LEGO Indiana Jones

Un des premiers jouets je suis devenu hanté avec car un enfant étaient LEGOs. J'avais l'habitude d'avoir une tonne métrique de eux. J'ai eu l'espace LEGOs, le château médiéval LEGOs de première génération, et le Technics LEGOs. J'avais l'habitude de sauver chaque penny de mon allocation ainsi je pourrais obtenir le prochain ensemble. I en conclusion, à contrecoeur, a donné ma collection de Lego à mes nièces et neveux. Même aujourd'hui, je trouvaille moi-même vérifiant les nouveaux ensembles. Lisez plus

Discutez cet article dans les forum - (1) poteaux

La conspiration de Bourne de Robert Ludlum

Si vous aimez des récits à suspense d'espion, les chances sont toi ont probablement entendu parler de Robert Ludlum Bourne romans, rendus populaires avec les adaptations de Hollywood tenant le premier rôle Damon mat comme Jason Bourne. The well choreographed and brutal hand-to-hand combat portrayed was the hallmark of the films, and game publisher Sierra and developer High Moon Studios have done a excellent job capturing that adrenaline-filled action, almost to the point where you feel like you’re recreating scenes from the movie. Read more

Grand Theft Auto IV

I really wanted to hate Grand Theft Auto IV.

I had decided not to buy it early in its hype-cycle. “Fool me twice, shame on me” was my attitude. I had bought Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City because of the glowing reviews from just about everyone, but I found them tiresome, sophomoric, morally bankrupt and — worst of all — not much fun to play. I fully expected GTA IV to be more of the same. When our Editor-in-Chief informed me he was sending it my way, I prepared for the worst.

The worst didn’t happen. I don’t hate this game, even though it has things about it — many things — that are hateful. It is, in some ways, like two separate games sandwiched onto a single disc. One of those games is the sophomoric, hard to control, ponderous and boring festival of reloaded missions that I remembered from previous editions. But the other game is a brilliantly scripted, lovingly realized analysis of the American dream in general, and New York City in particular.

The writing, dialogue, and acting in this game are beyond superb. That in itself makes the game impossible to hate. That the writers so effectively persuade players to sympathize with the characters, including the player’s sociopathic Eastern European avatar, speaks volumes. And the most important character, of course, is New York City itself. No one who has spent any time in Brooklyn, Queens, or Manhattan can fail to be stunned at how effectively Rockstar has distilled these boroughs to their essences: making them navigable in reasonable game time, while still preserving their character.

Little, it should be noted, has changed about the core gameplay, and when you drift away from the script, the game deadens and ossifies. The sensitivity and subtle humor of the spoken-word aspects of the game only serve to widen the chasm between the script’s high quality and the visual game’s penis-joke mentality. Apart from the missions, there is precious little to do in Liberty City if you aren’t interested in mayhem or exploitation.

The save system, as in previous games, is ponderous. A mistake late in a mission can force you to replay it from the beginning, including the pointless and boring drive from your house to where the action is. It’s as if the game is begging you to stop playing it and find something more fun to do, such as playing Mario Kart.

GTA IV is a seriously flawed game with a split-personality. The sandbox portion of the game presents a false choice between being bored or engaging in brutality. The game’s setting and screenwriting, however, contain moments of great insight and beauty. If you can accept the moral ambiguity of choosing to play a game that presents murder as inevitable and acceptable, then you will find parts of GTA IV to be entrancing.

I don’t hate GTA IV. But I still don’t want anyone to watch me play it.

On the Rain-Slick Precepice of Darkness

If you’re a fan of Penny Arcade (and who isn’t?) you’ll buy this game no matter what I say about it, so I’ll keep this short and to the point: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is $20 well-spent. It plays as a sort of mixture between the Telltale adventure games and a less pretentious Final Fantasy game with characters that aren’t big-haired, androgynous, and pouty. The user interface can be a bit hit-or-miss but the game makes up for it by being extremely forgiving.

The plot opens with the protagonist’s house being destroyed by a gigantic robot whose purpose in life is to sexually molest fruit. You give chase, and soon encounter a large number of smaller robots (keep some oranges handy to distract them!), mimes, hobos, and other assorted enemies. You’ll also become an associate of the alter-egos of the creators of Penny Arcade, Tycho and Gabe. With some assistance from Tycho’s girl-genius niece, Anne-Claire, you’ll upgrade your weapons, find clues, and uncover new areas in which to go forth and issue beatings.

It’s a short game, but in this case I think that’s a vice, and not a virtue. The writing, riddled with in-jokes, is merely serviceable, but the art direction and animation are superb. At its best, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness comes close to giving you the feeling of being in a Penny Arcade comic strip. God help us all.

Army of Two

There was a lot of hype surrounding Army of Two, so I was pretty excited when it finally came out.  After watching a lot of the trailers and commercials, and then actually playing the game, I can assure you that this is just one of far too many examples of how style and hype can supersede substance and quality.  

The story follows the adventures of Salem and Rios, two ex-Army Rangers-turned-mercenaries hired to do the government’s dirty work.  As you go on missions and complete your objectives, you receive cash rewards so you can pimp out your armory.  As you start following the “story,” you soon discover that someone within your organization is trying to sell you out.  Shocker!

There are some good gameplay concepts.  One example is that if you’re too wounded to fight, you can be dragged away to safety by your partner while you provide covering fire till he takes you to cover so he can heal you.  Another is the simultaneous snipe, which you and your partner can do to take out one or two targets at exactly the same time.  You can also give your partner help in overcoming obstacles, like giving him a boost to get over a wall or by pulling him up out of a hole.  The biggest element of note is the aggro system.  It’s much like a typical MMO, except the bigger a threat you are, the more aggro you generate, attracting more fire towards you, which frees up your partner to flank them and take them out.  The biggest problem I ran into playing co-op with the computer AI, however, is that when you order him to generate aggro, he does it for about five seconds, thus leaving you exposed in an open area as you try to maneuver for position, thus having to have your partner come in to drag your sorry butt back to safety.  And of course you can praise your character by giving him a high-five, or if he does something stupid you can give him a backhand across the face.  Not very useful for the game itself, but you can get a kick at smacking the crap out of your partner.

As a tactical shooter, I couldn’t say it’s even sub-par; the computer AI is horrible, both for your partner or the enemies.  I had enemies run right past me or my partner and neither would take a shot.  What the heck?!  And then I’m starting to wonder who’s the better shot.  It seems the terrorists were trained at the Marine Corps Sniper School.  When I run and gun, I couldn’t hit the broadside of the bus.  The only way to effectively take out your targets is doing a precision aim and taking a head shot.  In all, the gameplay is unbalanced and extremely frustrating. The game’s only saving grace is that it has some decent graphics.

In the end, Army of Two attempts to capture the magic of Gears of War or any of the Tom Clancy games - and falls way short.  As a multi-player, I’m sure that Army of Two would have been decent, but I have to admit that I didn’t get that far.  This game left me so bitter that I didn’t even bother trying to play its online co-op features.  Do yourself a favor, go pick up Rainbow Six: Vegas 2; or better yet, wait for Gears of War 2.

Team Fortress 2

I have a simple mission.  Jump out the window without getting shot, land without breaking a leg.  After that I need to swim under the enemy bridge and find my way into the sewer system spilling from their base.  Finally, after I’ve made sure the basement is clear of people that want to kill me, I need to setup shop with defenses, a dispenser and, most importantly, a teleporter.  If all goes well I should be done with this in about 30 seconds, and the filthy Blu base will be teeming with my compatriots.

Team Fortress 2 ships as an integral part of the Valve’s Orange Box, and I can safely say that TF2 is worth the price of admission alone.  I would even go so far as to conclude that some of you will never make it past TF2, since I know it gripped me for over two weeks before I finally shook my head about and looked at what else was in the ‘Box.  TF2 is that good, and if you were looking for a team-based shooter to wean you off BF2142 this is your ticket.

Taking everything a FPS gamer loves and ditching the boring in-between stuff, TF2 is multi-player gaming distilled into the purist form possible.  Throwing game types out the door, Valve stuck to the tried and true “capture and hold” game play mechanics that made the original Team Fortress an overnight success.  Players pick a side, pick a class and jump straight into capturing and defending points.  It’s a simple formula that works.

The class-based system seems to be fairly balanced.  Heavy hitting classes are less agile than their lighter brethren, and the special classes such as medics and engineers can easily turn the tide of a tug of war match.  Like many class-based titles, Team Fortress 2 provides players with a number of different playing styles to suit individual taste.  You can sneak around as a spy or zerg-rush as a scout.  Pyros, demos and heavys all pack a serious punch, and snipers can head-shot players from across the map.  Regardless of which class you select, the developers have gone to extra length to make abilities and weapons very intuitive.

Like many of the games based on Valve’s Half Life 2 engine, TF2 scales very well.  I had no problem playing the game on any of the test machines in our lab, and I was extremely pleased by the 200+ FPS I achieved on our SLI test-bed.  With a little anti-aliasing and motion blurs, the cartoonish graphics (think Incredibles) of TF2 come off as a tasty chunk of high-polished eye candy.  

Team Fortress 2’s blend of fast paced, class-based action is a shining slice of the Orange Box, and I would have happily paid full price just to play it.  Couple that with the solid gameplay of HL:E2 and the stellar, if not short, performance by Portal, and you have a collection that belongs in any gamer’s library.  I play UT3 as well, but it hasn’t stopped me from coming back to Team Fortress 2.  If you’ve got a fairly recent PC with a real video card, do yourself a favor and Steam (or buy retail, caveman) a copy of The Orange Box.  I look forward to sappin’ your dispenser!

Assassin’s Creed

From my perch on the highest point of the synagogue, all of Jerusalem stretches out in front of me.

This is an experience that I shared with the protagonist of Assassin’s Creed countless times while I reviewed it.  Before we dive into stories and gameplay and graphics, it’s a point I want to make as clear as the developer made it to me:  Assassin’s Creed is a technically astounding game.  The sheer size of the world, and the eagle-eye view from which players take it in, is easily worth the price of the title.  If you’re thinking of picking up the game on the 360 (I reviewed the PC version), I can see it being an excellent reason to buy a monster TV as well.

As you might have guessed, Assassin’s Creed is the story of an assassin.  While that would normally be enough to pull in the gamer love, Ubisoft went the extra mile to create a story that combines both the present day and the time of the Crusades in the cradle of civilization.  I’ll not spoil the plot for our readers, suffice to say that the story didn’t appear as usual to be slapped in at the last minute by a motley group of drunk developers.

The title falls into no genre, although we imagine that Assassin’s Creed must have been meticulously cross-bred from the likes of Splinter Cell, the Grand Theft Auto series, and Heavenly Sword.  Players find themselves slinking around a large realm, making contacts with allied ne’er-do-wells and learning more about each of the nine targets the game presents for assassination.

Players are given a choice to avoid guards and ruffians with a small arsenal of sneaking techniques, or throw caution to the wind and kill every obstacle in their path.  Do you want to sneak up on your mark and dispatch him with a hidden blade, or are you feeling lucky?  Why not waltz right into his sanctuary, in front of 10 guards, and draw your blade?  Assassin’s Creed let’s you decide, and though we found stealth assassination to be more “in character”, it was a blast to usher on your opponents and leave no man standing.

The game thrusts players into the combat system when an overly anxious guard spots you or you cause a disruption in a crowd.  Galloping through a group of jar-carrying peasants will do it, as will jumping on the roof in the presence of guards.  Regardless of how it happens, once the combat system is tripped the player has two choices: fight or flight.

The combat system is a combination of swashbuckling and Jujitsu, and players deciding to shed blood are given an arsenal of fighting techniques that makes a field of dead soldiers seem commonplace.  Swords and the occasional lunge can be countered with deadly blows, all presented in theatrical angles that look great and stamp the ESRB rating M all over the landscape.

If bloodshed’s not your cup of tea, you can also bolt like the sissy-coward you probably are.  To make a clean getaway, however, takes more than skills of the foot.  Players must first break line-of-site with their pursuers, then blend into the city through a variety of hidy-holes and busy crowds.  As fun as the combat is, the real action takes place in flight.  There’s no better cardio workout than running across the roofs of Bethlehem like some sort of crazed circus performer, and I’m talking about your heart racing, not the assassin’s.

Each assassination bring players closer to unraveling the overlying plot, which spills out in modern day throughout the game.  More importantly, perhaps, is that each dead boss increases your arsenal of weapons as well as your combat repertoire.  As players approach the end sequence, they’ll have a somewhat overwhelming series of options as to how to accomplish each mission.  At the end of the day, however, these options are what make the title worth playing. In fact, the one option you don’t have is passing up this game.

Assassin’s Creed is all of the good things we’ve enjoyed in action-based sandbox games, with a measure of stealth thrown in for taste.  The immersive landscape and killer combat systems make for a great game, and the only thing to complain about (which I didn’t, I might add) was the occasional minor PC camera issues that source from the game’s origin on a console.  If you’ve got a copy of Steam running, or just want to run to Wal-Mart today, pick up Assassin’s Creed and burn up a weekend or two.  Never mind the mess afterwards, the peasants will clean it up.

Hail to the Chief: Halo 3

A letter from the Managing Editor:

Dear Readers,

I wish to extend to you my most sincere apology for the amount of time it took to get this review to you. Because of my gross violation of one of the Gamer’s Commandments (”Thou shalt save a lot, save often”), I was forced to replay approximately six hours of Halo 3. It was an innocent mistake; I had paused the game and went downstairs, when my oldest daughter decided that it would be okay for her to take the game out of the Xbox 360 to play Guitar Hero II. My scream could be heard in three counties.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, on with the review.

I don’t consider Halo 3 to be the world’s greatest first-person shooter. As an FPS it’s excellent, but arguably there’s a dozen others that can top it, especially on a PC. One of the reasons that Halo 3 series is great, however, is its well written back story. You find yourself set immediately after the events of Halo 2. Master Chief and the remains of Earth’s forces along with your new allies, the Elites lead by the Arbiter, head out to stop the Covenant from activating the remaining Halos. I won’t go into any more details about the story. It’s definitely worth the effort of playing the game in order to get closure on many of the questions you may have had from the previous two games.

All of the basic game mechanics have remained the same with some excellent new additions. First, there’s the introduction of some great new weapons, such as the Spiker. They’re the Covenant equivalent of the sub-machine guns, and if you can dual-wield them, they’re devastating. Another new weapon is the Spartan Laser Cannon. You can also literally take weapons that are normally mounted and use them as handhelds, such as mini-guns, flame throwers, or plasma cannons. There’s also a host of new vehicles such as the Mongoose, which is basically a fast moving ATV that you can either drive or sit in back to shoot, and the Hornet, a Human version of the Covenant Banshee. There’s a bunch of vehicles that you’ll get to experience as you play, many of which are not documented in the game manual. Halo 3 also introduces the concept of deployable equipment. By pressing the X button, you can deploy items such as the Bubble Shield, which will stop weapons and explosives but can be walked through. Others include Power Drain, Regenerators, Trip Mines, and Deployable Cover.

One of Halo’s strong points has always been its multi-player modes. One of the major updates in Halo 3 is the new co-op mode. With Halo 2, you could play the entire game with another player, but in Halo 3, you can now have up to four players. To top it off, your teammates can play with you over Xbox Live, so you don’t have to crowd three other guys on the couch for split screen mode. I also enjoyed the level of customization available now. You can change which weapons you start with, which weapons you can pick up on the map, the speed of the game, or how much gravity can be on the map (I love low-grav maps!).

One of the most interesting modes is Forge, which essentially allows you and other players to manipulate certain aspects of existing multi-player maps on the fly, mainly moving objects and changing their characteristics. Each map has a “credit” limit, with each object having a set credit amount, so you won’t be able to put sixteen tanks on a single map (though that would be really fun). On top of all that, you can save your Forge creations and share them via Bungie’s new file sharing system. Players can now send files to other players that are online via Xbox Live, or you can send them to Bungie’s central file storage server where you can share them with the entire Halo 3 community if you wish. You can also upload screen shots and saved films as well. Each Xbox Live Gold member gets 25 MBs of diskspace across 6 save slots, with additional space and slots available if you choose to use your Microsoft Points.

Sound and graphic-wise, Halo 3 is impressive. Frame rates are smooth, with lots of nice dynamic lighting and effects you’ve come to expect from the Xbox 360. The soundtrack is also very familiar, but nonetheless appropriate, for each of the environments you’ll experience. You’ll also get the usual good voice cast making their return, from Cortana to Sergeant Major Johnson. The funnest things to listen to are the exchanges you’ll hear between other characters, such as an exchange between one Marine behind a blast door pleading with another marine who insists on asking for the password. It’s worth an extra minute or so to listen to the hilarity that ensues.

Bungie and Microsoft have scored another home run with Halo 3. With the enhancements to its multi-player features and the community it’s building with the new file sharing capabilities, packaged together with its great story and gameplay, it will leave you no doubt why some consider the Halo series one of the most successful game franchises in history. You’ll now have to spend the next couple of years wondering when the Master Chief will be back, and what threat to humanity he’ll have to save us from next. In the mean time, Halo 3 will be able to fill that void for quite a while.

Ecco the Dolphin [Retrograde]

There’s a wave of nostalgia – pun intended – when loading Ecco the Dolphin for the first time. It’s been fourteen years since this charming swim-em-up enthralled Genesis/Mega Drive gamers across the world. Released under the banner of the Sega Vintage Collection, Ecco the Dolphin is a welcome inclusion to a growing range of titles perfectly pitched to a generation who grew up with Sega, myself included. For me, this was the game which prompted the purchase of a Mega Drive all those years ago.

For those of you who missed it the first time round, the story goes like this: Ecco is a happy-go-lucky dolphin until the day a mysterious whirlwind rips his pod and most oceanic life from the seas. Alone, the young dolphin must travels the seas, explore the past and even travel to another world to rescue his family. He must find an ancient whale, battle alien denizens and the sentient ancestor of life itself before going one-on-one with an alien queen. Powerful stuff, eh?

For the most part, time has treated Ecco well. While the graphics and music are true to the Genesis incarnation, it’s a shame to have to say that for this re-release the graphics were not at least upscaled. Like Sonic, the game is played against a blue border, and modern HD TV’s manage to make each pixel painfully clear. This is the kind of game where you don’t sit too close to the screen, but it is still well worth purchasing.

Ecco remains one of the best examples of mid-nineties gaming. The plot is strong, and the levels are a genuine challenge. The XBLA incarnation even offers the ability to save the game, mid-level, a blessing to anyone who had to try and remember the passwords the first time round. Like most ports to the 360, Ecco comes with Achievements, although in this department, they are painfully lacking and oddly random, from completing the Undercaves to finding hidden statues left over from the original game in Jurassic Beach. However, playing Ecco is not about Achievements, and anyone who does unlock one is bound to be more interested in their ocean adventures than in a few measly points. Where else do you get the chance to explore Atlantis, travel through time, and listen to the song of the ocean?

Ecco’s biggest pull is with its previous audience. Given that, I’m pretty sure it won’t be too long until more Genesis titles including the even more gorgeous sequel hit Live Arcade. If you remember Ecco then this will be gaming heaven, and if you don’t, it’s high time you tried this true unsung classic.

The Orange Box: Portal

I watched Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey recently. I always thought that HAL simply wasn’t creative enough in his plans to eliminate the humans. HAL had a massive amount of control over the environment on the Discovery One and could have just turned off the heaters, or blown all the airlocks, or filled Discovery One with battery acid. Thankfully, GLaDOS (the Aperture Science, Inc. Artificial Intelligence) does not have or exercise such control.

At heart, Portal is a plot driven puzzle game where the protagonist Chell wakes in a rat maze that seems to have gotten all stylistic cues from the original smooth white iPod and iMac line. The portal gun itself would make Steve Jobs proud, both for its clean white style and intuitive usability. Styling aside, Chell needs to make her way through various courses designed to test the effectiveness of her handheld portal creation device. The portal gun is a delightfully simple device: Point at a wall, hit the left trigger, and you have a blue portal. Point at another wall, hit the right trigger, and an orange portal appears. In a twist of physics and quantum mechanics that would leave a Trekkie muttering something about Heisenberg Compensators, the two portals are connected, twisting gravity and space in their wake. Think Wiley Coyote and ACME’s portable hole. Chell can now move objects or herself from place to place via the portals while maintaining their speed. The possibilities here are endless. I’m still trying to find a way to fling myself over 300 feet across a chasm in real life. Motivated only by promises of a fantastic slice of cake and grief counseling, Chell must use her portal gun and wits to escape various deadly acid pits, flaming infernos, and crushings by weighted companion cubes.

My only complaint with the gameplay was that I couldn’t fire a new portal through an existing one. Perhaps that would have made the game too easy, but the thought of pseudo-recursive portals tickled my fancy. The levels are engaging and challenging, and the humor delightfully deadpan. For a puzzle game, a surprising amount of timing and reflex are required. A few challenges had me on the edge of my seat with an elevated heartbeat. Will I time this jump correctly? Will the energy ball make it into the door control before the blast door closes? I thoroughly enjoyed the gameplay, and I would have loved it if the rat-maze levels were about twice as long.

Valve constantly impresses me with their ability to tie in various titles to a larger world and story line. Throughout Portal, references to Black Mesa abound, and while the ending is somewhat akin to a Resident Evil climax, I was left wondering if GLaDOS would have been a helpful companion in the conflict between humanity and The Combine. I lay awake at night dreaming of the day that Gordon Freeman has the portal gun as part of his arsenal for battling The Combine. Dropping cubes on Combine troops, or even dropping troops on other troops, or building hallways of infinitely falling Zombies: Valve has me drooling at the possibilities. That, and I can’t wait for my very own Weighted Companion Cube desktop toy.

Next Page »