his luck at race car driving in Grand Paris. Sean's main competition is an Aryan named Kurt Dierker who cheats his way to victory and provokes Sean to get even off of the race course. What starts as a prank against Dierker quickly escalates to a game of life and death and ensnares players in a blood oath to kill him and remove his Nazi brethren from the country.

There's a fair bit of travelling on the way to and from every mission. Sean can steal any car on the road, or spawn them after bringing them to a garage. The driving mechanics are functional, but always feel a bit stiff, even in the best vehicles. Let's put it this way: escaping from the Nazis in an extended car chase can be entertaining, but driving isn't enjoyable enough to warrant jumping into the optional races or car collection quests.
Whether you choose to stick to the plot, or run off to bomb Nazis and collect contraband, the gameplay is relatively similar. Sean is an experienced brawler (he can kill an NPC with a single punch) a marksman, and an explosives expert. This translates to some loose run-and-gun gameplay and the ability to plant dynamite on Nazi equipment. In contrast to the subject matter, the combat is relaxed to the point of being silly. Clearly based on an arcade style shooter, ammo is plentiful and Sean can absorb about 50 shots from a sub-machine gun before death becomes an issue. Even then, health regenerates in a snap. That means players have plenty of time to plant a bomb, even while being shot directly in the back. It also means the thinly designed cover system rarely comes into play. Sean is essentially a one man army, and dealing out punishment to the Germans can be a lot of fun, just don't expect a very deep experience.

If, for some reason you choose to over-think the Saboteur and try to sneak up on your enemies there is a stealth system including disguises and sneaking. But a proper stealth mechanic requires subtlety, and that's one thing The Saboteur avoids completely. There's an indicator to let players know when they've been sighted, or are engaging in suspicious activities. But it fills up so quickly, that the system is almost binary. You're either completely hidden from your enemy, or alarms are blaring and guns are blazing. And if you're spotted in a "restricted area" where most missions take place, the alarms will continue to go off no matter how many guards you kill. Sean can always locate and turn off a base alarm switch, find a marked hiding spot, or escape outside of the base and attempt to leave the red circle on the mini-map. But this is always more trouble than just ignoring the alarms and blasting your way towards the objective.

Here The Game with the concept and game environments that really can entertain our players can perform in addition to main missions as an assassin and saboteur we can also perform other missions that can release us momentarily tired of running major missions as we can go racing , free to steal cars, and bring back the car if the car has been in the garage. for players who want to play this game sometimes if your PC meets the minimum hardware like an Intel Pentium 4 3GHz, 1Gb of Ram, 256Mb graphics card like the Nvidia 7600GT or higher, or Ati Radeon HD 4800Pro or higher. so what are we waiting for buy now DVD fast game and install on your PC, and you will not regret it. enjoy The Game.

Far Cry 2

2010-02-12T01:58:00.005+07:00

Caught in a war between two camps in Africa, you are sent to catch "The Jackal", a mysterious cause of conflict between the rulers of land and threatening the lives of many people. To complete your mission, you have to make both parties in conflict to mutual truce.
Far Cry 2's story is filled with potential. You're a mercenary working for a client who's sent you to an unnamed African nation engulfed in civil war, and your job is to take out a notorious arms dealer known as "The Jackal." He quickly proves to be an elusive figure, so you'll need to begin working for various warring factions that the Jackal has armed so you can trace the supply line back to your target. The two primary organizations at the heart of all this bloodshed are the militaristic UFLL and the revolutionary APR. You'll spend the bulk of the story working for these two groups, getting to know their power structures, and taking on all of the violent tasks they throw your way. Complicating things is the fact that your character has malaria, which means you'll need to occasionally play nice with the more ragtag Underground, the only group with the medical connections necessary to keep your potentially life-threatening symptoms at bay.

In Far Cry 2's chaotic world of mercenaries, gunrunners, and armed militias, you'll find yourself dropped into a dizzying web of shady clients and paper-thin alliances. All manner of names and faces are introduced during the course of the storyline, but the real star isn't anyone brandishing a smuggled weapon in search of blood diamonds; it's the daunting and awe-inspiring 50-square kilometers of African landscape that make up the game's open-world setting. Aside from providing the opportunity to soak up an amazing sunset, Far Cry 2's free-roaming terrain brilliantly harmonizes with the first-person combat. The diverse landscape and myriad environmental factors work alongside a wide assortment of weaponry to give you tremendous freedom to approach each mission. Combined with solid multiplayer, Far Cry 2's sheer breadth of action provides you with plenty of reason to stay lost in the African wilderness despite an underwhelming plot and the occasional sense of tedium in navigating from one location to another on the gargantuan map.
Although disappointing for a single-player campaign that could easily drain more than 30 hours of your time, any shortcomings in the plot are mostly forgivable thanks to Far Cry 2's overall structure. The game is organized in a way that provides a daunting amount of freedom to explore, earn currency, and wreak havoc on the game's landscape and its denizens. It's all laid out in a manner typical of sandbox action games. Pulling out your map reveals a collection of icons that signify available missions and points of interest that you can meander toward at your own leisure. Among these are dozens of side missions that you can take on, with various forms of rewards. Delivering transit papers to trapped refugees earns you malaria medication, destroying rival convoys for gun merchants unlocks new weapons for purchase, and performing assassinations for mysterious voices at the other end of your cell phone rewards you with diamonds. You can also rough up militias stationed in small camps and turn their dwellings into your own safe houses. The side missions can feel a bit repetitive when played through in rapid succession, but they offer a great change of tempo when sprinkled throughout the main narrative. But what's most clever is how their differing rewards intermingle so wonderfully with your needs in progressing through the story: Malaria pills keep your HP and stamina up, diamonds buy you new weapons and ability upgrades, and safe houses provide temporary shelter to stock up and save your game.

we can imagine how we play this game seemed like we own the war because in this game but can we at war with our enemies, we are also spoiled by the game developers with facilities such as buying weapons and much more, the minimum requirement for this game on your PC is, Intel Pentium D 2.8GHz, 1Gb of Ram (2GB recommended), 512Mb graphics card such as Nvidia Geforce 9600GT or higher or Ati Radeon 4800Pro or higher. quick buy this DVD game now, or you will feel regret for not buy it and play it.

Cursed Mountain

2010-02-12T00:16:00.003+07:00

This Himalayan adventure horror will make you shiver. The player must interact with residents, pilgrims, mountaineers, Buddhist monks, evil ghosts and demons when they open the mystery of the location .

It's cold in the Himalayas--damned cold. The chill fills your lungs as you desperately search the mountain for the leftover canisters of oxygen you need to survive. And as you draw rattling breaths with burning lungs, you desperately defend yourself from hostile spirits hovering between this world and the next. This is the world of Cursed Mountain, where the frigid air will chill you to the bone, and your inner eye draws secret runes into clear view. This slow-paced survival horror game is not just the tale of a vertigo-inducing climb up the side of a Tibetan mountain, but a fascinating and surprisingly authentic examination of Buddhist rituals and the Sherpas who populate the region. Even when compared to other horror games, Cursed Mountain moves at a slow tempo, so if you need to be consistently engaged with hot action or thoughtful puzzles, this is not the game for you. And even if you do appreciate measured exploration and storytelling, you'll not likely appreciate the unresponsive motion controls. Yet in spite of these and other foibles, Cursed Mountain will draw you into its frozen spell, from which the only respite is incense, meditation, and a trusty pickaxe.

You play as Eric Simmons, a famed mountain climber searching for his brother Frank, who has gone missing while scaling Chomolonzo, one of Tibet's Himalayan mountains. Frank is a hothead known for taking risks, so when injured climber Edward Bennett needed someone to retrieve an important artifact at the mountain's crest, Frank was the obvious choice for such a risky endeavor. Unfortunately, the mountain's resident goddess isn't pleased with the constant intrusion, so your slow climb in search of Frank is hardly straightforward. You must investigate Sherpa villages and Buddhist temples searching for clues and learning of the events that complicated Frank's troubled ascent. You'll discover diary pages and climbers' logs that detail Frank's determined attitude, as well as his disrespect of the local culture and your own climbing successes. Hand-illustrated cutscenes further describe the saga as it unfolds, and along with some dramatic voice acting, they do a great job of fleshing out the mystery. What is Frank's fate? What is this relic known as a Terma? And why are you being assailed by spirits caught between this world and the next?

The answers come, and while the plot is straightforward enough, it's the detail surrounding it that makes the story easy to get lost in. Cursed Mountain is brimming with authentic touches that show reverence to the mountain's people and customs--and that authenticity makes the journey feel even spookier, because the terrors are centered on real religious teachings. The notes you find scattered about from villagers and monks realistically reference actual rituals and traditions, from depictions of the intermediate realm known as the Bardo, to the use of incense to ward off evil spirits. As you make your way up Chomolonzo, you see prayer flags flying in the icy wind and colorful dome tents, which are sights you would see on an actual climb. Certain short sequences, like those in which you twirl the remote during meditation, and one in which you sneak up on prayerful ghosts to steal their mantras, make good use of these concepts and steep you in the ambience.
This game basically offers the tension through the forest, antagonistic characters, and especially the visual effect is very strong on the side of horror, especially when players in the mountains, for players who want to play this game there are some minimum requirements for your PC, such as the Intel Pentium processor 4 2.4Ghz, 512Mb Ram (1Gb Recommended), 256Mb graphics card such as Nvidia 7300GT or Ati Radeon HD2600. So what are waiting longer? Hurry to buy a DVD game and install on your PC, play games and enjoy the horror of this game.

Silent Hill Homecoming

2010-02-11T01:15:00.000+07:00

This game tells of a brother who returned from battle and return to his hometown on way back to his native Alex (the main character) had a bad dream, the dream he saw his brother (josh) was playing with a picture book somewhere very strange, he was confused about why his brother playing places like that, then in every time alex approached his brother josh he was always away and fled from his brother, because his brother was worried so he kept looking for his brother, until alex somewhere into the elevator and the elevator is in surprisingly comes a very large sword and stabbed him, alex immediately got up from his dream and he is in a truck with Travis Grady (the main character silent hill The Origins), alex who only ride in the truck and then droped by Travis in his hometown alex the Shepherd's Glen, but as he was walking in the city he felt the city was very quiet, suddenly when alex went he met an elderly woman she was a judge of the city, alex had then asked him about the state of his hometown, but she it says that the city state had been long since alex left the city to join the war, women are then advised alex to go home and see his mother, after that alex was headed to his home while alex go to the home he searched the house occupants will be, but her home is not nobody until he went up to 2nd floor of the house and into his room and found a flashlight and then take a flashlight and suddenly remembered by his brother alex first time which if her brother terrified alex always give it to josh's flashlight and when alex back toward the ground floor he saw a woman who was sitting near the window and then alex approaching person who turned out she was his mother alex, after a conversation with her mother is alex decided to help her mother looking for josh. alex horror adventure begins.

Silent hill homecoming is a game with a horror genre is the latest game of silent hill after hill sillent the origins (PS2) in this game we were treated to the visual effect is very heavy and thick with horror effects can be felt is not because silent hill homecoming This is in the PS3 and PC platforms so that the effects of visualization that can be felt by the players may be smoother, detailed, and close to reality, from the predecessor, I as a publisher of this blog recommended for players who want to play silent hill homecoming on the PC version is a good idea if your PC meets the minimum requirements in some games, such as an Intel Pentium P4 3.0Ghz HT, 1Gb Ram, and 256Mb graphics card or NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT or higher or Ati Radeon HD 2600 or higher. If you as a player meets the minimum requirements I am sure you will feel the tension high in this game, because basically silent hill homecoming has the power to the visualization effect was also supplemented with sound effects that feel horrible you will feel like taken to another world so different and scary. the developer Konami and double helix have to improvise in silent hill homecoming game by adding some evil characters such as scarlet doll and a few others, there are some characteristics of silent hill that is retained by the developer as combat techniques and a few places that look the same in some of the previous sequel, such as hospitals, hotels, and the silent hill town itself, as a lover of what horror games to look forward immediately to buy a DVD and install it into your PC and play. enjoy the silent hill homecoming game and play until end.

Resident Evil 5

2010-02-10T00:49:00.001+07:00

This latest series from Capcom Resident Evil 5 PC, with an entertaining show we can directly know that we as players will be brought to another dimension that much different, with a display and a dazzling graphics Resident Evil 5, if appropriate action is categorized as a horror game of the year because we as players will be spoiled by the developer with the presence of two visual modes of game we can use visual mode in directx 9 or directx latest fashion ie we must know the 10 most prominent difference between these two directx if we want the visual result is very close to reality then of course we can choose to use the latest directx directx 10 but of course some consequences must be our responsibility as a player must have some hardware in our computers must be upgraded to match with what we want but when we have limited funds then of course while waiting for the funds collected will there is nothing wrong if we use directx 9 will but make no mistake though only using directx 9 we as players do not despair because although other dimensions such effects would still feel in this game because of the presence of anti-aliasing modes, motion blur, and many more.

As shown in the following figure besides Resident Evil 5 PC has added a few characters like majini antagonist, uroboros, and more so anyone who plays this game would have been amused either of the elements of action, shooting, horror, and some elements of sadistic Other things available in this game, in order to maximize its visual display recommending the developer to the players to play Resident Evil 5 PC using Intel Core i7 processor, because the developer claims that Capcom made this game would be perfect running very smoothly so as to showing above average 58fps, of course, be adjusted to a good graphics card too, like using a graphics card Nvidia Geforce 9800GT or better visual results Cleaner will be much better again, this information is given to the players to play this game of comfort can feel better and more tense because of the support of good visual effects too, but of course it is returned again to his players that if due to some inhibiting factors such as your finances to purchase or upgrade your hardware so please be patient because this game can work well even with the same specifications intel pentium 4 3GHz and 2GB Ram Nvidia 8800GT VGA with windows Xp operating system.