As the title says I'll posting be short reviews of video games I have been playing, purchased, or have just read about online. Anyone is free to contribute and they don't have to talk about new release games, reviews of great old games are very welcome. Random gaming discussions, computer problems, comments hardware are welcome to. Coming soon in a thread near you a review of "Defcon: Everybody Dies". Expect it tomorrow while I am procrastinating at work.
Well, it took me longer than I expected but real lif got in the way, here goes. ----Defcon: Everybody Dies---- Defcon, the game of global thermonuclear war that until recently was available via download purchase from steam but I managed to pick up a store copy for $20 AUD after much trouble*. The basic premise... The world has gone to shit, the cold war has become boiling hot and all out nuclear war is just a matter of time**. The player takes the role of a general in a bunker coordinating the military of a world superpower (North America, the UK, Soviet Russia, Africa etc. but not Australia) There is no way to win this game, only to minimise your losses while maximising the amount of nuclear fire your rain done upon you enemies***. Maybe you can lose the least. http://www.everybody-dies.com/screenshots/screenshot4.jpg Did I mention you get to fire nuclear weapons at your foes and not just one either; you have a arsenal of around 120. Right so the basic setup of the game is a 1980's war movie blue-light backlit world map and everything is real-time*** controlled via the mouse and keyboard. The game starts at defcon 1 with the clock ticking towards defcon 2 and in this initial stage it is necessary for the player to deploy their ground (radar towers, silos and airfields) and fleets of sea units (battleships, carriers and submarines) before defcon 3 rolls around. At this point, defcon 3, sea units and fighters from airfields and carriers are now authorised to fire on the oppositions forces. During defcon 3-4 players fight for the upper-hand in the seas and to defend their coasts, ground installations and airspace. Its normally quite helpful to sneak fleets of submarines, each of which carries 5 medium range nuclear warheads, up to the enemies coast at this point. Eventually defcon 5 rolls around. The use of nuclear weapons is now authorised and the waiting game begins. Up until this point silo's have only played a role in the game as air defense but now you are free to fire the ten long range nuclear missiles each contains, there is a "but'' though. Firing those missiles means that they are not defending your airspace, it takes 120 seconds to do so and a further 340 seconds or so to be back in anti-air mode. Timing is everything, you need to wait for the opportune moment in which you can maximise the damage you can do to the cities in your enemies territory will minimising yours. Nuclear medium and short range nuclear weapons on your submarines and bombers (from airfields and carriers) allow you to apply pressure without leaving your own cities without air defense and potentially forcing a opponent to prematurely fire off there nukes, which can allow you to cripple their silo's before they can defend themselves and their cities. http://www.everybody-dies.com/screenshots/screenshot1.jpg It is a bit like a morbid game of chess where timing is everything. Aesthetically nukes leaves coloured trajectory line and a a white blast over a city when it impacts which is represented by a dot of which the size is indicative of population. The games sounds off which city is hit and text display the number of dead civilians (in the millions) above the city. The cities name and population pops up when the mouse cursor is held over it; Moscow, New York, London and Tokyo they are all there. Ground, air and sea units are represented by 2D wireframes on the world map, which can be seen better by zooming in. http://www.everybody-dies.com/screenshots/screenshot3.jpg The matter of fact way in which the game tells you that millions of people are dead make the whole process of events rather emotive, as you the people of the world dying as simple statistics, and once everyone starts firing nukes, then the world lights up with mushrooms of nuclear fire over each city and you see just how screwed over the world would be in the event of global thermonuclear war. This feeling is only made stronger by the games soundtrack; a sweeping epic ochestrical piece of music perfectly fitting in with the theme of the game. Until nukes start hitting cities and ever so faintly in the background the you can coughing, sobbing, choking and then silence. Disturbing stuff. And then the game ends about 1 hr after defcon 5 is declared, you dead civilians tallied against the civilians you have killed and the nukes you have fired. Nobody wins, everyone is screwed but you can lose the least. The game has multiple other modes; office, speed and epic to name a few where the game quits to the screensaver when you hit escape (I think), the timer is set at 20x speed or you have double the amount of units respectively. I give the game :smile::smile::smile::smile: out of five :smile:'s, it is definitely different and very fun. A demo video of what I am talking about can be seen on youtube here(YouTube - DEFCON) and the website for the game is here (DEFCON - Introversion software). The system spec's are nothing special all, almost any modern computer could run it. Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, P3-600, Geforce 2, 128MB RAM, 60MB Hard Disk space and a net connection for multiplayer games. * I had to wait on the store clerk "Mark" to finish a personal call, have the clerk intentionally attempt to charge me double the price and the bastard didn't put the disk in the case. Normally I wouldn't have bothered but I really really wanted the game. Karma and possibly the store manager will get him, I just name one of the AI's "The Marks". ** About 25 minutes. *** Everyone else, although you can make alliances in multiplayer games. **** At one of four speeds. From 1x to 20x speed. Notes: I shamelessly stole the screenshots from online and I did not make the video on youtube. Credit where credit is due and I take none for these images or video.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback The third installment in the Soldier of Fortune franchise, the first not developed by Raven Software and the first published on the Activision Value label, as opposed to Activision proper. Oh, if only I had heeded that niggling little voice. "What of this new developer?" it said. "Why are they publishing it on Value?" it said. Soldier of Fortune had possibly the most detailed 'hit map' in a first person shooter ever seen. If you shot one of the digital bad guys in the abdomen, you saw a very graphic depiction of a gutshot. If you shot one in the throat, you saw a very graphic depiction of a throat wound. The game pits you as John Mullins, mercenary for hire. To get a realistic feel of mercenary life, the developers hired a consultant, real life 'soldier of fortune' John Mullins. ... Funny that. Soldier of Fortune II used a revised version of the G.H.O.U.L. engine developed by Raven software for the original game. While it offered sharper graphics for the time, it actually lost some of the detail of the original. Instead of seeing identifiable organs in your target after a shotgun blast to the lower abdomen, you now just saw red. lots of it. gooey, gushing, spraying, oozing red. In SoF2 you reprise your role as John Mullins, shooting people for various reasons. I think there may have been a biochemical terrorist plot at some point... and I'm pretty sure there was a double cross within your organization, 'The Shop', but I never played it that far. Soldier of Fortune: Payback... Shoot someone in the throat, and they clutch their throat. Shoot them in the crotch and they grab their crotch. You got a bit of a blood spray when you hit someone, and you could dismember bodies by hitting them in the right spot. This was nothing new, in earlier games a sniper bullet into the knee would blow the lower leg free from the rest of the person. Only, in Payback you'd sometimes shoot them in the chest and their arms and head would blow off and go flying god knows where. The graphics show the console origins of this game. There's an attempt at creating a depth of field illusion. Particularly when you reload, the distance becomes much more fuzzy while your gun is precise, sharp, and clear. I have to praise the gun models. Most of them looked good. The actual gameworld wasn't bad, but it felt a bit 'fuzzy' in general. They did a good job of disguising that with a Bloom factor that probably gave me a bit of a tan. Bloom is the console game's answer to a graphics experience that will never quite equal even a mid range PC. In a PC game, a mild bloom effect makes the outdoors feel more vibrant and alive. In my experience with console games that use Bloom, it just overwhitens every damn thing until you wonder if wearing sunglasses in doors would make you look like even more of a dork. I'm not a big fan of Bloom, but until nVidia make a card that can run anti-aliasing AND high dynamic range lighting at the same time AND make the card affordable, I'm sticking with the AA set to max and a tiny taste of bloom - just enough to add zest. The character models weren't fantastic. They werent great, but lets face it, Half Life 2 should be showing its age by now - only it isn't. It's still the best looking FPS there is, and the fact that some games can't even equal a three year old product is just sad. Sad for the wannabees, that is. The bad guys were functional, they ran, they shot, they grabed at their wounds very convincingly. The voice acting? The voice acting was so awful, even by the standards for cheap, crappy video games, that I found myself embarassed to play the game when Grace was in the room. The writing was even worse. Racist, moronic, and a plot with holes the size of exit wounds in the previous games in this series. And don't think that makes an excuse for the voice actors! Sure, you can only do so much with bad dialog. Look at Mark Hammil or Harrison Ford (for the examples of how to suffer from and overcome bad diaglogue, respectively). Okay, so, we're starting off in an arabic town that might be north africa, might be middle east... Now we're double crossed... Now we're in china, because they're bad guys too... now we're in what looks to be afghanistan.... now we're facing some of the most attrociously sterotyped and prejudiced characterization you can find outside of republican party supporters discussing hillary clinton. At this point, i quit playing the game for a while and went to find some bizzare, quasi-legal german porn, just because I had to try and acclimate myself. Jumping straight from the game into 'normal, decent society' would have given me a serious case of whatever equivalent emotional maturity has for the bends. So, okay, we're done in afghanistan? Now we have to try and shoot down a black guy who's called 'The Moor' who's in a helicopter. With an assault rifle. Maybe I didn't mention that yet. You have 'boss fights' in this game. You can kill three arabs at once with a shotgun at close range, but you can unload four hundred rounds from a squad support machine gun into a 'boss' character without even slowing them down. How's that for emersion and realism? Right, shoot down the helicopter, only i dont think it got shot down, it just exploded and the moor says he'll get you next time, inspector gadget, or something like that. Now we're off to africa, because there are evil black men in the world as well as evil brown men! the moor has surely proven this! So we go to africa to liberate some slaves from their evil black oppressors (or something, i wasn't paying much attention at this point), but also to rescue (possibly) an IRA weapons maker who's now an international terrorist and going to help some other unknown organization build a nuclear biological chemical something or other bomb. Just like the IRA used to back in the 80's, yeah? So, the IRA bomb guy escapes with his brother, and you have to try and track him down. Somehow, fuck the plot, there's no way this makes sense, somehow despite him getting away completely and you having no trace, your contact in a brothel in eastern europe can put you in touch with the new bad guys. Who, although they're irish, have a humorous tendancy to slip into a californian accent mid sentence. So, onto the brothel in eastern europe. First we get the sexual inuendo with all the subtlety and sex appeal of a cinder block to the face, then we get to start shooting our way through the place. Only, the guards are using some kind of super shotgun that kills you in one hit. Nevermind that the same weapon has been available to you most of the game, and it's modestly effective in certain situations, in the hands of a bad guy it's got the range and accuracy of a laser beam with the stopping power of ... well, i can't even think of a comparison. It just kills you stone dead. Reload, try it again, skipping the tacky prostitute bit. I had to fire a grenade launcher around a corner to get past the first guards. Only, okay, maybe its not that common in a FPS, but you can't do blind fire in this game. When I say i had to shoot around the corner, I mean i had to stand far enough back form the corner to fire at an angle and hit a wall opposite me. I was lucky to hit close enough to kill the shotgun gods looming just out of sight. Blast your way through the brothel, and then you have to go down into the garage. This was actually worth playing, surprisingly. The whole level was tense, well paced, and quite tricky to get through. Had the voice acting been better, it might have been great. Had the plot not insisted on applying itself, it would have been great. See, IRA bomber guy is throwing wave after wave of badguy at you. Remember that great scene in the matrix when they stormed the building and had the big shootout in the lobby? the scene that ALMOST makes up for the next two movies? You've got big concrete pillars in this garage level, and it feels a bit like a matrix homage at some points. It's also genuinely scary when someone comes driving around a corner in a SUV that then explodes as it crashes behind you. Dodge it but stay too close and you're still dead. I got lucky to survive it. It actually felt quite gripping. Then we come to the boss fight of the level. We're in an underground garage, or warehouse judging by the look of the final room, when the lights go out. When they come back, it's red emergency lighting, rotating at a creepy pace. You now have to hunt down the mad irishman armed with a super grenade launcher (like the super shotguns earlier, but a grenade launcher, so its worse) that never needs reloading or runs out of ammo. before the fight kicks off, he mentions that its too late, he's already given his brother 'the device'. for fuck's sake, they couldn't even be bothered to name their half assed mcguffin that didn't even exist until half way through what, for lack of any suitable way to textually convey the sensation of forcibling vomiting and defecating at once, must be called a plot. So the stupid ridiculous boss fight requires that I hose the whole place down with hundreds of rounds from a big big machien gun, and I still don't know how I won because I certainly didn't hit him that often. I think maybe the game just had a timer going - survive for more than 90 seconds and you win! fantastic. Now we're on to the other mad irishman, the bomb makers brother. only now, there's just the slightest hint that you've got another reason to hate this guy, a reason that's never been suggested, as you didn't even know who he was back when you had to invade africa. So, this guy hangs out at a disco club. Go in and find him. This level plays a bit like the one before, lots of guards, lots of shotguns with a better range than your sniper rifle, and lots of funky lighting. only now its just annoying, because its poorly rendered in the game and what should be 'light' is actually just 'solid opacity'. fucking bloom. fucking cheap ass shitty game. So, through more luck and judicious use of grenades than skill you can bomb your way through this bomb of a level, to meet up with the mad irishman at the top of the club who has some sort of device, possibly a bomb. Maybe one of those typical IRA nuclear bomb type thingies that we heard about earlier. A small cutscene plays, you saying how this is going to be your revenge for what he did to your best pal or something, and him saying bring it on then, and the scene ends with him suddenly pulling a pistol on you; you, for god knows what reason, then look behind you as if he'd only pointed and you fell for that 'look behind you!' trick. there's a faint sound of a gunshot, and then... nothing. you're half way across the room, he's nowhere in sight, and then it transpires that he's got a super shotgun with rapid fire mode and you have to try and kill him in not one but TWO shitty stupid bossfights. I'm reminded now to cover the sound in the game. craptastick. with a silencer on, you can't hear your own shots. with it off, you kind of can, only every gun sounds just alike. enemy gunshots can't be heard if they're further away than about 30 feet, and just sound like a faint version of yours if they're any closer. well at least we can rule 'sound effects' off from our list of possible suspects as to where they spent all the development money. So, okay, to finish up the plot, we fight through two stupid shitty bossfights, we kill the mad irishman twice. now we go pick up his briefcase, and then you get smacked in the head by the woman who was your contact in the brothel earlier. you're fully conscious as she walks off with the briefcase, only, because it would ruin the 'story', you can't move. then suddenly you black out. or maybe my monitor died, i don't know. the game concludes with an intercepted audio of a conference call between 'the moor', the chick who just coldcocked you, and someone who is 'unknown'. it indicates that there is an intended sequel with MORE racism, bad acting, and inadequate gameplay. The whole game would take only a few hours to play through if not for childishly pathetic boss fights and suddenly ridiculous difficulty hikes. You can't try to play through in a cunning, clever, steahtly way. No, you HAVE to shoot every arab or black man in sight until they explode in bizzare ways. Otherwise you just can't move on to the next railroaded plot point. They're going to make a sequel to this? As the credits rolled past and I pounded furiously on my keyboard to make them go away, the only thing that kept me from memorizing the names of those responsible and hunting them down for my own "payback" was the tears blinding my sight. On the official "we're professional game reviewers so you should buy advertising space on our site and buy the games we tell you to buy, which also happen to be the ones we advertise" scoring system, the one that starts at 70%, I give this game a steaming pile of turds with a few rotten eggs stuck on top. Call it 73%.
Lemmings Lemmings rocks so much that my 67 year-old mother plays it daily, for several hours, over and over again. So that must mean that either the game rocks or my mother sucks. Oh.
Incidentally, Defcon is fantastic, but you have to let it connect to the internet or it goes spastic. SoF: Payback is the same way, actually, though i can't fathom why as it has a clearly 'single player' mode. Defcon is designed as multiplayer, though you can play against AI opponents. Since this 'multi' aspect was fundamental to it, the game will constantly be trying to find internet access while you play. If you disable it at the firewall, the game just hogs resources while it tries to get through. On even a decent system, that dinky little (fantastic, by the way) game can suck up 99% of your system resources. The lesson we learn? Let the game go online. It won't give out your credit card details or spend all day looking at porn.
Jetpac from 'Imagine - play the game' for the ZX Spectrum. Awesome game in the early eighties. Wasn't able to go on line with it though... Oh...me poor old back and failing eyesight etc. etc.:wink: R.
Spider Solitaire For full player value you must choose the Hard four suit version otherwise you will complete this game too quickly. The four suit version has only a limited number of ways that is can be solved and as the basic goal of this game is to waste as much work time as possible the four suit version is the most successful in this task. The basic play is fairly standard with only a single player mode and the cards are randomly dealt. The goal is to get from King to Ace all of the same suit while you can only swap cards in numerical order. Swapping doesn't need to be by suit but the solution is suit specific. You can play with sound although this will make you want to slit your wrists after the first hour of playing so I recommend that this function is disabled. However, the big disappointment with this game is that although regular solitaire has fireworks that explode across the screen when you complete the game successfully Spider Solitaire merely asks you if you want to play again. As I have spent nearly 3 hours completing this game being asked if I want to play again is just an incitement to further procrastination. Besides after spending all of that time solving the damn thing I think I'm due a few fireworks. I give Spider Solitaire:
Could the gaming system be included with the description? I've played several games on PS2 after having the title recommended to me only to find out that the PS2 version sucks, but that I should have played the computer version. Edit: I don't need to know what gaming system to play Spider Solitaire. I know that one is X-box 360. ;-)
Cool stuff. Incidentally, Pepster, I think you have the DEFCONs the wrong way around? I'm pretty sure DEFCON 1 is the highest state of alert, and DEFCON 5 is normal peacetime readiness.
Maybe it is just your version. What OS are you running XP or Vista? The version on my work PC and laptop both running XP has fireworks:tongue: That is a good idea, Defcon is to my knowledge available only on PC. Incidentally, the reverse applies Firewarrior on PC is atrocious however it is rather good on PS2* (until about 3/4's through the game where you find out that have to grind through another 5 levels of the same crap). * It was a PS2 port to PC. That is correct, I will have to fix that later. You know I usually just keep count of them in my head as they come up. --- Coming Soon Pepster investigates buying a next gen console (Wii)
I've heard the Wii is a novelty item great for children and girls*, but doesn't have the finess for seasoned gamers. Basically you can just wave the stick any old way and it will still do what you want. *Hahaha women you cannot play games it is a mans sport like hunting and fire /Sexism
That depends on the game - a rule of thumb being that most non-Nintendo made games don't utilise the Wiimote correctly resulting in random stick waggling, whereas Nintendo actually give some thought to making the most of their own console, so you do need to be quite specific in the majority of cases. A good example being Archery in the Olympics game, which is a bugger to learn, but so satisfying once you start getting good shots, but then if you don't pay attention (or twitch) you are back to square one. By the way, if you want some non-standard but hilarious video-game reviews, try this guy (note: Includes swearing, not work safe unless you have a hidden corner and headphones)
I've never played the Wii personallly. (Also, I've never played it impersonally, in fact, you could just say i've never played it) by story is based on an account where my friend was playing with a 11 year old. And he would learn to make the correct movements while the child would just wave any old way and do just as well. To me fair my friend is prone to bullshitting in stories, so it may not be that bad.
Sounds like a classic case of losing to a child and then trying to excuse yourself from the ignominy. Personally, I would have lied and said that I had crushed the child into a bloody pulp and cooked him into a curry. But that's just personal preference, some people don't like spicy food.
Oh, so you mean the child would have to be over 3. In that case, he could also beat him with his superior mastery of the bladder. And probably his resistance to alcohol too.
I've heard that to, however in terms of a console I see the Playstation 3 & Xbox 360 as more of the same with better graphics. Which can be great, buts its nothing special. To be honest it is the gameplay that matters not the graphics; besides there is a major problem with this approach: The closer you get to photo real graphics the more wrong they look. The Heavy rain tech demo is a pretty decent example of this, near photo realisic graphics but it comes off slightly creepy.The concept The Wii however is something completely different, focusing on gameplay over graphics. Which in my opinion is the way to go. As to the motion controls of the Wii; they tend to be a hit or a miss and it is not surprising that the first years 3rd party games have not used them aswell as Nintendo 1st party games. Resident evil 4 for the Wii is another good example, it has a excellent control scheme that makes well use of the Wii remote as a pointer. Metroid Prime 3 is also another good example of this, and the sword fighting in No More Hero's seems to be done extremely well. I can't see that happening either. --- Part 1/3 of my discussion of the Wii will be coming soon, and a review of the PC game Galactic Civilizations 2 is upcoming.
