Happy New Year and Our Game Of The Year !!!!!
Ah yes, the obligatory BEST OF 2008 list. It must be New Year’s Eve.
Flakes and I looked back on all the games we’d played this year to see if we could pick a favourite. Last fall we saw one of the busiest release seasons ever. With so many great games it was hard to pick one winner. Flakes and I ultimately couldn’t come to a unanimous verdict.
Here then are our Top 2 Games of the Year. We’ve put up a poll so that you can weigh in and cast your vote. Who got it right: Flakes or Darth
Tehflakes’ GOTY:
Metal Gear Solid 4 – Playstation 3
Released earlier this year, it may not be the “savior” Sony Executives were hoping it would be, but it did help sell some PS3 consoles and did rank well in the sales charts. MGS4 was by far the best game both in the franchise and for the PS3 this year. The controls were “westernized” which added to the overall experience. The game play was very intense and challenging as Snake showed signs of old age. There was a lot of talk regarding the cut scenes, both good and bad. Overall, there were a lot of cut scenes that told the story and wrapped up the story brilliantly. Metal Gear Solid 4 can be summed up by saying you were treated to great game play and a fantastic cinematic experience.
DarthAlbert III’s GOTY:
Fallout 3 – PS3
With its expansive terrain, detailed stats building, in depth leveling system, and unique characters, Fallout 3 plays more like an excellent D&D quest than anything else. You can go (almost) anywhere and do (almost) anything. Want to kill the Sheriff of Megaton? Do it! Want to help survivors? Go for it. Want to extort them and kill them anyway? Up to you. But Fallout 3 is more than making decisions; it’s an epic moral battleground.
I’ve played morality based RPGs before (Knights of the Old Republic is one of my favourite games) but Fallout 3 is the first game that has forced me to question my own morals and stray from the light. In games like KotOR, there are clear distinctions between black and white, good and evil. Also, there’s the knowledge that no matter what path you choose, you’ll still have plenty of money and allies to buy and fight your way out of trouble. Not so in Fallout. When wandering a post apocalyptic world can one afford to lose the credits he or she is offered for performing good deeds? I walk the path of ultimate good (despite my name) in all morality based games. At least, I did before Fallout. Now, stealing a clip of ammo or hacking into a restricted computer could be the difference between life and death for my character. Morals be damned, I’m surviving over here.
Yes, Fallout has great graphics and sound. Yes, Fallout has engrossing environments and unique item systems. Yes, Fallout has an amazingly laid out story with strong characters. Fallout has all these things, but so do other games. Fallout wins for me because it does what every videogame strives to do. It firmly places the player in the shoes of the main character and creates an immersive, unbelievably realistic world where anything can, and will, happen. I just can’t get enough.
read moreCall of Duty®: World at War Review
Call of Duty: World at War (aka CoD: WaW) is the follow up to the smash hit Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare developed by Infinity Ward. CoD: WaW is developed by Treyarch Studios who brought you such awful titles like Call of Duty 3. CoD3 was one of the first games I played on my Xbox 360 and, well, let’s just say I didn’t keep the game for very long. With the huge success of Modern Warfare, Treyarch has learned the valuable lessons that made Call of Duty 4 so popular and what provided it with such a long shelf life.
One of the advantages Activision has with its Call of Duty franchise is that it rotates developers each year. Treyarch took full advantage of the Call of Duty 4 engine; the environments are stunning however there wasn’t an improvement over the CoD4 graphics. As soon as I received the flamethrower in the story mode, I caught myself on several different occasions setting grass and trees on fire just because it looked cool. The audio was exceptionally well done and the voiceovers were good. The soundtrack was something I really liked about the game. There’s nothing like playing as American solider and hearing some classic rock in the background to get you pumped up to shoot enemies or blow things up. It didn’t quite work the same for me when I was playing as a Russian Solider.
One of the first things you will notice when you start the single-player campaign is the level of realistic violence. Body parts get dismembered and there is a lot of blood. These visuals should make you realize how violent and bloody WWII actually was. You could be walking through a jungle environment with your flamethrower setting grass and trees on fire and then suddenly have a Japanese Solider come out of a trench and start attacking you. Overall I found the single player campaign very fun. The action was well paced but the campaign wasn’t very long. One of my major concerns lay in the fact I found my character seemed to have a big target on his head and his AI buddies were just along for the ride. I was constantly under siege with grenades. No matter where I was the on the map they found me. My saving grace? There are a ton of checkpoints in each level.
There was a level in Call of Duty 4 called “Death from Above” that put you in control of the guns on an AC-130 Spectre gunship. You played the level from the perspective of a person watching a thermal television. That level was one of the best levels of CoD4 as it put real war into perspective. World at War tried to copy this feat by having you man one of three weapons aboard a plane and rotate from weapon to weapon. When you’re not blowing up U-boats, you are rescuing survivors. I’m not quite sure what Treyarch was going for in terms of mood, but it felt sloppy. Overall, it felt out of place.
The co-op campaign takes a page of out Halo 3 by offering campaign scoring, which is a nice addition, and a new feature called death cards. What are death cards you ask? They are similar to the skulls found in Halo 3. Different death cards can be used to add extra challenges to the game.
The weakest part in the Call of Duty: World at War package is the multiplayer. It feels like they did an export of CoD4 and added World War 2 guns and character models. CoD: WaW didn’t innovate or improve on anything from CoD4’s high ranked multiplayer mode, giving CoD4 players little reason to leave familiar territory for something new.
Conclusion
Call of Duty World at War is a very fun game that tells a very good story about the Pacific Rim. Treyarch vastly improved their performance on this edition of Call of Duty but didn’t do enough to set it apart and make me want to leave Call of Duty 4. The “if it’s not broke don’t fix it” attitude seems to have been applied to this game. I’m not sure it justifies spending $59.99 on this game during a holiday season filled with so many Triple A titles.
Scene It?: Box Office Smash
For someone who isn’t a big movie buff but plays casuals games with his significant other, who claims to be a movie buff, last years Scene It: Last Camera Action was quite the hit in my household. This year’s version Scene It: Box Office Smash brings some new features, hopefully some DLC packs and most importantly a real chance to win at this game on a game to game basis.
There are 22 different puzzles or challenges, if you will; including a few new types of questions such as, Pixel Fix which requires you to name the movie based on an 8 bit video of the movie. Celebrity Ties is a series of clues in which you must link the two actors to a movie. Personally, I really enjoyed the filling in the quotes puzzle. They gave you a quote with a series of blanks on it and provide you with 4 possible solutions to the answer. Also, there is Which is Which, where they give you a series of four still photos and you have to link two of them to the name of the movie. There are hundreds of questions however they tend to repeat after awhile. The movies in this game range from the 60’s to 2008.
Some other highlights were the overall pacing/feel to the game – it felt quicker but, needless to say, sneaking a game in before dinner was still completely doable.
One of my biggest issues with the original Scene It was simply that the game wasn’t fun playing by your lonesome as compared to with another person or a group of people. This problem has been averted! They have fixed it in this edition by adding a feature which allows you to play on Xbox Live. Furthermore, they are promising downloadable content. Hopefully this comes sooner then later and the pricing isn’t overbearing.
I didn’t pick up the big button controllers. I don’t think there was much difference from the originals. The fact that I couldn’t pause the game to get a refill on my beverage was quite a nuisance. Also, the multipliers in the Final Cut were bothersome. It allows the player to earn multipliers based on the number of questions correctly answered in a row. It went from 1x to 2x to 5x. It can either make things really close or you can get blown out of the water. It can be a huge “cut” if you aren’t familiar with the movie clip shown.
Overall, this is a great addition to the causal line up for the 360 and should have families playing it over the holidays. However, with the repeat questions already appearing, I really hope the DLC comes quickly and is reasonably priced.
read moreGears Of War 2 Review
The holiday season is upon us and that means for gamers it’s time for a vast array of Triple A titles to be released. Gears of War 2, developed by Epic Games and published by Microsoft Game Studios, was released on November 7th, 2008 to high expectations. The original Gears of War is one the highest rated games and best sellers on the Xbox 360. The original Gears did a lot right such as introducing a fantastic cover system that may have changed the way we play shooters for ever. On the other hand, it didn’t have much of a story and the multiplayer wasn’t as polished as it should have been. Make no mistake this isn’t Gears of War 1.5, but a true sequel.
The overall presentation of Gears 2 is significantly improved from its predecessor. This is really no surprise for Epic Games. After all, when you develop an engine like Unreal and license it off to other studios, you should know full well how to take advantage of it.
The mechanics of Gears of War 2 are similar to the original with several minor improvements that really enhance the overall in game experience. The changes to the cover system are a welcome improvement. Now you can disrupt entering cover and press A to roll. The single player campaign is roughly 10 hours on normal difficulty containing 5 chapters to play through. The main complaint about Gears of War’s single player campaign was the story was sparse, bordering on non-existent. Gears 2 focuses on Dom who, while helping Marcus Fenix fight the locust invasion, is searching for his wife Maria. The cut scenes are hit and miss. Some of them make you feel connected to Dom while others have you scratching your head. This is still an improvement from the original.
Multiplayer is no longer an afterthought in the Gears universe. GoW2 includes 10 new maps as well as the original 5 maps re-made for GoW2. Multiplayer matches have grown in size from 8 to 10 players. Also of mention is the addition of bots. The bots can be quite useful depending on the difficultly you choose. Online match types you can encounter are Warzone which is the classic deathmatch, Execution which is similar to Warzone but with one life, King of the Hill and Annex in which you have to capture points but have different rules. You also have Guardian in which you have to keep your team leader alive in order to respawn. Once he dies there are no more respawns and it’s a battle to the end. Wingman puts you and your partner against another team of 2 where you only have 1 life and a winner is crowned over a series of matches by kills and deaths. Finally we have Submission which is like capture the flag but instead of a flag you have a person known as the meatflag. The AI doesn’t want to be caught and will kill you. Your job is to knock him down and escort him to your scoring point. Most interestingly, Gears introduces a new game mode called Horde. Horde puts you and up to 4 friends fighting wave after wave of various Locust enemies. After you complete each wave, the following one gets more difficult. There are 50 waves in total.
Conclusion
I didn’t follow any media coverage during the lead up to Gears of War 2. The one exception was during X’08 where I spent a little time on multiplayer getting my butt kicked by the man himself Cliff Bleszinski. I wanted to go into GoW2 with a clean slate much like I did in the original and it worked. I was blown away by this epic experience. It still has some room for improvement, but it has come a long way. In GoW2, there were characters I actually felt emotionally connected to at times which was a welcome change. All in all, if you liked Gears of War you will surely love Gears of War 2.
read moreLittleBigPlanet
Developer: Media Molecule
Publisher: Sony
Media Molecule has made its debut on the Playstation 3 with platformer Little Big Planet.
Graphics
The graphics in Little Big planet are shiny and clean, on par with every other next gen game on the market.
Audio
Actor Stephen Fry has done a fantastic job as narrator in Little Big Planet. His dry, British sense of humour really takes the voice acting to another level. The sound track sets the mood for each level.
Game Play
The minute Little Big Planet loads up you’re introduced to a lovable character named Sackboy. From here the tutorials teach you how to use the controls as well as how to use the six axis capabilities in the game. The D pad controls facial expressions while the pitch and tilt of the controller make Sackboy perform a variety of humorous expressions. You can also control Sackboy’s arms individually with the L2 and R2 buttons in conjunction with the left and right analog sticks. After the tutorials you are brought to your pod, an enhanced menu screen from which you choose which levels to play, download or create. You can decorate your pod as well as Sackboy by either downloading free or paid DLC from the PSN store or by unlocking clothing and accessories in the single player campaign.
The single player story mode is very short at 35 levels. Sure, that may sound like a lot of levels but they aren’t terribly long. That being said, the puzzles are very fun to solve and each level is unique. You should be able to breeze through the single player campaign in 6 to 7 hours; longer if you go for full completion. In each level you can find and unlock various objects, stickers and decorations which are then available to you when designing your own level. After beating the single player campaign the real fun begins: level creation. While I have not yet posted my own levels online to share with the world, I have started to play with the massive tool set provided. I’ve created some small levels and I am impressed with the versatility offered. I’ve downloaded some levels created by other users and all I can say is that the creativity is unbelievable. My favourite so far might have to be the Wipe-Out HD remake. That being said, don’t expect levels like this to be around for too long. Mm is now cracking down on copyrighted content in level design. With the endless possibilities, I would love to see some sort of Hockey or sports level created. They probably already exist, but I haven’t found them yet. I was really looking forward to online co-op level creation, but it is currently not available. This is sort of a letdown as this feature was one of my most anticipated in LBP. Hopefully they will patch in this feature soon!
Conclusion
If you’ve always sought to create your own game but lacked the know-how, Little Big Planet is the game for you. It will help you harness your creativity to design your own masterpieces which can then be shared with the world. There are only thirty-five levels in the single player campaign but, as mentioned, the true replay ability in this game lies in creating your own levels and downloading levels created by other users. The controls are not as tight as they should be and could be tweaked. Only time will tell how long this game will truly last. However, ‘teh good’ outweighs ‘teh bad’. Therefore, if you have a PS3 you need to buy this game. If you don’t have a PS3, well then Little Big Planet gives you a reason to buy one!
Fable 2 Review
It’s hard to review a game like Fable 2. Like any blockbuster we’ve spent years listening to previews, bits and pieces, developer diaries and studied every screen shot wondering what the final game will be like. However even as the Microsoft marketing and P.R. machines chew through your game shows, magazines, podcasts and blogs there is yet another more intimidating hurdle to clear.
In my opinion and many others the first Fable was anything but the best RPG game. Although it did a lot of great things – like looking beautiful for the original Xbox’s always beefy graphics engine, introducing easy to pick up controls and RPG elements of depth and customization, it also did a lot of things poorly. The most talked about and obvious problem was the length of the first game and it’s limiting – although attractive – world. Beatable in a few hours was a jolting disappointment to many of us who where just starting to become deeper intertwined in the story and lush landscapes especially when there simply wasn’t much else to do but the main story. So unlike many of the masses who had followed Fable 2′s progress since the launch of the Xbox 360 a few years ago, I stayed away. I ignored the hype and dare I say was mildly interested, if at all. As I sat down with a copy of Fable 2 in my Xbox it was a hard memory to forget… for at least the first few hours.
For fans – the happy and disappointed – returning to Albion will for the most part be a welcoming experience. For first time players – you will be a little less jaded and more likely to dive head first into the opening act to be swept away by the grandeur in what a blockbuster game is expected to deliver. As you trek through this lush and diverse landscape much of the look and feel is the same as before, simply larger and graphically more advanced. This isn’t a bad thing. One thing to note is that this game takes place 500 years after the first game. In the 30+ hours I played the game I have to admit that I was a tad disappointed in this future where really all they seemed to have accomplished in 500 years is change the buildings a bit and invent guns. I am crossing my fingers that they will introduce a bit more technology and industrialization before the end.
This is a game targeted at a diverse body of gamers and it shows. Whether you want to tackle the straight and even path and work on the main quests or take your time and see the world, you are free to do so. Fable 2 treats its player with a very open experience where all actions have reactions and your very character is questioned. Much of this comes through in the good and evil approach to gaming. Commit crimes and be loathed or be virtuous and be loved.
The overall story is not a new one. Child and brother/sister – you are given the chance to play either at the beginning of a new game – are involved in a horrible incident in their youth. Your character grows up to become a hero and seek revenge or justice. As you travel you are encouraged to interact with the people of the land as well as find ways to leave your mark. You are invited to interact with some characters through conversation as well as shopping or doing jobs to earn some extra cash. Other characters are less interactive but will still react to you based on your renown, how you act around them, the time of day and even what you are wearing. There was one point while I played the game where I decided to buy some pink dye and proceeded to dye all of my characters clothes and his hair pink. Upon which the trader started to laugh at me. The laughs continued as I walked out into the marketplace. You will also be given sales and discounts based on your popularity or level of intimidation. You can buy property and rent it out to town folk to earn extra income which continues to accumulate even when your Xbox 360 console is turned off.
One of the games unfortunate downsides are the jobs, many of which earn little and are very tedious. Try pouring 281 pints of beer and you’ll see what I mean. After leaving my Xbox turned off for over 12 hours I turned it on, loaded the game and was welcomed with 3000+ dollars in earned rent and business. At last count I owned 3 homes, 4 caravans in a gypsy camp and over half a dozen trader booths selling everything from clothing, weapons, fish, to pies and fresh fruit. When the expensive items start to number in the tens of thousands – creating your own mini empire is a big help to making the game move along.
Beyond business and morality, you are also give dozens of expressions from funny to angry to friendly and yes, to flirty. Your expressions adjust how characters in the game react to you. And as you learn more you will unlock more opportunities. One of the larger ones is the ability to flirt with an object of your affection (guy or girl or both – this is a liberal Albion after all) and develop relationships. In the towns this will usually require a wedding ring and a house – hey, married life is a responsibility. However if you are outside the walls of the proper societies you will find others willing to have some fun without a ring on their finger… or you could always just get them drunk. Then all you need is a place to sleep. Here Fable 2 demonstrates one of it triumphs: humour. Humour plays a huge role in this game and in many ways you will find yourself doing things simply to see if you can and if you will get a good reaction out of a character. I’ll leave all the details for you to unlock but I will say that if you’re not serious about said strumpet that you have just seduced, be sure to stop by the general trader and pick up some protection. Seriously.
Beyond your character and the many people you will meet on your journeys you will also have a sidekick. Man’s best friend – or woman’s, depending on who you are playing – will be there by your side for the game. Your trusty dog companion becomes a helpful tool in what is often the worst part about games like this; the search for treasure. Your dog will often bark and run off the path you two are on and lead you to all sorts of places. It will warn you when enemies are near and occasionally fight with you – although do not expect this dog to become champion fighter. Like all characters in the game you have a special set of expressions to interact with your dog to show your appreciation, positive or negative.
When you are NOT parading around town in your pink dyed suit, playing catch with your dog or trying to work out a better deal on that hand gun by flirting with that shy weapons trader, you’ll spend a large part of your time duking it out with enemies. Fable 2 is, after all, an action RPG and fighting is part of its core gameplay. Like the first Fable this one has simple controls that are fairly easy to use and learn. At its heart Fable 2 is a bit on the button smashing side – but very accessible for anyone to pick up and play. As you proceed through the game you are given orbs that add to your abilities. Abilities break into 3 major categories: Strength (life, stronger attacks, etc.), Skills (aiming, speed, etc.) and Will (magic).
Beyond the single player mode Fable 2 also has a same system co-op where your character and a guest can travel the countryside completing quests and adventuring on the same screen. During the recent Toronto community and media launch event we had the opportunity to take this for a spin and had a blast while going on an evil killing spree and wiping out an entire town and a handful of guards. On launch day the developers released a downloadable update to unlock online play which remained untested at the time this was written.
In reality, after over 30 hours of playing the game, I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. It is a welcoming world to go back to and feels fresh and more accessible then I would have ever imagined. Most characters have a reaction to you, most doors to buildings are open or breakable and the main story is well developed and engaging. For the non-believer like me I suggest you give it a try and sink in a solid day of play before you turn your head from this one. And for newcomers with no experience in Albion, that are fans of action RPG games, this is a must have. You will be swept up and never want to leave. And by the way, kick a chicken… trust me.
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