GameguideReviews Archives – Page 22 of 31 – Gameguide Reviews Archives – Page 22 of 31 – Gameguide
Torchlight is a rather nifty game available on XBLA and harks back to my dark days of gaming where every new release would se me frantically ensuring my PC was game ready. I sunk a fair amount of time into Diablo as a teen and sitting down to Torchwood brought back memories of endless click storms through asymmetric dungeons until the early hours of the morning. Ahhh Good times.
If you missed out on Diablo then never fear, torchlight is here. Originally released on PC back in 2009, which didn’t even register on my hardened console gamer exterior, the game has been polished and adapted to work correctly for a controller. Ditching the mouse in this style of point’n’click RPG is a refreshing change to the constant mouse waggling inherent with the PC. The simple act of moving your character helps with the immersion as you feel in control of your hero rather than in management assigning waypoints to your lackey. The control system reminds me of Sacred 2 in a lot of ways which is an epic sized ‘point’n’click RPG with all sorts of complicated stat systems and rules with a much darker and realistic feel. Torchlight keeps it simple which equates to more time slaying monsters and less time running numbers to get the perfect min/max on your character.
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When I played EA’s MMA game last year, I leaned towards a fighter who primarily focussed on boxing, rather than going for all the kicking a groping on the floor. The only time I wanted to be on the floor was when I was on top of some poor fool whose face I was pummeling into submission.
Unfortunately, Boxing is more of a gentleman’s sport and you’re not allowed to hit a man when he’s down.
So is Fight Night: Champion just a tamer version of MMA, or does it hold it’s own?
Well, to be honest, it is a totally different game, and at times it is just a vicious, especially the new story mode. But lets not get ahead of ourselves just yet.
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BulletStorm crept up on me. I didn’t pay much attention to the pre release build up, I didn’t download the demo. The simple fact is I knew very little about this game until a couple days before release when a friend sent a link to the ‘Whip, Kick, Boom’ trailer and that when my eyes went all glazed and I fell in love. Fresh IP is a rarity these days and what the trailer promised got me quite excited.
BulletStorm is a story about revenge. After being betrayed by their General, Dead Echo goes rogue and become space pirates. 10 years later in an Alcohol fuel attack on the General star ship which leaves both ships crashing into a nearby resort planet… filled with violent criminals and mutated freaks. Without giving to much away this game has a reasonable story and the script had my laughing pretty hard at some points, be warned though, its not cerebral humour. To be honest though the story isn’t what BulletStorm is about, Bullet storm is about killing things. Not so much about now they are dead, more about how they are dead.
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Fighting games. The old staple of the dark arcades where I spent many an hour of my youth. But even back then when games required you insert a large silver coin, rather than forking out a hefty stack of notes to take the game home to play, I really didn’t get fighting games.
And I still don’t.
The finer complexities of a game like Marvel vs. Capcom 3 are lost on me. I can seem to win many fights just by button mashing, and when I do try and figure out what button does what, I usually find myself out cold whilst some half dressed, well proportioned female dances on my dead body.
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Killzone 3 is my first taste of this Playstation 3 exclusive series, and is the first FPS I have played on Sony’s console, so I don’t have the history, which will probably men I approach it from a different angle from fans of the series. THis is quite possibly truest when it comes to the story line.
I don’t really give a crap about the red-goggled Helghast, or why they hate me so much. All I really care about is that I’ve been abandoned on an unfriendly planet and if I see someone with red eyes, I’m gonna blow his freaken head off.
Fortunately I’m not alone, I have a small squad, though they are only there it seems to help drive the story and add variety to the missions.
The game itself kicks off with a lengthy and ever so slightly irritating training level, where for some inexplicable reason, you actually get to play as one of those red eyed freaks – only you’re not, as it turns out.
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Mar-T and Chip are two robots stranded on a plant by the Krofax, and alien race The planet is a veritable junkyard of parts and during their journeys they find a spacecraft with an exeedingly helpful shipboard computer called Con-Rad. Con-Rad helps them discover parts to get the ship working
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I’ve been hanging out in anticipation of Test Drive Unlimited 2 for some time. It’s the sequel to the first driving game I owned on the XBox 360, and as such my anticipation was high. My hopes, unfortunately were initially dashed – and this is the part where I act like a spoilt brat complaining that the game I got sent for free, was for the wrong format. My review copy of Test Drive Unlimited 2 – as you can probably tell from the review artwork above – was supplied for the PS3 and not – as requested – for the XBox 360. This was initially disappointing on two levels – the first being my previous experience with the series on the 360, the second being that most of my friends have XBoxes, so to really enjoy the social aspect of the game, I was hoping to encourage my friends to at least rent it for the weekend.
So I went into the game on a downer, and the beginning of the game was pretty ho-hum and I was ready to throw in the towel early on.
But I persevered. And was duly rewarded.
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We can be total idiots really. We do things that are so obviously silly, and then repeat over and over again. Playing a good survival horror, at night with the lights off and the headphones on is guaranteed to make adult diapers a gaming necessity. Dead Space 2 is such an intense experience that I couldn’t play it for more than an hour before I had to turn on the lights and fire up Viva Pinata – just to calm my frayed nerves.
Why did I don the headphones and turn out the lights when I knew Dead Space 2 was going to be so freaky? Because that’s just what you do with this genre of game. It’s designed to make you soil your pants, and that’s why we’ll keep coming back to the genre. We like to be scared shitless.
Despite this being Dead Space 2, it was my first outing as Isaac Clarke and my first experience with the nasty Necromorphs. I’d seen a few screen shots and been a little worried that this would be all hype and no substance. I needn’t have worried, because the visual presentation was fantastic and the Necromorphs, essentially a kind of alien/moster/zombie hybrid, are the perfect nightmare inducing enemy.
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Breach is a new FPS from Atomic which is available on Xbox Arcade. Its cheap and realtively quick to download, so how does the game stack up. The premise is fairly simple, Breach adds destructable environments as a key gameplay aspect to an already crowded FPS market. You can play
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The ability to record digital TV is nothing new, I’m just surprised that it’s taken so long to reach our consoles. I had been hopeful that with the arrival of the XBox 360, there would be the ability to record TV programs onto your hard-drive. But Microsoft had other plans for being the media center of your house. Then the PS3 came along and still nothing. It seemed like the two major players were content only to sell us content, rather than allowing us to harness the technology we had connected to our HD TV’s.
But then late last year Sony released Play TV for the PS3. I admit I totally dropped the ball on this one. I didn’t realise what it was, foolishly thinking it was something along the lines of eye toy. That and I was caught up in all the hoopla over Move and Kinect.
Once I realised what Play TV was however, I had to have one.
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