Tehflakes.ca Game of the Year
It’s that time of year, time to discuss my favourite game of the year along with honourable mentions and biggest disappointment. But before I get into that, I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about how I came to decision and what criteria I used.
So to me game of the year represents the overall best complete package that a game has to offer. This includes everything from the menus, the graphics, the sound, the story, the multiplayer, the connection I have to the characters within the game, and I guess the best way to say it is how engrossed I am into the game. I must eat, breathe and think about the game and lastly what replay value does it offer. Things that shouldn’t be considered when tabulating your game of the year is number of copies sold, marketing budget and whether it is a console exclusive title. It shouldn’t matter that the game is on 1 platform or several. It’s all about the best game of 2009.
There truly was only one logical choice for Tehflakes.ca game of the year that is Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. You can check out my review here. Nathan Drake is the new James Bond and Laura Croft of the video game space. The plot twists alone will have you on the edge of your seat. Uncharted 2 doesn’t do a lot new but it does what it does better than anything out there right now. You can beat it on normal in about 10 hours and don’t worry you can replay the game and be sure to go and hunt for all the treasures. Had enough of the single player? Why not check out the co-operative levels or the new multiplayer. I know what you’re thinking great a new multiplayer but the team at Naughty Dog did a fantastic job with it. In the span of 2 days I played this game for almost 15 hours and if I didn’t have to work I would have probably played more. I still continue to hop on to get some multiplayer action when I can
Well it’s time for some honourable mentions that were under consideration for Game of the Year:
- Batman Arkham Asylum
- Assassins Creed 2
- New Super Mario Brothers
Well I am certainly going to get some heat for this but Forza Motorsport 3 was probably my biggest let down of the year. Don’t get me wrong it was a good game but the difference between Forza and Forza 2 was huge, that made think we would see Forza 3 turn out to be an epic game but it wasn’t. It felt more like Forza 2.5 with a good physics system. The track selection was boring, the menu system was awful, and just in general I found it boring. I really had a hard time staying focused and wanting to play it, it was a very different feeling compared to Forza 2.
Art done by Todd Lawson -Visit Todd’s site at www.toddlawson.com
read moreDj Hero Renegade Edition Review – Xbox 360
Activision has yet again brought us a new “Hero” series game, this time venturing away from the guitar, drums, and microphone to bring us DJ Hero. Yes another metal and plastic instrument for are already overcrowded living rooms. There are two versions of the game the regular edition and the Renegade Edition featuring Jay-Z and Eminem.
There are only 2 differences on the hardware that I’ve found so far one being the knobs on the Renegade edition are metal compared to plastic on the regular edition. Secondly the turntable is black and gold compared to black and silver. My only real complaint regarding the turn table is the cross fading mechanism. It is has 3 positions left, center and right. When sliding from right to center or vice versa there isn’t enough of a click to ensure that it is centered. I’ve often lost note streaks because of it. FreeStyleGames even thought of the lefties, you can detach the mixer and place it on the right.
One of the biggest complaints I have had with games Rock Band and Guitar Hero are the tracks. Being in my twenties the music in those games just didn’t appeal to me because I didn’t know 90 percent of the artists. This is one of the single most important reasons I love DJ Hero the set list is fantastic. You have music from Eminem, Jay-Z, N.E.R.D, 2-Pac And 50 Cent mixed by the likes of DJ AM, DJ Grandmaster Flash and DJ Jazzy Jeff. This game is loaded with star power.
Another Hero game means another controller, so half of it is the record platter that contains 3 buttons green, red and blue. The other half is the mixer that includes the cross fader, effects knob , euphoria button (star power) and system control buttons .As the familiar red and blue and as notes come down on the screen you press the button. Scratches involve holding either the green or blue button while moving the platter back or forth, but on harder difficulty you’ll have to follow onscreen arrows that indicate whether to push it forward or pull it back. When you get into the medium, hard and expert settings you add in the cross fader, which you’ll have to push left and right depending on what notes are being played during the song. Think of it this way, when the cross fader is in the middle position music from record 1 and record 2 are being blared through your speakers. Move it to the left and only record 1 is being played, move it to the right and it’s only record 2.
Beginner and easy mode are just like sound, lame and boring. For me this game started to take off once I switched to medium 5 starred all the songs and found my groove. Hard and expert is a challenge and some of the songs really do kick my ass but I’m ok with that since music in this game is incredible. You can hook up a USB microphone and throw shout out’s to your TV, it’s lame but it could be fun at a party. Next time they tried to integrate a co-op mode by having 10 songs that can also be played using a guitar. The guitar and Turntable mode sounds but I really thought it was tacked on instead of being carefully thought out. One small annoyance I have is that you cannot fail a song regardless of how bad you suck, the music will keep playing. This is great if you wanted to just kick it at a party and listen to some great tunes but it’s hard to focus on where you need to improve your skills.
You can go on line, pick a set list and battle other people, I personally didn’t enjoy this mode at all as I could never seem to win a set list.
I hope Activision takes a cue from the fine folks at Harmonix and releases weekly downloadable mash up tracks for us to play. This is only way to prolong the life of this game.
Dj Hero makes a very good debut onto console platforms but FreeStyleGames needs to make a few improvements to the hardware, co-op and potentially a lower price as some people may find the current price tag a little high. At the end of the day this is one of the best music genre games I’ve played.
read moreGran Turismo PSP Review
We all remember Gran Turismo on the Playstation 1 with its multi disk package and countless hours of fun. Fast forward to 2009 and Gran Turismo PSP is making its debut on the portable platform. This game was roughly 5 years in development and I could have waited another 6 months for it.
Well GTPSP must surely be one of the best graphical looking games running at 60 frames per second on the PSP it makes me think it’s a tech demo to show other developers what can be done on the PSP. The soundtrack is solid and quite enjoyable throughout the experience. The only let down would be the cock pit view it’s not as detailed and polished as I would have liked.
As soon as you fire up the game you’ll be glad to see the familiar user interface we’ve all came to know and love. GT has 800 cars and 35 tracks that include over 70 different variations of tracks to play. Tracks in the game include original courses, famous world circuits, city courses ,Mazda Raceway, Laguna Seca, Nurburgring Nordschleife, Tokyo Route 246, a Seattle city course and a Grand Canyon rally track. One of the annoying parts of having 800 cars is that car manufactures only sell their cars on certain days of the week meaning you need to fire up the game every day to buy that car you need. Also the cars for sale are randomized as well as I got giddy when it was Mitsubishi day to sell cars but Eclipses weren’t for sale on that day.
There are time trials, drift and something called a career mode as well as over 100 challenges to test your driving skills. Let’s start with the career mode or the lack there of one. There is not structured career mode, all you need to is select a car, track and you’re off to the races. I would have preferred that the driving challenges played some role in the career mode. Like if you beat the first 5 challenges it opens up the first set of races and in order to progress you need to beat more challenges. The lack of career mode is really the downfall for this game. The driving challenges are so deep, rich and fun I spent the most time beating all the challenges. Drift mode is your standard drift mode It doesn’t appeal to me. Time trials are always fun. There are online capabilities using Ad Hoc which always you to pick a car, track and challenge up to 4 friends to a race.
It looks great, plays like a sim racer but the lack of structure in the career mode really disappoints me. One of the main reasons I kept going back and playing it was challenges. I had a blast and I wish we could get more via downloadable content. If you love the Gran Turismo franchise and need a really good racing game to play, than this is it. Oh I forgot to mention buy all the cars you can and get a head start on the competition when Gran Turismo 5 is released on the PS3
Uncharted 2 Review
One of the best games to date on the PlayStation platform is Uncharted Drakes Fortune developed by Naughty Dog studios. They brought back are favourite womanizing witty character Nathan Drake. What you get with the Uncharted franchise is a mash up of James of bond meets Laura croft. By this I mean you get the action intense sequences with a male character that all the women love. Then you have you have the exploring puzzle solving aspects from the Laura Croft franchise. Combine these together and have Uncharted 2 Among Thieves.
From the moment you start Uncharted 2 you will notice how gorgeous this game is, in fact I will say I don’t there is a better looking next gen game. This games audio is a reason to get a surround sound system or a very end set of headphones is to experience the audio. The gun sounds; the rain and music simply compliment and go hand in hand with this game. The voice acting is simply brilliant throughout the game Nathan Drake will simply leaving you laughing at the remarks he makes. The supporting cast in the game also has some tremendous voice acting. The actors can only do so much with a script that the writing team gives them and wherever Naughty Dog found these writers they deserve a big pay raise.
Uncharted 2 does not do a whole lot different from the first game but it just does it better. The combat in Drake’s Fortune was one of the weak spots of the game, the team over at naughty has greatly improved the shooting mechanics and it certainly shows. Enemies are no longer bullet sponges unless they are completely covered in Kevlar armour. The cover mechanics have also greatly improved allowing Nathan slide from cover to cover effectively. Blowing enemies up with grenades is always fun but it was a real struggle in first game which involved using the D-pad or six axis. Now all you have to do is aim and tap L2. It’s much easier and more effective. Melee combat is just more fun to use as well and there are several trophies available to encourage melee combat. There is also a heavy focus on stealth whether it be shooting enemies from ledges, pulling enemies off of ledges or running down the very quietly and then knocking out the enemy.
I played it on normal and beat the game just under 10 hours that has Nathan Drake searching for a mythical city of Shangri-La because he wants unravel the mystery of Marco Polo’s voyage from China in 1292. After spending time with Kublai Khan, Marco departed with 14 ships and 600 passengers and crew but when he arrived at destination he only had 1 ship and 18 passengers. Throughout the course of the game Nate encounters friend Flynn who turns into a foe, Chloe, Zoran Lazarevic, our good friend Sully and Elena.
One of the biggest editions to the game is multiplayer. There is Co-operative multiplayer as well competitive multiplayer. First up for co-op will allow 3 players to take on roles of Nathan and 2 other characters as they make their way through gun fights and team based objectives. Should one of your comrades should fall you will need to revive them and I have to say as someone who was downed a lot good teammates are key to this mode. Gold Rush has players team up to get a treasure and return it to their base. You also have survival mode where you take on wave after wave of bad guys or girls. For competitive play you get the usual deathmatch, elimination and capture the treasure and much more. There is a bit of RPG element to the multiplayer as you can gain ranks and in turn allows you to buy perks or upgrades with the cash you earned in game (if you finished Uncharted you’ll start with 80k). Levels have been taken right out of the first player campaign so that means you can climb up to the get the higher ground on the other team. Naughty has also implemented a party system that works extremely well for a Playstation 3 game.
If you own a Playstation 3 there is no reason why you shouldn’t play this game. It’s gorgeous looking, it’s funny and it was one of the first games in a long time made me completely lose track of time. The single player campaign is epic and multiplayer is quite fun and for 60 dollars this game is a steal!.
read moreGhostbusters: The Video Game Review
The game starts like a movie with a full introduction and opening credits and then you’re greeted with the Ghostbusters theme song we all came to know. The opening level of the game consists of the team training a new recruit who they call the Rookie. He’s faced with capturing ghosts that have escaped from the containment unit.
From the moment the rookie strapped on the new prototype proton pack and got lectured about why proton beams should never cross paths. I felt like I was actually part of the team. Too bad there is no punishment in game for crossing paths which I was a little disappointed with.
The single player campaign follows a story around a large PKE wave hits New York City and sends the team on a variety of missions to capture a wide variety of ghosts. Throughout the game everything you do is scrutinized by a douche bag named Walter Peck who is now in charge of the Paranormal Contract Oversight Committee who was appointed by the Mayor. During the course of the game you meet Dr.Ilyssa Selwyn a museum curator who’s ties to this mysterious events leads you to find and destroy node’s and node guardians at the Sedgewick Hotel, The New York public library, the museum of Natural history and the final node being a mansion that rises from the middle of the Hudson River.
The basic game play consists of firing your proton stream at ghosts, weaken down and throw out a trap and slam them into a trap and pick up the trap and you have a ghost captured. You earn cash on each mission which can be used to purchase weapon upgrades throughout the game. You’ll also receive upgrades from Egon as the game progresses since you are experimental weapons specialist. One of the first things I upgraded was the trap; the upgraded trap makes capturing ghosts a lot easier.
This game also features a multiplayer aspect which consists of the 4 Ghostbusters cooperatively blasting and capturing ghosts. There are six jobs (game play modes) for you to enjoy. The six game modes are survival, containment, protection, destruction, thief and slime dunk. If there was ever a game that did not need multiplayer Ghostbusters is it. After a long and drawn out campaign last thing I wanted to do was run around and capture more ghosts. I had my fix and that’s all I needed.
Overall I had a lot of fun using the proton beam to weaken, slam and capture ghosts, my biggest complaint is I feel the game dragged on too long. It also has a 60 dollar price tag which is probably a little too high but you need to pay for all the original Ghostbusters for incredibly funny voice acting work they did. If you can find this game for 40 bucks and want to experience would it would be like to weld a proton pack, I would highly recommend you do.
Halo 3 ODST Review
This is the latest Halo title developed by Bungie Studios and it doesn’t star the famous Master Chief. Halo 3 ODST actually takes place before Halo 3. The UNSC are at war with the Covenant, and during the Convenant discover Earth and launch an assault on New Mombasa which is located in Africa. You play as the Rookie an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper (ODST) during the drop down to Earth your pod collides with another pod and you then you crash on Earth. Six hours later you wake and go through the basic Halo tutorial level. You now must make your way through the Streets of New Mombasa to find clues in order to piece together what happened to your follow squad members Dutch, Romero, Mickey, and Dare while you were unconscious. So essentially you start as the Rookie and once you find the clue that links you to a squad member you go ahead and play as your squad member and you live through what happened to them. Very interesting concept and Bungie totally pulled it off. The cut scenes tell a very interesting story.
The story ends with your squad members fly out of the city in a captured Phantom and have took an engineer aboard. Eventually Sergeant Johnson arrives and tells the engineer that he intends to ask questions regarding its knowledge of the Covenant.
ODST plays very different from any other Halo game from the way the story is told to the underlying game mechanics. ODST doesn’t feel like a complete game but more like an expansion which allows Bungie to experiment and try new things. There are only a few new weapon variants, 1 new alien race and everything you shoot comes from Halo 3. The health system works a bit different, the more you get shot the more you stamina goes down that leads to your health going down. Low on health? Find a health pack to regain your health. The other big addition is your visor, see the streets of New Mombasa are very dark and in order to find your way you need to turn your visor on. This is a catch 22 as it allows the enemies to find where you are. Marty O’Donnell does a fantastic job with the soundtrack which really does set the mood for each level.
Another new mode in Halo ODST 3 is Firefight which allows you and up to 3 other friends take on waves of Covenant troops. Out of the box it comes with 10 maps and each map has an achievement for amassing 200,000 in points on a map. This should keep things fun and exciting for a period of time before Bungie will need to release new maps to play on. The one negative about the firefight was that as a team you share 4 lives. So if you one douche on your team that is constantly dying, you will get annoyed very quickly.
There is a second disc included with both standard and limited editions that features Halo 3’s Multiplayer. There aren’t any real big updates from Halo 3’s Mutliplayer. The second disk comes with all 21 Halo 3 maps plus 3 new maps which are only available if you buy Halo ODST. The new maps are Hetertic a remake of the Halo 2 Midship map, Citadel and Longshore.
Overall Halo ODST is a solid game and will provide you with a great story and Halo combat we all love. Overall the game’s length is could be compared to as expansion pack. It really is short but packs in a load of fun either single player or co-op. The real winner in the Halo ODST package is firefight, fighting off wave after wave of Covenant with a limited number of lives is a blast with a group of friends. I really wish that ODST came out as a downloadable expansion instead of a full retail release. The retail price of $69.99 Canadian is a bit overpriced but if you a diehard Halo fan and need your fix Halo ODST is for you.
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