Bionic Commando Review


PC enthusiasts are used to feeble ports of console games, and Bionic Commando is no exception. The usual signs of indifference to the platform are all here, such as onscreen prompts that assume you are using a console controller, and laughably few graphics options. But even if you're just seeking good entertainment and are able to look past the obvious apathy shown to this version of Bionic Commando, you'll still find that consistent fun is in short supply. There are some good ideas here, and when they coalesce, you glimpse the great game struggling to escape from the shackles of averageness. You see it when you fling automobiles at a crowd of troopers; you see it in the exciting, high-flying concluding sequence. More often, however, you get the idea that developer GRIN didn't know what to do with its clever ideas. Early glimpses of a big world to explore tantalize you, but your progress is restricted by annoying clouds of deadly radiation. You'll come across new, more powerful weapons, only to discover that shooting them is just as lame as firing your default pistol. Moving about the world with your bionic arm is fun, but that mechanical wonder isn't strong enough to carry the entire experience.

That bionic arm is the gameplay's backbone, and it's the source of every positive feature found within Bionic Commando. Most importantly, it's your standard form of transportation. Using it as a grapple hook, you can fling it onto posts, tree branches, and girders and swing and climb toward your destination. Stringing swings together can be satisfying, though you don't have Spider-Man-like freedom to glide about as you please. Your arm has only limited reach, so you can latch onto something only when the targeting reticle indicates that the surface is available. Furthermore, swinging has a lot of weight behind it. You must release your grip earlier than you would expect to keep the momentum going, which leads to a bit of clumsiness in the first hour or so as you become acclimated to the mechanics. If you're playing with a mouse and keyboard, you'll also need to work around the onscreen button prompts, which assume you're playing with an Xbox 360 controller. Eventually, you'll be able to figure out these obstacles and swing with ease, though certain levels are more enjoyable to navigate than others because they offer a bit more elbow room.

A glimpse of a futuristic metropolis may at first lead you to believe that there's a lot of room to explore. However, while Bionic Commando does afford you occasional, minimal leeway, you're generally pushed down a linear path. In this case, the modern replacement for traditional invisible walls (though there are some of these as well) is radiation. These blue clouds of instant death choke the city streets and coat the sides of buildings and are to be avoided at all costs. Radiation is one of the game's most common sources of frustration, because it imposes an artificial limitation on movement. You might fling yourself onto a seemingly safe rooftop only to be welcomed by this fatal mist, or reach out toward a wall but find that radiation keeps you from grabbing it. The restrictions have a big impact on the pace, and the scattered enemy encounters are far too tepid to energize the experience.
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Wolfenstein Review


Most modern first-person shooters are so very serious. They feature a whole lot of brown environments and gruff characters, but never have enough archways into alternate universes. Well, if you're in the mood for an FPS with a glint in its figurative eye, Wolfenstein is a good way to stave off the forces of evil without the in-game grumpiness that usually accompanies such endeavors. This sequel to 2001's Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a worthy addition to the series and a fun romp in its own right. The game won't set your world on fire; it occasionally stops feeling old-fashioned and starts feeling just plain old, and a number of flaws are woven throughout the gameplay's very fabric. Some awesome boss fights and memorable combat sequences prevent Wolfenstein from falling into a rut, however. Besides, you're not just fighting Nazis--you're fighting magic Nazis that conjure force fields and fly around with jetpacks.

The setup for this historical/sci-fi mash-up is typical Wolfenstein whimsy, shouldered by the ever-capable B.J. Blaskowicz. This returning hero has spilled his share of Nazi blood, so who better than B.J. to protect the residents of the city of Isenstadt (not to be confused with the Austrian city of Eisenstadt) from the ongoing onslaught? Isenstadt is the headquarters of several resistance groups that seeks to wrest the secrets of the supernatural from the hands of the Schutzstaffel. It seems the Nazis are up to their old tricks, this time harnessing the powers of a mystical force called the Black Sun for the usual take-over-the-world kind of evil. If you know the series, you know not to expect much substance or surprise, though it's too bad there isn't more to draw you into this kitschy fiction. A lot of this has to do with the technology powering the game. Wolfenstein looks a bit aged; the prerendered cutscenes look overcompressed and facial animations are stiff. These second-rate assets, along with unenthusiastic voice acting, are distracting and make it hard to get invested in your fellow insurgents. Wolfenstein's story is a throwaway that boils down to a simple premise: Throw a bunch of Nazis into the occultist blender and see what cockamamy concoction pours out.

As it turns out, this concoction doesn't offer many surprises. Though you'll get tastes of role-playing elements and paranormal wizardry, Wolfenstein sticks to the trusty run-and-gun formula that has worked so well for shooters over the years. And it does it well, sending you into country farms, sprawling airfields, and secretive corridors to see how well you can fend off the soldiers and various anomalies it flings toward you. Your tools of destruction are solid. Traditional World War II weapons, such as the MP40 SMG and the Flammenwerfer, feel excellent, so even if you run out of ammo for the more powerful firearms, you'll never lament falling back to the simpler choices. But the better half of your arsenal is essentially snatched from an alternate reality. Of these options, you'll quickly grow fond of the Tesla gun, which fires electric streams in various directions at once, and the Leichenfaust 44, which is a heavy weapon that instantly vaporizes standard enemies. As you explore Isenstadt and complete missions, you'll earn money and find bags of coins. You can then spend these spoils on upgrades for your weapons, such as diminished recoil or greater damage. While some weapons are better in certain circumstances than others, there's really no weak banana in this bunch.

The action itself is rudimentary as far as first-person shooters go. There is no cover system to grapple with; you won't peek around corners, slink in the shadows, or pilot vehicles. You can, however, enter a parallel dimension called The Veil. When you activate The Veil, the world is shrouded in a shimmering cloak. In it, you can run faster, and enemies glisten, making them easier to target. Odd creatures called geists also float about, shocking nearby enemies if you shoot them down and even creating fearsome webs of electricity in tandem with neighboring geists. More importantly, entering The Veil lets you perform three potent powers: slow down time, surround yourself with a bulletproof shield, and empower your own bullets to do more damage and pierce paranormal force fields. You can also purchase upgrades for Veil powers just as you do for weapons. Eventually, you might be turning adjacent enemies into pillars of ash when you suppress the flow of time or deflecting bullets back toward your foes when in the safety of your shield.
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Mega Man Star Force 3: Black Ace Review


When you release a game that is effectively the ninth entry in what is already a stagnant franchise, keeping things fresh should be a primary concern. Capcom, however, seems content to drive whatever potential the Mega Man role-playing games had into the ground with Mega Man Star Force 3. Based on the Battle Network series from the Game Boy Advance, Star Force 3 retains essentially the same gameplay mechanics and presentation as its predecessors. If you've never played any of the previous Mega Man RPGs, you'll probably enjoy the solid battle mechanics in Star Force 3. Still, the inane plot, annoying characters, and aged visuals are reason enough to avoid this tired retread.


As Geo Stelar, you become Mega Man and explore the wave world by merging with an alien named Omega-Xis. This time, the obligatory evil organization bent on world domination is called Dealer. Its members, each with a corny playing-card-themed persona like Queen Virgo or Jack Corvus, are attempting to gain control of a meteor heading for Earth, and your goal is to stop them. Despite its mature themes, the plot is primarily told through insurmountable walls of inane dialogue from characters who rigidly conform to stereotypes you've likely encountered countless times before. Geo's group of friends includes a computer whiz kid; a fat, bullish classmate whose main concern is food; and a prissy girl whose only motivation throughout most of the story is to win her student-body election. Plot twists are predictable and, too often, character dialogue is used to spell out and remind you of events that have already occured, just in case you missed them the first (or second or third) time.

Star Force 3's saving grace is its intricate battle system. Encounters take place on a 3-by-5 grid, which you view over Mega Man's shoulder. Each turn, you can choose from a random set of six offensive or defensive battle cards. Emphasis is placed on the timing of your attacks and on evading enemy fire by sidestepping left or right. When you succeed in battle, you gain more-powerful cards instead of leveling up as you would in a traditional RPG. Discovering items in the environment or forming friendship bonds with other characters increases your maximum health and allows Mega Man to learn new abilities. Intense boss battles, a hallmark of all Mega Man games, are just as engaging and challenging here. Each enemy requires you to use a different strategy and to fine-tune your 30-card deck, so returning to the same bosses throughout the game always yields a new encounter.

Sticking with the playing cards motif, Mega Man Star Force 3 is available in two versions: Black Ace and Red Joker. These refer to the different ultimate transformations Mega Man can make in each game. Defeating certain enemies releases "noise," which is a kind of electromagnetic pollution that you absorb during battle. Depending on which battle cards you use and how quickly you dispatch enemies, Mega Man "noise changes" and gains abilities specific to his new form. For example, the wolf form makes him vulnerable to fire-based attacks but increases the damage he causes from wood- and sword-based battle cards. Different noise changes are available in the two versions of the game, but there's really no reason to buy both. The characters and story are identical in each. If you happen to know someone with the other version, you can link up locally or over the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection to trade battle cards and unlock a more-powerful ultimate transformation for Mega Man. You also have the option of battling up to seven friends as long as each person has a copy of either Black Ace or Red Joker.
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Dawn of Discovery


Set in a bright, idealized version of the 1400s, Dawn of Discovery is a charming game of exploration and city building, with mechanics that are straightforward enough for anyone to grasp yet complex enough to stay satisfying in the long term. Dawn of Discovery for the Wii and DS share their title with a PC game, but aside from the era in which they take place and the most fundamental gameplay concepts, the games are quite different. This actually benefits the Wii and DS versions, streamlining the number of resources and the overall scale into something more comfortably manageable for these platforms. It's not without its flaws, but it gets most things right, and the various elements come together to create a captivating experience.

There are two modes of play. The Story mode is a lengthy campaign that takes you from building tiny fishing villages to founding massive cities of stone. The tale it tells is populated with overly broad characters--generous sultans, arrogant nobles, treacherous women--but it breaks up your path to progress into a series of bite-size objectives that make putting the game down very difficult. It also serves as an effective tutorial for the Continuous Play mode in which you customize a variety of aspects to your liking, including the overall size of the world, the size of the islands in that world, and whether you must compete for islands and resources with any AI opponents. Then, it sets you free to play in that world for as long as you like. In either case, the controls and interface work very well, laying out all the buildings you can construct in easily managed menus that let you simply point at where you want the structure to go and plop it down on the ground. Of course, the act of creating cities is nothing new to games, but Dawn of Discovery's lighthearted visuals and effective interface make it feel playful and pleasurable.

Regardless of the mode you're playing, you'll need to settle islands and create pleasant living conditions for your residents, helping them advance up the social ladder from simple pioneers to lofty aristocrats. It's not out of sheer altruism that you do this; the higher your citizens' quality of life becomes, the more taxes you can extract from them. Pioneers require only food, milk, and a nearby chapel to become settlers, but with each successive rank, the needs become more numerous and complex, and your people more demanding. For instance, in addition to carrying over all the needs of pioneers, settlers also require herbs, clothes, nearby convent schools, and guest houses to become citizens. Production flows become a bit more elaborate, as well. Producing clothes, for instance, is a two-step process, requiring hemp farms to grow the material and huts for weavers to process it. The complexity develops enough to stay interesting as your society advances but not so much that it significantly slows down the pace of development.

You also need to be mindful of your overall economic balance. Each production facility drains a set amount of gold coins over time, and you'll need to avoid creating redundant facilities and manage the tax rate for your residents to ensure that those operating expenses are outweighed by a steady influx of gold. You can also sell surpluses of your own goods or buy goods you're lacking on the open market. Once you get the basics down, you'll be able to see your settlements advance from level to level in no time, and watching your towns flourish into ever-expanding cities is a joy. As your settlements grow, they'll become prone to such problems as fires, rat infestations, and even the plague, which require firehouses, rat catchers, and hospitals to deal with these threats.
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G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra Review


The 1980's animated series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero famously featured a series of good-natured public service announcements. These PSAs taught youngsters safety lessons, like not to play with electrical wires and to be careful with campfires. They did not, however, tell you not to play G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, so if you need an official warning, let this be it: Don't do it! Even in the realm of licensed tie-ins, this monotonous third-person action game is particularly poor, managing not only to screw up the mechanics it rips off from other games, but also failing to get even the basics right. An awful camera, atrocious vehicle sequences, and dreadful storytelling are just a few of the inhumanities you'll face on this mission to spoil the latest scheme from the terrorist group Cobra. Local co-op play eases the tedium and frustrations, but even the closest of friends can't rescue you from this snake's venomous fangs. So now you know--and knowing is half the battle.


G.I. Joe borrows liberally from Contra and Gears of War. You and another Joe (controlled either by another player or the AI) run through a series of 3D environments, blasting everything in sight to earn points and occasionally taking cover and popping out to fire at the more resilient nasties. Bringing enemies down consists mostly of holding down a button to shoot and hitting another one to tumble or hide behind conspicuously placed barriers. There should have been fun here. With more than a dozen different characters to unlock and play, G.I. Joe could have delivered action enthusiasts some fast-paced gunplay, or amused franchise fans with a fun and entertaining story. Instead, you get ugly cutscenes, bad dialogue, and deadpan voice acting that expresses all the excitement of a long yawn. And the gameplay itself is not only sloppy and boring, but it fails to get a number of essentials right.

G.I. Joe's fixed camera is the first example of a simple ingredient gone sour. You get absolutely no camera control. As you traverse the environments, approach downward slopes, and turn corners, the camera will swoop around to give you what is apparently intended to be a proper view of the proceedings. But it leads to disaster. You'll be shot at from offscreen enemies, or have to run toward the camera, unable to see where you are going. When the camera view suddenly flips while you are moving, the controls often won't adjust properly, so your Joe may go running off in some direction other than the one you intended. Plenty of games with fixed or semifixed cameras have managed these camera shifts properly; there's no excuse for the issues here. Things become even more disastrous when you jump into any of the game's slippery vehicles. You always push an analog stick forward to move the vehicle forward, but your view of the action may be from the side, from slightly above, or even from in front. And the camera will move about as you drive, forcing you to constantly rethink which direction you need to push the stick in to make the tank move in the direction you want it to go.

Another standard component done poorly: the targeting system. The Rise of Cobra selects a target for you automatically. If you are using the Wii Remote and Nunchuk (the Classic Controller is also supported; motion controls are not), you can switch targets using the d-pad, but this is clumsy and uncomfortable. To make matters worse, if you take cover and select any enemy other than the default target, the game will automatically switch your target back to the default if you don't fire for a few seconds. Why? Who knows. The fact that you can fire at certain power-ups to reap their benefits only complicates matters. The game doesn't distinguish among foes that can hurt you, buildings that cannot, and these score-enhancing cubes. Thus, you'll be surrounded by Cobra grunts but firing at some offscreen power-up because the game can't prioritize a dude with a gun over a harmless cube hovering in the air. When an enemy does fall, the targeting may not lock on to nearby foes because they are behind you--which happens often, given the rotten camera. If you play on the middle or upper difficulty level, you may die once or twice, almost always because of the awful camera or the awful targeting.
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Preview Aliens vs. Predator Alien Gameplay Impressions





Aliens vs. Predator made its debut at E3 in June, with both the marine and predator sections being shown in Los Angeles. However, developer Rebellion left out the alien gameplay until today, when it demoed some of the levels behind closed doors at GamesCom. We entered the darkness of publisher Sega's booth to find out more.

The main thing to note about the alien is how vulnerable it is when it's out in the open. As anyone who's seen the movies will know, aliens may have acid for blood, but marine gunfire will cut through them like butter. That said, aliens are deadly up close, as they're able to rip through flesh with similar ease. As a result of all this, you'll have to choose your battles carefully when playing as the alien, using the environment to your advantage and picking off enemies one by one.

As Rebellion points out, while the predator and marine characters are battle-hardened killers, the alien has far more primitive, animalistic instincts. Its main goal is to serve the hive, using humans to incubate new aliens and assimilating them as part of the nest. The game reflects this with regular goals to find humans to impregnate using facehuggers. However, you can't just attack the armoured marines--you have to hunt down civilians, such as scientists and workers, who have no such protection.

Ripping through the marine forces as an alien is a satisfyingly gory experience, as the alien has plenty of finishing moves at its disposal. If you approach enemies from behind, you can rip out their throat or puncture their chest with your tail, with blood spraying all over the walls as a result. If you approach them from the front, they'll wrestle with you, sometimes actually winning out and kicking you off before you can finish them off. However, if you're successful, you'll get a first-person view of you biting through their head. The potential harvest victims also put up a bit of a fight. In one section, they ran through a security area, and as we ripped through the door to try to catch them, they shot themselves in the head to resist being captured.

Of course, the one thing the alien really has going for it is its incredible agility. It can climb walls and run across ceilings at a breakneck pace, allowing it to get close enough to unleash its deadly melee attacks. Speaking to Rebellion reps, they commented on the challenges of wall running, especially as the level geometry has become so much more complex since the original Aliens vs. Predator. One feature they've implemented is the ability to quick jump to certain vents, which are highlighted in your vision with a kind of swirly vortex. If you look at something in the world with this vortex and press the jump button, you'll automatically leap to it, allowing you to get away from enemy fire.

While we didn't get to see the multiplayer in action, we couldn't pass up the chance to at least ask Rebellion about it. There'll be two main game modes--three-way and two-way, referring to the number of species involved. In both modes, there'll be support for up to 18 players online. There'll also be a four-player mode where you'll team up as marines and take on wave after wave of enemy--the team already compares it to Gears of War 2's Horde mode and Left 4 Dead.

The complete Aliens vs. Predator single-player game will offer 12 hours of gameplay, so expect a four-hour alien campaign. The game is set to launch in February 2010 on the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, and we've been promised a hands-on in the next couple of months. Watch this space for more details soon.
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Dragon Age: Origins Updated Hands-On - The Dwarf Commoner's Humble Beginnings


We've already covered much of the basics of starting a new game in BioWare's upcoming role-playing game Dragon Age: Origins...because we've played through them. If you haven't already, take a look at our previous story covering the origins of the human mage, which also covers the basics of character creation and interface elements--we won't be repeating those here. Instead, we'll jump into the origin story for dwarves who begin their careers as lowly commoners in the streets of Orzammar, the subterranean metropolis. As a dwarf commoner, you can choose to play either as a rogue or as a warrior--there's virtually no difference whatsoever in the experience or gameplay, except that each class has its own skills, and that certain fights seem tougher if you play a rogue who didn't specialize in combat skills. On that note, please be advised that this story contains minor spoilers.

Even though the tall, stony architecture of Orzammar looks impressive in some places, the life of a dwarf commoner isn't pretty. According to the introductory cinematic sequence for this origin, the dwarves have a rigid caste system that forbids dwarves of lower classes to mingle with highfalutin nobles--and your character is at the very bottom of the barrel, a "casteless" character marked with a brand on his or her face that tells the world that you're the most common of commoners.

You begin your adventure being harangued by the local dwarf slumlord Beraht, who has recruited you to do his dirty work while he "encourages" your kindhearted sister Rica to catch the eye of a dwarf noble. Beraht's potentially not-family-friendly scheme is to marry her off into a noble family to give birth to an heir, elevating her, you, and "Uncle" Beraht to noble status. (Interestingly, while mages speak with the prim and proper BioWare British Accent made famous in Knights of the Old Republic, dwarves all speak American/Canadian English--no evidence of a British accent or Scottish brogue in sight.)

Beraht then storms off, reminding you that you have more dirty work to do before the day is done. Before you go, you can chat with your sister to get more insight about your situation and the world of the dwarves--how most of your people remain below ground rather than deal with repugnant, smelly surface dwellers like humans and elves, and how the darkspawn, the game's villainous monsters, have risen from the depths of the earth to claim the lives of most members of the noble and warrior castes, which leaves the nobles desperate for heirs. It also seems that Rica has caught the eye of a potential suitor, but with no promises made on either side, you're better off heading out to Orzammar for some more shady dealings, at least for the time being.

You leave your sister, and immediately meet Leske, a dwarf thief and cohort who also works for Beraht, and who also has the hots for your sister. (In fact, if you create a female dwarf character, he'll actually make a pass at you as well.) After reminding him that his attentions are unwanted, you get the details of your next mission--locating, shaking down, and ultimately killing a smuggler who works for Beraht, but has been skimming lyrium ore (the enchanted metal used to power magic spells and forge enchanted weapons) to sell to illicit parties on the surface.

The common areas in the dwarf city, much like the halls of the mage tower, are full of ambient characters that go on about their business and occasionally have independent conversations that touch on bits of the world's lore, such as the political tension between the current dwarven king and an ambitious dwarven prince. And if you happen to be a rogue, you can also use the profession's free skill point in the stealing skill to relieve some commoners and guards of their coins and healing poultices--the latter of which will prove to be a godsend later on.
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Overlord II Review


The impish minions of the Overlord universe haven't been idle in the two years that have passed since the first game and have emerged with a host of new tricks in Overlord II. The evil little scamps have used the time off to learn how to operate machinery, wear disguises, sail the open seas, ride mounts, and get possessed by their evil master, as well as develop an uncanny talent for attacking baby seals. These additions make Overlord II a more varied experience than the first game, and while some of the issues that hampered the original have been addressed, they haven't exactly been fixed. Overlord II retains the gleeful maliciousness of the series; thus, it's still great fun to have a small army of nasty little blighters at your disposal to wreak havoc. But because the game’s auto-targeting is still haphazard, and the minions apt to do some very dumb things, you can expect some frustration to go along with your enjoyment.


Though the minions have evolved and you're playing as a brand new overlord this time around, the title character remains as mute and inscrutable as in the original. The game is set dozens of years after the first game, so you'll have to start your evil dominion from scratch, with the new enemy being the Roman-like Glorious Empire. The tone of the game is satirical, sharp, and more than a little silly--the elves here are portrayed as hippie environmentalists, the Empire nobles are obese snobs, and the fairies are ridiculously overendowed. Meanwhile, the soldiers act like they stepped straight out of an Asterix comic. It's all harmless fun, and while you will get to kill your fair share of cute animals, your silent, mainly charmless overlord won't really get to do anything too nasty.

Because the main character is so impassive, it's once again up to the minions to carry the charm quotient of the game. The minions are a cackling, gleeful lot of destructive slobs who are endearing in their dedication to their master, and it's a joy to watch them attack enemies, harass innocents, and act like general nuisances. You'll be well into the game before you find all four types of minions--the melee-focused browns, the flame-throwing reds, the sneak-attacking greens, and the magic-heavy blues--but when you do, you'll have a formidable miniarmy at your disposal. As overlord, you need this support because--despite your intimidating Sauron-like garb--you're no match solo for more than a few enemies at any one time. All of the heavy lifting will be done by your minions, and while you'll be able to get away with sheer force of numbers in many encounters, the toughest battles in Overlord II will require you to think hard about your minion mix and how you deploy them on the battlefield.

Initially, it can be a little intimidating to deploy your minions, and you'll need to be fairly dexterous when manipulating the keyboard and mouse. The default layout, however, is pretty easy to get used to, and is superior to the game’s console counterparts as it affords you more accuracy when directing your minions. You'll quickly get the grasp of sweeping units across the landscape, separating your minions into their respective color groups to take advantage of their unique strengths (and shield their weaknesses), and making them hold strategic checkpoints. For the most part, your minions are dependable creatures who'll find the best path to take or attack the most present danger. They can, however, still be quite dumb, which means a certain amount of micromanagement from their overlord is in order. Minions will often stop to pick up booty when there are still plenty of dangerous enemies attacking, and some are prone to aquatic suicide by trying to pick up objects close to water.

Despite their occasional brain lapses, this time around, your minions are a much more talented bunch and their most important new trait is the ability to ride different mounts. Three of the four minion types have their own specific beastie they can ride, allowing them to vastly increase their effectiveness and speed. It's satisfying to see your reds do damaging strafing runs atop their fire lizards. And breaking through a heavily shielded phalanx becomes a breeze when your browns are mounted on their wolves. Opportunities to ride don't occur too often in the game, but when they do, it's a welcome change from Overlord II's usual gameplay.
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Battlefield 1943 Review


The Battlefield series has been delivering great team-based multiplayer combat for many years, and Battlefield 1943 is the latest scion of this venerable franchise. Set in the Pacific theater of WWII, Battlefield 1943 pits the forces of Imperial Japan and the United States against each other in online matches that support up to 24 players. While this downloadable game features a small number of maps and only three soldier classes, it still captures the thrill of the best multiplayer shooters through well-balanced, varied, and exciting gameplay. Though hindered by some technical issues and other sundry oddities, Battlefield 1943 is a great game that provides a lot of bang for your $14.99.


The victory conditions will be familiar to veterans of the Battlefield series. Each team has a reinforcements bar that functions like a team health meter. The more team members die and respawn, the more this bar is depleted. When one team's bar is fully depleted, the game ends; but it's not quite that simple. Each map has five capture points. Holding these capture points will make each kill worth more and help you deplete your enemy's reinforcements bar faster. The action flows between and jumps around these points as teams struggle to take points from the enemy while defending their own. Players can respawn near any friendly capture point, meaning forces shift dynamically and the battlefield is constantly in flux. You'll regularly have to reassess and attack or defend as the situation warrants. It's rewarding to devise a tactical maneuver and execute it well (flank the enemy's defenses and clear your enemy out with grenades), and though things often don't go according to plan (your jeep is flung into the air by an explosive antitank round).

Unfortunately, coordinating such maneuvers with your teammates is a tough proposition. Voice chat is not fully functional. Sometimes you will be able to hear your teammates talking on an open channel no matter how far they are from you; other times, you will get only silence. If you join a squad (assigned randomly), you share a squad-only chat channel, but this channel is equally unreliable. The only people you can actually invite into your squad are players on your friends list. Xbox 360 players can join an Xbox Live party and chat without issues, but PlayStation 3 players have no such luck. These issues make advanced strategies difficult to coordinate, but after a few rounds, every player will have an idea of how to help the team out. And despite the chat issues, being in a squad is still tactically relevant, because you can spawn wherever your squadmates are (even in a moving vehicle, if there's a free seat). You can also tag a capture point to indicate where your teammates should rally, so even without open communication lines, you can still coordinate your efforts.


It's important to be mindful of the battlefield situation when you respawn because there are three different classes of soldier from which to choose. Each class has a unique weapons loadout that gives it certain strengths and weaknesses. The Infantry class carries a machine gun that is deadly in close quarters and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher that is great against enemy vehicles or structures. The Infantry soldier's repair ability makes him a good vehicle escort, but he is vulnerable if caught out in the open. The Rifleman class is the best antipersonnel unit and is deadly at all midrange distances. This soldier's grenades are good for clearing out trenches, but they aren't very effective against tanks. The Scout, armed with a scoped rifle, is the long-range specialist. His remote-detonated explosives can protect his back or booby-trap a road, but if either of the other classes gets close, the Scout is in trouble. Of course, there's always a trusty one-hit-kill melee weapon on hand, be it the wrench, the bayonet, or the sword. Each class can be equally satisfying and frustrating to play, depending on the situation, and players must spawn carefully and play to strengths of their class in order to be effective.
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ARMA II Review


Arma II is a first- and third-person tactical shooter that simulates a military operation in the midst of a growing civil war in the fictitious European country of Chernarus. The sequel to Armed Assault and the spiritual heir to Operation Flashpoint, Arma II sets a new standard for realistic military simulation games. While Bohemia Interactive's games have always been detailed and ambitious, its latest has surpassed its predecessors by adding meaningful interaction with non-player characters (other than shooting them), increasing the number of moral and strategic choices you will face throughout the campaign, and achieving unprecedented levels of detail, openness, beauty, and believability in the setting. Despite an infuriatingly buggy single-player campaign and some artificial intelligence driving issues, Arma II is a triumph. From its fascinating, sophisticated, and unscripted battles to the immersive detail of the gameworld, Arma II delivers a wholly unique and uncommonly replayable gaming experience.


Arma II’s setting is visually striking, amazingly detailed, and brimming with life. Modeled after regions of the Czech Republic, the landscape is so authentic that you could orienteer by watching the stars move across the sky. The terrain includes picturesque forests, mountains, beaches, and pastures, plus one large urban area and several smaller towns, and in many missions, you'll have free rein to traverse vast tracts of the 86-square-mile gameworld. Alongside the Chernarussian people, wild animals and livestock go about their respective lives. However, the animal AI is disappointingly indifferent to the war. Another element of the environment that can interrupt the immersion is the scarce number of civilians you'll encounter per town, along with how few buildings you can enter. On the whole, however, finding a well-worn trail in the forest or commandeering a farmer's tractor for the occasional joyride makes the world feel lived in and real.

Like the geography, the story is refreshingly complex and believable. In the former Soviet Republic of Chernarus, five factions vie for power, including the US Marines, your faction for the single-player campaign; the Chernarussian military, which is allied with the US; the Red Star Movement, a group of Communist separatists from the ethnically Russian areas of Chernarus; NAPA, an independent group of nationalist partisans fighting the Communists; and the armed forces of the Russian Federation. Although your mission is to help the legitimate government in its campaign to crush the Communist insurgency, it's not always clear which factions are in the right; they're all guilty of corruption and atrocities.

In contrast to many first-person shooter games, the war doesn't stop and start at your convenience. You'll find corpses, stumble upon unscripted battles, and encounter friendly troops on patrol, creating the impression that the fighting will continue with or without you. At the same time, your actions can have a profound influence on the story as the campaign unfolds. For example, at one point, you can become instrumental in forming an alliance between NAPA and the Chernarussian government, and at another, you can follow up on evidence of Communist war crimes to win the hearts and minds of the natives. Civilians can often provide intelligence about nearby enemy forces, rebel leaders, and their hideouts, but don't get too attached to your new friends, because enemy partisans don't take kindly to collaborators. In the campaign, each path you take develops fluidly into new missions, which typically begin with a simple objective, like scouting an area, and lead to additional optional objectives, based on your choices. Will you risk your squad and engage your target on foot, or will you endanger nearby civilians by calling in a missile strike? The ramifications of your actions will bear both on your immediate situation and on how the game unfolds several missions down the line. Other missions will send you deep into enemy territory to scout for insurgent bases, capture rebel leaders, rendezvous with partisans, and take part in a wide variety of other realistic military operations.
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G-Force Review


In the real world, guinea pigs are oversized rats that sleep in their own filth and enter the afterlife in the crumbling confines of an old shoe box. In the video game world, they don high-tech weaponry and have jetpacks strapped to their furry backs. So when the fate of the planet rests in the tiny paws of these domesticated rodents, be glad that it's happening in a video game rather than in reality. Thankfully, not only are these unexpected heroes up to the task of saving humanity, but their licensed game is also quite fun. Although it doesn't break new ground for 3D platformers, and the lack of variety can lead to brief bouts of boredom, G-Force is a well-put-together experience with engaging combat, crafty puzzles, and rewarding exploration.


For the majority of this 10-hour-plus game, you play as Darwin, the field leader of G-Force. A nefarious being has tampered with the delicate circuitry of everyday kitchen appliances, causing them to attack their owners with merciless force. There is a surprising amount of story interspersed with the action; unfortunately, it's not particularly interesting or humorous. Every few minutes you'll have a brief back-and-forth with your support team, and though these exchanges point you in the right direction, they aren't entertaining, and they crop up far too often. These interludes don't muddle up the action too much, given that you can jump and shoot while your objectives are being laid out, but be prepared to put up with a number of groan-worthy puns and cheesy one-liners during the course of your quest.

At least the action is smooth and satisfying. From the first moments of the game, where a tutorial guides you through your basic moveset, it's clear that the controls in G-Force are one of its strong suits. Whether you're shimmying up a drainpipe, diving out of the way of a flying electric shaver, corralling a crowd of waffle irons with your electric whip, or using your jetpack to reach a high computer terminal, everything in G-Force responds with precision. There is a lot of combat in G-Force, and though there aren't many different weapons to play around with, it's still fun. Enemies come in many forms and require you to use different strategies to defeat them. An evil desktop computer can be harmed only when it exposes its glowing circuitry, air fresheners poison the surroundings with noxious gasses, and blenders hurl oil, acid, and other nasty substances if you can't take them down quickly. The flow of new enemy types abates as you get deeper into the game, but there are enough unique enemies to keep the fighting fresh for most of the journey.

When you aren't battling monstrous microwaves, you'll have to solve puzzles such as figuring out how to open locked doors or hack delicate computer equipment. There is a good bit of variety in these parts, so you'll have to use your noggin to bust through a wooden door or melt a block of ice encasing a computer console. The best moments of these sections, though, are when you control your fly pal Mooch. He may not be armed to the teeth like Darwin, but he can fly all over the environment, and it's really fun squeezing through metal grates or zipping along lights hanging from the ceiling to nab power-ups. You can also slow down time so you can pass through the treacherous blades of a spinning fan, and this technique is used really well during an extended segment later in the game.

G-Force does a good job of mixing up combat and puzzle solving so you don't have to toil on any one task for too long, but monotony does settle in after a few hours. There are a few unique environments, but they all look pretty much the same, so you're always making your way through some bland government facility, without any visual diversity to keep things fresh. And though the combat and puzzles are satisfying, there aren't many memorable moments to break up the action. There aren't any boss fights, and the two times you take to the road in your motorized hamster balls are dull. The controls while driving are loose, so it's difficult to fly around curves with precision or shoot enemies out of the air with panache. Played in small doses, G-Force stays joyful because the individual pieces are so well done, but things get repetitive when you play for long stretches.
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Roogoo: Twisted Towers Review


You never realize how important visual clarity is in a puzzle game until it's taken away from you. Roogoo: Twisted Towers starts with the age-old concept of descending blocks and moves it into a 3D space. Then, it falls in love with its own 3D-ness, focusing more on fancy camera angles and dimensional depth than on affording you clear view of the action. A few levels rely so heavily on obscuring your perspective that you'll be ready to throw your Wii Remote in frustration. It's too bad that this one obvious issue is so prominent because there are fun moments to be found within this simple package, which reminds you that a square peg can't fit into a round hole.


The issues with obscured vision aren't obvious at first, however. The first 15 or 20 levels of Roogoo don't hint at the frustration that's to come, but instead, introduce you to the basics. Up to five different types of blocks-- triangles, cubes, stars, cylinders, and hearts--fall from above and toward rotating discs with those same shapes cut out of them. Your job is to rotate the discs so that the blocks can pass through, which you do using the B button on the remote and the Z button on the nunchuk. The game chooses which platform can be rotated at any given time based on the rules of that particular level. It's a simple concept, but when the blocks really get their move on, Roogoo is quite challenging. To succeed in the most demanding levels, you need a keen eye and quick reflexes.

Roogoo's greatest stumbling block, however, is that even the keenest of eyes will have trouble with some of the game's later, frustrating moments. "Cinematic presentation" may not be a phrase you'd associate with a puzzle game, but developer SpiderMonk was obviously trying to create one. Platforms are spread throughout the environments, and sometimes the camera will swoop into new positions to give you a view of the current controllable disc. These camera placements can be incredibly unhelpful. If a disc is particularly far away from the camera, it may take a few moments to identify the halo that indicates where on the disc the block will land; if the camera view of the platform is more from the side than from the top, it's difficult to judge depth and, therefore, a chore to keep up with the faster block showers. These issues culminate in the underwater levels, where the stacks of blocks (or in this case, treasure chests) may get so tall you can't see the aforementioned positional halo at all. In the same levels, the developers didn't account for the large interface elements on the screen, which obscure your view at crucial times. In a game that requires precision and quick response times, the inability to clearly see what's going on makes this an inexcusable design choice.


Thankfully, the better levels offer a nice challenge without resorting to cheap tricks. For instance, creatures called meemoos will appear and block the holes, so you need to speed up the falling blocks and bop the critters on the head to make them disappear. The finest of these levels let you get into a groove of meemoo bashing and platform spinning, and completing these levels can be very rewarding. The boss fights can be really fun too, such as one where you wave your net around using the remote to catch bats and thump a vampire with your hammer in between rounds of falling blocks. In an enjoyable pirate-themed scenario, you whack meemoos with your hammer as your blocks fire into the distance. On the other hand, a frigid boss fight in which you must wipe frost off your screen with the remote isn't fun at all, particularly when it's hard to see what's going on in the game.
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Watchmen: The End is Nigh Complete Experience Review


The first episode of the Watchmen game was a short beat-'em-up that starred Nite Owl and Rorschach, two of the masked heroes/vigilantes featured in the movie. Punching and kicking your way through wave after wave of goons was enjoyable, thanks to the great animation and simple yet powerful moveset. As well-crafted as it was, repetition crept in and made the game a fairly shallow experience. The End is Nigh Part 2 brings more of the same entertaining action, albeit with a few subtle differences that add some spice to the mix. Even with this added flavor, however, Part 2 loses some savor because it's mainly more of the same repetitive stuff. Still, if you've got any kind of appetite for cracking skulls, The End Is Nigh will give you your fill. The Complete Experience bundle contains both episodes of the game, plus a Director's Cut Blu-ray of the Watchmen movie. If you're looking to get all your Watchmen content in one go, then this is a reasonable purchase. If, however, you've already purchased The End Is Nigh Part 1 or a copy of the movie, then this package is not for you.


The End is Nigh Part 1 introduces you to the crime-fighting team of Rorschach and Nite Owl, and it's there that you'll learn the basics of combat, acquire advanced combos, and learn how to use your special attacks to maximum effect. Read the review of Part 1 for a detailed evaluation of the exciting action, the striking graphics, and the creeping repetition.

One of the main ways that Part 2 differs from Part 1 is that it relegates tutorial elements to a separate mode. You begin the Part 2 campaign with all your combos unlocked, and your enemies seem to know this. They'll come at you hard and fast, and once again, if you get surrounded or take a few good hits from one of the tougher enemies, you're done for. Part 2 demands that you counter attack frequently, maneuver nimbly, and make ample use of all the skills available to you. Night Owl's crowd-stunning special attacks are especially helpful, and Rorschach's bull rush is a great way to bust out of a crowd. Area attack and knock down combos are also handy, and the increased difficulty means it isn't as easy to get away with button-mashing. This welcome challenge encourages you to step up your game and actively chain combos together, and methodically taking out a group of enemies with well-timed, well-chosen attacks is immensely satisfying.

Not every encounter requires this kind of thoughtful pugilism, though, and you can slug your way through a lot of enemies without much thought. Though you'll encounter new enemies this time around, most of them don't fight much differently than their Part 1 predecessors. Leisure suit-clad goons in a strip club fight similarly to leather-vested biker gangs in the street, but it's still fun to knock out a guy that looks like a criminal version of Disco Stu. The environments aren't as slick as most of the Part 1 scenery, and though the riot-ravaged streets feature some pretty lackluster fire, they do a good job of advancing the game within the Watchmen storyline. The police are on strike, protesting the prevalence of "masked vigilantes," and the Keene Act is just around the corner. As Rorschach and Nite Owl investigate the abduction and apparent sexual slavery of a young woman, their different moralities start to chafe against each other, foreshadowing their inevitable falling out.
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SingStar Queen Review


There are 25 songs included in SingStar Queen, which includes almost every song you'd hope for in such a compilation. "Bohemian Rhapsody," "We Will Rock You," "Another One Bites the Dust," "Fat Bottomed Girls"--the songs you'd want to sing along to--are all here, along with a variety of other great, singable tracks. Queen fanatics may bemoan what's missing; the two earliest albums aren't represented, nor is the awesome, campy Flash Gordon theme. But the included music is a solid cross-section of the band's output, and it's fun (and sometimes hard) to sing along with these songs. Mercury was a one-of-a-kind singer with a broad vocal range; be sure to have a bottle of water nearby to soothe your aching vocal cords. And if you want to sing along with a friend on duets, be ready to put a bit of work into your performance. Such songs as the famous "Bohemian Rhapsody" feature complex, multitracked harmonies, and SingStar's simplistic karaoke interface makes it tough to figure out which harmony notes you're supposed to sing.

If you've played SingStar before, there's nothing here you won't recognize. You sing along with the songs, trying to hit the correct pitch and length of each note, and you are scored on your performance. You can do this alone, or you can grab a friend or seven and play around with the local multiplayer options. These include the aforementioned duets; head-to-head battles in which you compete for the highest score; pass-the-mic face-offs between two teams of up to four players; and more. Because Queen's music is so dramatic and harder to sing than you might think, it is particularly enjoyable to play SingStar Queen with friends. If you can keep up with Mercury's soaring vocals, you look extra-talented; if you can't, you look extra-foolish, just as your buddies were secretly hoping.

You still can't compete with others online (let's hope the series eventually catches up to the music-game competition in this regard), but you can upload photos and videos of you and your friends looking silly if you connect a PlayStation Eye camera while you strut about. The online community features are slickly organized and fun to check out, if just to see the absurd antics of other players. And as with other SingStar games, you get access to the impressive library of downloadable music in the SingStore. This doesn't mean that nothing is new. Trophy support has finally arrived--but of more interest is the microphone-powered menu navigation. You can now speak into the mic to flip through songs and choose menu options, and the game does a good job of recognizing your voice commands, so you can set the controller down for the duration if you want.
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Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs Review


The game's plot is loosely based on that of the movie and features the same cast that fans will be familiar with. When Sid decides to adopt a litter of baby tyrannosaurs, the broody sloth is subsequently taken by the babies' mother, and it's up to you to rescue him with the assistance of the herd and Buck the weasel. Unfortunately, the characters' motivations are a bit incoherent at times, which leads to plot confusion. For example, the game never properly explains explain why Sid decides to adopt the dinos, or why Buck is seeking revenge on a dinosaur.

Ice Age has a lot of variety in its gameplay, and each of the six playable characters offers a different experience. Buck is the main character, and both he and Sid take part in Ice Age's more action-packed sequences; their on-foot levels typically mix combat, puzzle-solving, and exploration. The combat is simple button mashing at its core, but Buck's basic combo system and fruit-based projectile weapons make the fighting amusing, though monotonous hordes of similar enemy dinosaurs eventually put a chill on the fun. It's sometimes easy to lose your way in these on-foot levels, and while gusts of wind will give you clues as to which direction to head in, the lack of a map means you sometimes need to backtrack to find your way.

As you progress through the story you get to experience a number of different gameplay styles. Each level puts you in control of one character, and you take advantage of their strengths to complete the section. For instance, Diego the sabre-toothed tiger chases down a gazelle in a racing level, and Manny the mammoth uses his tusks to clear tree trunks in another. Despite having playable roles, their sequences are brief, and it feels like they've been included merely to add a couple more characters to the roster. Following the style of the movies, Scrat, a sabre-toothed squirrel, has a separate storyline that focuses on his pursuit of an acorn that's always out of reach. You also get to play as his new love interest Scratte, a flying squirrel, and their endless quest for nuts incorporates some fun 2D side-scrolling platform levels.

Along with the action sequences, the platforming sections are the highlights of Ice Age 3, and jumping from platform to platform while dispatching pesky enemies is suitably challenging. It's a shame that the rest of the game feels so shallow because these levels give you a glimpse of how much fun it could've been. In the shooter levels you control a pterodactyl, which Buck has lassoed as a mount to navigate over sweeping landscapes. These areas require little skill to complete, making them more of a button-mashing chore than an enjoyable challenge to play. Because there's only one very easy difficulty setting, it shouldn't take more than a few hours for experienced players to reach the end credits. Ice Age lacks any substantial extras, although there are movies, music, and voice-over clips that can be unlocked by collecting crystals throughout the game.

Ice Age also includes eight offline competitive multiplayer games for up to four players. They're split into sloth- and dinosaur-based levels, and their quality is inconsistent. The most enjoyable game, sloth barge, involves balancing atop a snowball while knocking other players out of the icy arena. In other, less-memorable sloth games, you have to throw mud at your opponents, match Sid's cheerleading actions with the D pad, or outrace your opponents to the finish line. The rest of the games feature baby dinosaurs and are mostly forgettable, but one noteworthy exception is a lava-filled slalom course where you pass through gates while bumping your opponents away from theirs. Each multiplayer game has several options, such as adding hurdles or speed boosts to a running race, which increases the replay value somewhat. Ultimately, though, the multiplayer mode is similar to the story mode in trying to offer a multitude of different games and not doing any of them well. It's fun in short bursts, but it doesn't offer anything you'll return to again and again.
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Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce Review


The Dynasty Warriors franchise has become stagnant as of late. Incomprehensible storylines and simplistic combat mechanics make it increasingly difficult to get interested in the series' aging formula. While Strikeforce doesn't address all of these problems, it incorporates a good multiplayer experience and a number of new features that make it significantly more engaging than many of its predecessors. As a result, this Dynasty Warriors game will strike a chord for some newcomers without alienating the series faithful.

Like previous entries in the series, Strikeforce is set in the Three Kingdoms era of ancient China when three factions waged war for control of the land. After choosing your kingdom and character, you're dropped into a town to prepare for battle against the Yellow Turbans, a religious extremist group inciting rebellion across the continent. Because each mission is presented a la carte from a simple menu system, there is little emphasis on story. Each faction has five chapters of these story missions, and between each chapter, you'll be fed more exposition through perfunctory voice-overs and minimally animated cutscenes. Diehard Dynasty Warriors fans may be interested in what's going on, but for the uninitiated, the plot roughly boils down to this: Go here and kill these people. There are usually at least four story missions available that can be chosen in any order, as well as repeatable side missions that you can spend time with when you need to level up before attempting some of the more difficult story-driven objectives. Most missions are limited to 30 minutes to keep the portable game playable in small chunks, but you often won't need the entire time to complete your main objective.


A small town serves as your hub to upgrade weapons, store and exchange items, and learn new skills between missions. Using the new Chi augmentations, you can equip one special skill to each arm and leg for a total of four abilities that will help you in battle. These augmentations have a wide range of effects like increasing jump height, item potency, or dash distance. Weapons can also be upgraded to increase their damage or to expand your maximum combo length. To upgrade the Chi augmentations, weapons, and even the town stores, you'll exchange the gold and materials you've earned in battle. Because the items you find on the battlefield are randomized, loot hunting becomes a priority. If you don't find the materials you need to upgrade the specific weapon or ability you'd like, the town has a market that allows you to trade common items for loot that tends to be harder to find. However, even these trade options are randomized, occasionally making it difficult to get the right materials for the job.

The Dynasty Warriors series has a reputation for mindless button mashing, and Strikeforce is certainly no exception. You'll spend most of your time hammering on the square button to build up a combo, occasionally switching to the triangle button to perform a charge attack and break an opponent's block. Each character can equip a second weapon in addition to his or her traditional armament, which adds some variety to the combat. However, Strikeforce distinguishes itself from previous entries with the new Fury mode transformations. Building up combos fills your Fury meter, which can be unleashed to turn your character into a glowing Fury form that wreaks havoc on the battlefield with a special attack. This can be a big help during single-player missions when you're particularly overwhelmed by the sheer number of enemies on the field. Using Fury mode is also a quick and easy way to temporarily overcome the awkward camera and lock-on mechanic, which make it difficult to quickly switch between targets during battle.
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Marvel vs. Capcom 2 Review


Like its cousins in the Street Fighter series of games, MVC2 takes the tried-and-true formula of pitting players against each other in head-to-head combat on a 2D plane and then flips the concept sideways by offering a team of three selectable characters in place of a single bruiser. The game's expansive 56-player roster includes characters from the X-Men, Avengers, Spider-Man, Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, and Mega Man series. It also includes broader Marvel and Capcom universes, as well as a handful of original personalities. Unlike previous versions of the game that required you to earn points and spend them at the in-game store to unlock additional characters, arenas, and costumes, everything is available here straight out of the blocks.

The game is divided into two parts: single-player and multiplayer battles. Single-player includes mainstay fighter modes: Arcade, Training, and Score Attack. Arcade gives you an infinite number of continues to complete the game's seven rounds (in one of four difficulties) before facing off with final boss, Abyss. Score Attack works similarly to Arcade mode but grants you only a single credit with which to finish the game. Training gives you the chance to put together a team and give them a dry run against three opponents of your choosing. There's no tutorial here to help improve your skills, but practice and a little trial and error will definitely help you nail the timing required to string together serious combos. You'll also be able to fiddle with your super gauge power as well as toggle your target dummy character's stance and guard settings. Though Training appears fairly basic in terms of customisability, regardless of whether you're a returning MVC2 veteran or first timer looking to scope out the options, it is a great place to come to terms with the various abilities, and combat rules before you test your mettle.

Undoubtedly, the biggest new addition in this version of MVC2 is the inclusion of online play. Multiplayer supports both offline two-player battles and online ranked and player matches. Player matches allow you to have lobbies with up to six players, and you're cycled in and out of play as matches begin and end. A Spectator mode follows the players during character selection and into the match, which means you can cheer on your friends or study rivals as you watch from the bench. Ranked matches pair you with one other player of roughly the same skill level, and while his or her gamertag is obscured until your game begins, you're able to watch the other player make his or her character selection in real time. The lack of a ready-check system similar to the one in Street Fighter IV means you'll often sit there mashing the A button to start a game without being given any indication of whether it is working or being shown the other player's status.
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Fossil Fighters Review


The game begins as you arrive on Vivosaur Island to test your skills as a fossil fighter, sporting the spiky hair that's all but required of a hero in a game like this. The days of fossil fighters are largely taken up with three pursuits: digging for fossils, cleaning those fossils to revive the dinosaur those bones belonged to, and pitting their revived dinos against those of other fighters. Those revived dinos are referred to as vivosaurs, presumably to make it clear that this game doesn't offer a realistic portrayal of prehistoric pet behavior. A typical Ouranosaurus of the Early Cretaceous period probably did not use a fist jab in battle, but your vivosaurs employ all kinds of fun, goofy attacks.

Of the three activities, digging is the least interesting. To dig, you'll first need to travel to one of Vivosaur Island's dig sites. Once there, you'll use your sonar by tapping the screen or a shoulder button, head to any dots that appear on your sonar display on the top screen, and dig with your pickax. You may get a plain old useless rock for your trouble, but more often than not, you'll be rewarded with either a fossil or a jewel. There's not much to the digging process, which is why it's good that you're rarely just digging. Upon arriving at a new dig site for the first time, you'll quickly find yourself caught up in some quest or other, which likely involves getting your fellow fossil fighter, Rosie, out of trouble and foiling the plans of a nefarious purple-clad crew called the BB Bandits. So as you dig, you'll also be exploring the ancient pyramids, mines, pirate ships, and other locales where fossils are buried, engaging in fossil battles, and advancing the story. The story itself isn't anything special, and the way it's modeled after a typical Pokemon tale is shameless, but it's got a cartoonish sense of humor to it that younger players will enjoy. Particularly amusing is the banter between Vivian, the driven leader of the BB Bandits, and her bumbling cronies.

The fossils and gems you dig up are encased in rock and need to be cleaned before they can be used. This cleaning process takes the form of a fun touch-screen minigame. You're given 90 seconds to extract the bones and jewels from their rocky prisons. You'll start by using a hammer, which chips away significant chunks of rock with each tap but must be used carefully to avoid damaging the fossil or jewel underneath. Once you've cleared away most of the layers of rock, you can switch to a less powerful but much more precise drill. As you hammer and drill away, rock dust will fill the screen, obscuring your view, and you can eliminate this by blowing into the microphone or tapping the shoulder buttons. When time runs out, or you finish stripping away the rock from what lies within, you're given a point rating out of 100, with 100 being a fossil or jewel that is completely cleaned of rock without being damaged at all in the process. The higher the rating, the more powerful the vivosaur that's revived from the fossil, so there's incentive to clean fossils for vivosaurs you already have in your collection.
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Madden NFL 10 Review


Madden NFL 10 for the Wii continues the trend introduced by last year's game of crafting a football experience that's geared toward the Wii and its control setup. Therefore, it delivers some familiar options, including the All Play control scheme that pares the traditional Madden controls down to a single button and some motion control. Madden 10 pushes this approach even further, not just by introducing new gameplay modes that are meant to capitalize on the inherent multiplayer appeal of games on the Wii, but also by crafting a look that fits better with the lighthearted theme of the game. The result is an experience that's fun the first few times around--provided you can consistently play with friends--but lacks the longevity to keep football fans coming back.

That's partly because the traditional mainstay Madden modes, like Franchise and Superstar, still haven't received much attention, if any at all. In fact, they use the same interface and mechanics as previous iterations of Madden on the Wii, so they don't reflect this year's philosophy of making features more Wii specific. What's even more curious is that these modes aren't available off the bat and have to be unlocked, no matter if you want to build up a franchise over the course of the season or create a rookie who has to prove himself and climb through the ranks, you have to either work for it.

It seems like an odd move for any football game to hide typically prominent and more in-depth modes in the background, but maybe not as much for Madden NFL 10 for the Wii--the simple reason being that there's a clear emphasis on playing with other people in the pick-up-and-play modes instead of engaging in the solitary experience of worrying about trade deadlines, injuries, or salaries. But if there's any single mode that's comparable to something like a franchise mode without the aforementioned details (aside from the franchise option itself), it's the Road to the Super Bowl mode.

This mode lets you play a full season, a half season, or just the playoffs with local players cooperatively, and the idea is for you and other players on your team to play as well as possible throughout the season to earn points (rewarded for gaining yards, making catches and tackles, or scoring touchdowns) and avoid being benched during a game. Players get benched when an arrow on a colored bar located next to their Mii falls into the red, but you can get them off the bench by spending some of your own points. But if any players get benched that means they are doing something seriously wrong, like running in the wrong direction on every play. Plus, Madden generally automates the experience for people who don't know what they're doing, so you could drop the controller entirely and still be in no imminent danger of heading to the sidelines. From the competitive perspective of earning more points than everyone else and as a simplified stand-in for franchise mode, Road to the Super Bowl does a fine job, but the threat of being benched rarely feels serious
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Dissidia: Final Fantasy Review


Fan service? Absolutely. Fun? Unquestionably. Dissidia is a Final Fantasy fan's dream come true, the kind of crossover that's sure to make franchise aficionados giddy. Yet it's far more than just a love letter to series fanatics. Dissidia: Final Fantasy is an exuberant and addictive game in which showy one-on-one fighting and role-playing mingle so effortlessly that it's hard to pull yourself away. And the more you play, the more Dissidia keeps giving, showering you with extra features and in-game rewards as if you were in the center of a ticker-tape parade. The visual drama of battles is unfortunately undercut by some camera foibles, and the feeble narrative is out of step for a series renowned for excellent storytelling. Yet this is a generous package that offers untold hours of over-the-top spectacle that almost anyone can appreciate, even if they've never played or cared to play a Final Fantasy game.

If you are a fan of the series, however, you're probably curious about the story that confines the heroes of Square Enix's famous role-playing game series to a single universe. Heroes and villains from Final Fantasies I-X roam this world, where the gods Chaos and Cosmos have provided the balance that supports reality. When Chaos gains an upper hand, 10 brave warriors clash with 10 nefarious rivals in the hopes of saving the world as they know it. This is your opportunity to revisit old rivals on the battlefield--and to experience some unlikely possibilities. Cloud versus Sephiroth and Tidus versus Jecht are natural choices; but have you considered the idea of pitting Squall against Golbez, or Bartz against Ultimecia? Dissidia's story modes are crammed with such improbable scenarios, though the tale they tell is a disappointing mess of shallow cliches and awkward voice acting, stripping each character to the barest essentials. You'll follow each hero as he or she take parallel journeys, which involve finding Cosmos-curing crystals while occasionally stopping to hear Firion reminisce about roses and Squall grumble about, well, everything. The aftermath of this search is told through an additional story mode called Shade Impulse, in which you can choose your own playable hero in each chapter. And once you complete this story, Dissidia gifts you with even more chapters, more playable characters (it's best to discover who they are on your own), and much more. It isn't an involving tale, but there's a lot of it, and the more you play, the more the game gives you.

While the story won't be enough to captivate you, Dissidia's mix of role-playing and fighting will keep you hooked for some time. In the story modes, you move a battle piece that represents your fighter across a game grid where treasure chests and enemy engagements await. Each move on the grid consumes a destiny point; completionists will want to clear each board of all items and foes without overspending the allotted points, though doing so isn't necessary to progress. It's simply a contrivance (and a good one at that) to move you from one encounter to the next so that you can level up your character, earn funds (Gil, of course) used for purchasing new equipment, and unlock hundreds of new items, moves, and accessories. This constant flow of rewards is the basis of Dissidia's addictive nature. It starts with the promise of a better sword for Cloud and becomes an obsession with unlocking new voice samples for your fighters, multiplayer fighting arenas, and even enhancements to how quickly you receive other enhancements. It's an embarrassment of pleasures.
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LEGO Battles Review


Recent Lego video games have featured gameplay that is cutesy and kid-friendly but still solid enough to appeal to more seasoned gamers. Lego Battles tries to take this trend into the realm of real-time strategy, embracing the basic concepts on which many successful RTS games are built. Resource acquisition, building construction, unit production, and combat are the main gameplay elements here, and the game bears strong similarities to early RTS games like Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. Sticking with what works is generally a good thing, and Lego Battles does that well enough to appeal to folks who don't have much RTS experience. The downside of imitating a 15-year-old game is that Lego Battles lacks the sophistication to appeal to a more experienced audience. The vexing pathfinding issues and slow-witted friendly AI are often frustrating, but the solid core mechanics and humorous Lego charm make the light strategy of Lego Battles fun and rewarding.


The evil wizard cackles as he leads his undead minions into battle.

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There are six different campaigns in Lego Battles, each featuring a different Lego faction. Medieval knights, skeleton warriors, pirates, an imperial navy, astronauts, and aliens each have a unique campaign that takes a couple of hours to finish, making for a robust amount of single-player content. Each faction is set against another, and these rivalries create some interesting situations. For example, at the beginning of the astronaut campaign you are tasked with capturing an alien specimen. Meanwhile, in the alien campaign, you are miffed to learn that some strange creatures have run off with your buddy, so it's off to the rescue. These mission briefings are often amusing, and there are a few cutscenes per campaign that contain the uniquely charming humor found in recent Lego adventure games.

Each campaign begins with easy missions and slowly ramps up the difficulty, and the first available campaign has an extensive tutorial that walks you through pretty much every aspect of the game. In order to construct buildings and recruit soldiers, you'll need bricks. You can earn bricks by building a mine, but not all maps have a conveniently located mine site. Given that, your main brick supply will usually come from chopping down trees and carrying the logs back to your castle or your yield-boosting lumber mill. The castle is your home base where you can replace a fallen hero and recruit builders, who are the only units that can harvest trees and build structures. There are structures that produce units (barracks, special factory, and shipyard) and fortifications that help you defend your territory (walls and towers). You won't need or be able to build all these structures on every map (bridges, for example, are rarely needed), but they will all come in handy at some point in your campaigns. Constructing a bustling brick-reaping, unit-producing settlement gives you a great feeling of progressively becoming more powerful, and you'll soon be ready to extend your influence out into the world.

Building a barracks lets you recruit a few different kinds of troops, and as you amass your army you need to build farms to feed them all. Each farm supplies four regular units (such as soldier, archer, or knight) and one special unit (such as boat, tank, or dragon), and you can have a maximum of 20 regular units and 4 special units in any given level. You can explore the map and battle enemies by selecting a maximum of nine units with the stylus, then tapping a location or enemy. While this may sound simple, your movements are complicated by the fact that your units aren't very good at navigating the map. If you tell them to cross an open landscape, they'll do fine. But if you send them around a bend, some of them will get hung up on the scenery and forget what they were doing in the first place. Narrow bridges and winding paths are even more problematic. You can tap the destination at regular intervals during your units' journey, reissuing the movement command and making sure all your units arrive, but this gets tedious and makes it aggravating to manage more than nine units at a time
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Real Heroes: Firefighter Review


Playing as a firefighter in Real Heroes: Firefighter obviously isn't as grueling as facing down flames in real life, but this Wii game is as close as most of us will want to get to donning protective clothing and hauling around a giant hose. Developer Epicenter Studios has taken the formula for a first-person shooter and grafted on firefighting mechanics, turning a simple design template (and budget-looking packaging) into tense expeditions into burning buildings. A few issues with the wrist-twisting Wii Remote controls make the game more of a slog than it needs to be at times, but the lengthy, nicely scripted levels keep you immersed in the action even while your hand starts to ache.

Essentially, this is a standard Wii first-person shooter where enemies have been replaced with fires. Instead of gunning down monsters, you haul around hoses and fire extinguishers to put out roaring blazes, hack down doors with axes, wrench open boxes with a pry bar, and rescue civilians before they succumb to smoke inhalation. All actions are handled with the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. You move a cursor around by pointing the remote and then move with the nunchuk's thumbstick. Motions are mimicked with the remote. So when you need to smash windows with your axe to let out smoke, you simply hold down the B button and swing the controller forward. When you have to open up a car with the Jaws of Life, you do so by twisting the remote until you line up onscreen cursors and then jab it forward to plunge the hefty hardware into place.

Most of these movements are easy to pull off and are pretty satisfying. There's something very cool about putting out fires with a hose and smashing things with an axe. The only problem is the overly sensitive cursor. This makes the remote unforgiving, forcing you to adopt a white-knuckle grip to keep everything on track. It's too easy to run into fires or slip a bit when lining up an action like hacking down a door and then wind up aiming at the floor. You get used to it after a while, although you need to have a strong wrist to endure the game's lengthy levels without taking breaks to ease the aching that this causes.

A cheesy, B-movie story serves as the background for Real Heroes: Firefighter, although you can ignore it and jump right into smoky buildings. You take on the role of a probationary firefighter with a city fire company and ride along to calls that serve as the game's nine single-player-only levels. All are large-scale industrial calls, so you're not getting any cats down from trees. You venture into a factory, a shopping center, a museum, and even a medieval theme park, all with the general goal of putting out fires and rescuing people. A lot of the game involves extinguishing fires in set locations. You smash into a room and soak everything while a meter on the right side of the screen ticks down showing your success rate. Another frequent pastime is cutting paths through blazing rooms to allow civilians to escape or fellow firefighters to get through to key objectives. You generally either direct people out by soaking a trail for them or cover other firefighters from a good vantage point while they perform rescue ops. You also man the big water cannon on pumper trucks when putting out large-scale conflagrations, much like you would take over a gun turret on a vehicle in a standard shooter.

Simple puzzles are common as well. Gas jets might be firing out of control, forcing you to dodge them in order to get to a control panel and shut them down. Electrical arcs might be firing off in all directions, necessitating that you quickly pry open a nearby breaker box and throw a lever. There are a lot of stock situations to deal with, and they do get a little dreary at times. Levels are long and you spend too much time simply spraying water onto fires over and over again. Still, most objectives are mixed up enough that you don't get too bogged down in repetition. When levels end, however, you've usually had enough.
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Halo 3: ODST Updated Hands-On - Multiplayer and Firefight


As Microsoft and Bungie release more information on Halo 3: ODST, it’s become clear that this upcoming shooter is neither a sequel nor an expansion. Rather, it’s a combination of new and familiar that doesn’t fit very neatly into either definition. You’ll find a new cooperative mode called Firefight and a full-fledged single-player campaign that dives into unexplored territory from Halo 3’s storyline, but the competitive multiplayer component is both identical to and compatible with its predecessor Halo 3. However, one major piece that pushes ODST deeper into “all-new” territory is the inclusion of three exclusive multiplayer maps that regular old Halo 3 players won’t be able to download anytime soon. We traveled to Bungie this week to get a hands-on run through all three of these maps and to take a quick look at a brand-new setting in the Firefight mode.

First, here's a primer for those unfamiliar with ODST’s unique packaging. The aforementioned campaign and Firefight modes will come on one disc, while the competitive multiplayer comes on a separate disc within the same box. It’s the same exact Halo 3 multiplayer fans have been playing for nearly two years now, but with every downloadable map pack ever released for the game on the disc. And, of course, there’s also the trio of exclusive maps known as Heretic, Citadel, and Longshore.

We’ll start with Heretic. This one is the resident re-creation of the bunch because it’s closely based on Midship from Halo 2. Midship, as you’ll recall, is a smallish, circular map with a wide-open space in the middle and a number of sprawling ramps leading up to perches that flank the outside walls. Bungie reps were quick to note that it’s a much more faithful re-imagining than the update from Lockout to Blackout. They described it as being not quite “pixel perfect,” but close enough that all those strategies from the second game will still work here. The inclusion of Halo 3 equipment, such as the bubble shield, adds a new layer of gameplay though, as anyone who’s trying to hold the middle area during a game of King of the Hill while plasma grenades rain down from every direction can attest.

Next on the list is Citadel. According to Bungie, the inspiration for this map comes directly from the studio’s voracious fan base. The Halo 3 community has been clamoring for a small, symmetrical arena-style map for quite some time now, and Citadel is designed to be just that. It’s somewhat of an oval-shaped map inspired from a citadel environment from the Halo 3 campaign, with a fairly open space in the middle and continuous paths around the outside that include both a ground level and second level. It’s a very straightforward map that keeps the focus directly on the players and the action while keeping things fast and frantic. In Oddball, picking up the skull is akin to asking for instant death because there’s nowhere to hide, but in multi-Capture the Flag, there’s enough space between sides that you can score somewhat easily but still keep good enough sightlines on the enemy to play solid defense.
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