Introduction:Game of the Year, Game of the Year; I kept hearing this title bestowed upon this game. I however had never played this supposedly superior gaming selection. When the game showed up on Steam, and was on sale for $2.50, I told myself. “Even if it fails at being great, it should be $2.50 good.” With that I bought it. To say I irked out $2.50 out of a game I spent over 12 hours completing is a little bit of an understatement. I beat it on either normal or hard.

Now, I find that my reviews tend to be more like designer documents, commenting on what works, and what doesn’t about many different aspects of the game. Therefore they often contain spoilers. You have been warned.

SPOILER ALERT

Story:

I know there is a story to this game, but it is impossible for me to tell you exactly what it was. It has startling complexity, with many different organizations and terrorist groups exerting their influence on the game's world. The main plot however revolves around JC Denton, one of the first augmented humans. Augmented in the sense that rather than mechanical advantages by implants; these humans have nanotechnology in their body that can change to fit the environmental need seemingly at will. JC Denton begins his journey working for UNATCO, which is a company that is seemingly bent on stopping terrorism. Their adversary is the terrorist group NSF.

The first few missions of the game have the story following this basic line, but soon many more companies are introduced, alliances broken, and characters added. The story is written like a novel and doesn’t seem toned down at all for the gaming audience. In a way this is very good, it fills the world with lore beyond what might be seen through one playthrough. Information on the story can be obtained through a number of ways, newspapers, data pads and NPC's conversations. The story lore, while usually not needed for playing the game, fill in expansive backstory. For example, while I initially read many of the newspapers throughout the game, I soon found out they were not mission critical at all. Therefore, similar to the Bioshock recordings, I either chose to ignore them with minimal loss in gameplay or quickly skim over them.

In my opinion, the plot becomes very deep quickly. Keeping track of one terrorist group was easy enough, but then having Majestic 12, FEMA, VersaLife, and a number of other protagonists: Bob Page, Tracer Kong, etc. quickly left me confused. Not to mention, stopping during the adventure and coming back later on left myself trying to remember why I’m being contact by one of these many beings. The basic premise of what I was doing at each mission seemed simple enough, download this, infiltrate that, but I didn't connect with the multitude of characters. Too many names, not sure why I should do things for any of them. This caused me to not want to stop playing the story aspect, as I didn't feel a driving force besides the gameplay itself. Those who are deeply entrenched with the story may enjoy following the complexities and subtleties of the plot, but I was not so drawn in. I'm still not sure why some things happened. Luckily, the augmentations granted later help break up the confusion with changing gameplay by which to entertain, but it doesn’t make the story more captivating.

Choices:

The storyline is linearly based, yet one of the game's best attributes in the choices the player can make. There is enough semblance of choice so that the player may play through the story again to see other choices, such as one would do for dialogue trees in Mass Effect. Of course, there are also more substantial changes depending on the player’s actions than just another voice clip. For example, big spoiler here, JC can either save his brother from dying or not, doing so yields not much difference in the conclusion of the game, but does allow for the brother to pop up at various points past that event, offering reflection on his survival. The developers have done the story well too, so that when the brother does stay alive and show up, his locations and speech do not seem out of place. It feels like an actual plot changing possibility. This felt much better than Mass Effect, where Shepard had to choose which one of his allies would stay to die on the planet to detonate a nuke. In that game, the ultimate conclusion has no large effects at all, just the loss of a teammate, and dialogue right after the event, though not sprinkled through the rest of the plot. In both game examples provided though, the outcome is still negligible.

The early portion of the game is a testament to choice. In fact, it is a shame that the developers were not able to carry through the rest of the game with how well designed the first few levels were in their ability to give the player a sense of control over the actual objectives. In the later game, JC is forced to complete objectives to advance the plot. Not so in the beginning. When I played through the statue of liberty level, I never rescued one of my fellow agents, and I killed the terrorist leader against orders. To my surprise, my boss later rebuked me for doing both, deducting my pay on the missions. If I did everything correct on the mission, my boss might still debunk me for entering the women’s bathroom back at headquarters. These events impressed me greatly. “Wow”, I told myself, even some recent games don’t pay attention to those little details. The second level has much of the same, I never found the ambrosia shipment I was supposed to find, and I killed a bunch of hostages in the subway. The game recorded those things, with the boss further angry at my inability to perform my mission objectives. These things seem minor, but I loved my sense of choice. Even little details were not completely overlooked, Walton Simons, who is one of the main antagonists, tells the player to buggeroff when he is interrogating some hostages at the UNATCO headquarters. If the player chooses not to, Walton Simons will comment on that fact near the end of the game. It is rare in FPS to feel as though my actions or even inactions have influences that decide details, however minor, to the overall construct of the storyline.

Like I mentioned though, these choices quickly drop off, and is one of the reasons I became more “bored” with the game as I progressed. Later on, my ability to change the plot was minimal, and I felt like most of my choices to affect the story had been extinguished in the early game.

Note, choosing to kill or not kill people is a “choice” but is not something I would consider more compelling in Deus Ex compared to every other game out there. The consequence of killing most characters is about the same as if I chose to smash a crate open or not. Like Oblivion, the game won’t let you kill mission critical NPCs which makes for discordant thoughts of the strength of the human body when it remains standing after coming in contact with a rocket. Interestingly, the game suggests not killing everyone. The player is granted non-lethal weapons, and almost every enemy can be subdued without killing them. Sadly, there are only a couple portions of the game where NPCs actually comment on sparing lives, and they all occur within the golden 1/3 of the game, filled with its many actual choices.

On that note, there is one portion of the game where the killing of usually mission critical personal IS allowed. This part, where Anna Nevera, one of UNATCO’s fellow mechanically enhanced humans, is holding an NSF leader at gunpoint, seemed one of the biggest morally unguided portions of the game to me. Similar to skipping mission objectives, the game doesn’t tell the player that they can kill her, but you can. This is amazing, and really gives the player that final sense of control, before the game begins to run mostly in autopilot. If you choose not to kill her there, probably because, like me, you didn’t know (or were too weak to do it) you will have the chance to kill her at a later time. Sadly, at this later time, despite the fact you can glitch your way around not killing her, the game forces you into the position of killing her. If you happen to glitch past her she will not make another appearance, and the game plays as though she died.

Not all choices were well designed, I was especially disappointed by the ending to this game and the choices available there. The endings mattered little on JC’s compounded actions through the game, and indeed he could choose an ending as easily as flipping a couple switches. JC chooses who he wishes to ally with by just following their advice on the very last stage. I chose an ending by accident, Everett’s advice, unaware that I was beating the game with those actions. Also, Deus EX does not allow JC to side with Bob Page, the “evil” antagonist, who I would think that in a supposedly free choice adventure like this, would atleast be an outcome. Who cares if he’s evil, I want the choice!

GUI:

The GUI also takes inspiration from traditional RPGs by allowing a quick selection of items, available at the bottom of the screen, and on the side. Augmentations are highlighted on the right side of the screen when activated, using the F# keys. Up to 9 inventory items are hotkeyable using the number keys. These items can be specified to items on the inventory screen. It is also possible to activate Augmentations through one’s inventory scene, but I never used the feature, and seemed to be there for those who like to micromanage every second of their bioenergy.

An interesting innovation for Deus Ex that I have not seen in any game that have succeeded it is location based damage that affects the player’s abilities. For example, losing the player’s legs prevents them from jumping or moving quickly. (The game says that agents in the field will be terminated if they lose both legs, but this doesn’t happen. Instead, if you cannot get a healing item and lost both legs, you will probably have to restart the game.) There is no explicit total health bar. A wireframe, similar to Starcraft’s, of the player on the left side of the play screen shows the conditions of each body part, from a healthy green glow, to a dangerous red. If the player’s torso fails, the player will die regardless of the conditions of the rest of his body; Important to consider, as radiation and electrical sparks usually target that portion of the body. This GUI element also houses the bioenergy meter and a useful compass.

Besides NPCs giving out information by mouth, there are also datapads, and newspapers. The game does not force the player to “read” any of these things. In fact the developers made it quite easy to access data pads, just to have the vital bits recorded to the player’s Conversation/Log menu. The player’s Conversation/Log tab under his inventory is perhaps the best feature of Deus Ex, for without it, the game would have required a pen and pencil and, to tell you the truth, I would not have completed the game. There are just too many login codes, passwords, and conversations to keep track of, not all are necessarily needed to complete the mission objectives either. Players can delete notes, which I never did, or they can add their own. The ability to add the player’s own notes was a nice feature, but one that I didn’t really need for anything, since the game does a fine job chronologically storing notes. Perhaps good for those who dropped items in a location and wished to note to themselves where the items were. It is too bad that there were more sorting features of the logs, such as sorting by passwords only, or user-created notes, but even without this navigating them wasn’t too much of a pain. The most vital and recent notes were usually at the top, and rarely were notes used from missions besides the current one.

Besides adding notes by oneself, players can also tag points of interest collected images. While cool for a military strategy game, or an RTS, I found it to be of limited use. Tagging people’s pictures? Eh? Facebook in 2000? This is not to say I dislike the feature of being able to tag images; I enjoy anything developers do to increase a players freedom without clutter. The issue is more that the game doesn’t give out images that are useful to be tagged, or the system isn’t robust enough. The images provided by the NPCs in most cases were either self-explanatory, or were maps of greatly varying usefulness. I could see the need to tag where personnel were on the map, but I felt this was more work than should be required. The game lacks an auto-map, which I think was a mistake. In the futuristic setting of Deus Ex, I would think that atleast constant top-down satellite footage would be available to a nano-augmented human, not just helicopter snapshots, and video hacked from a building’s camera. I can’t draw on the provided maps either like Myth or Alien Swarm, so charting paths is cumbersome.

Furthermore, since maps for all locations were not provided I ended up getting lost when navigating to places that I am told to explore. Following good design practices, the developers added landmarks, but this necessity could have been suppressed more with a proper map system. A player-self tagging system would even have been a useful ally. Tag where enemy are on the map to avoid them, or atleast tag where the player is currently.

When the player goes up to a computer terminal, they have a login screen. Assuming their hacking skill is trained, they are also able to hack the device. Hacking is boring. The player hits the hack button, waits a standard amount of time depending on their training level, and they are into the system. The continually dwindling countdown timer shows the remainder of the hack time and terminal access. If the terminal access time through the hack is exceeded, the player’s bioenergy will be drained completely. Improving the hack skill supposedly increases the time until lockout, but I usually had enough time to do everything the terminal provided in the time I had left. The only exception was the reading of e-mails, which usually contained nothing vital to the mission. If they did had something of importance, my log would contain it later. Therefore, the whole computer hacking, accessing, bit of Deus Ex feels empty.

Timesplitters: Future Perfect had an interesting take on computer access, complete with a mini-OS and that felt more active and full-fledged, despite being used only on a single level of that particular game. Besides hacking being un-interactive, it is also somewhat required. Without it the game forces you to find login information laying around, and this could be anywhere on the level. It is much easier to just spend a couple skillpoints into that basic hacking which lets the player do almost everything the terminal or computer provides, the absence being player controlled turrets. Furthermore, the game seemed against typing in the user-names and passwords since, despite them being in your log, you cannot access both the terminal and your logs at once. This forces you to depend ultimately on your memory, or a handy piece of paper. It would have been greatly appreciated if the developers had provided a screen where the compilation of login information could be accessed on the terminal screen. Alternatively, the hacking should be instantaneous as JC already HAS the information needed to login, so why would hacking even require millions of test permutations?

Graphics:

It is unfair for me to judge the game’s graphics. For I played it with the assistance of a DirectX 10 renderer, which wasn’t even out when the game first was released.

However, since that renderer did not change the character models, nor textures, nor style, I can still comment on those fronts. From what I have seen of other games during the same year, and the years before it. It seems that Deus Ex was slightly behind the graphical curve. Luckily, I feel this hasn't affected the game too much, as it seems to accomplish everything it wanted to do with the graphics it had.

I felt the game’s graphics were surprisingly good. There isn’t any bump mapping, or advanced shadowing and lighting, but the game still holds up. Textures have fine details on them when viewed up close, such as the interlaced bands of a television monitor, or the graininess of a wall. The textures are so good, that they even seem to surpass some modern games. Sticking my face onto a wall in more recent games will often confront me with a muddled cloud of color, baked lighting and an overall lack of detail. But in Deus Ex, even in close proximity the details keep their composure for the most part. This does not hold true for the textures on the character models, which do appear blurry and remind me of N64 games. But atleast for the world that JC explores, the textures never put me off as low quality for the time. I must give credit to the new renderer though, since I’m sure atmospheric filtering did help in warding off such blurriness at long distances. When textures are viewed up close, I think my comparison is fair, where the filtering is limited in its usefulness.

Deus Ex takes a somewhat cubist approach to both level design and character model. The world is not made of completely right angles, Chamfer and sloping do exist, but are not used to eliminate the look of blocks completely. The game carries off this style of blocks surprisingly well in the architecture of buildings, which are usually squares anyways, it is the various objects in the world that feel low quality. For example, a basketball in the game looks more like a oblong diamond than a round ball. Furthermore, Characters have rows of teeth that are squares, fingers are cubes (ala The Sims), and water coolers are pointy. These thankfully do not detract from the world too much, since the texturing is capable enough of adding details where the polygonal rendering could not. Yet, rounded edges will be pleasant to your eyes when you leave the game.

When Half Life 2 was still in production, I talked with some of my fellow co-workers about it. One was extremely hyped about the game, saying that players would be able to destroy walls with rockets, anywhere they want to create a path. When I played Half Life 2 I was disappointed to find out this was not so. The world was sterile and the only objects that were destroyable were bottles, cardboard boxes, and specially pre-programmed events. Sadly, 2001’s Red Faction had a more truthful realization of a player pathing their way with destruction. Playing Deus Ex, I found another gem of world destruction. Unlike Red Faction, you can’t blow holes in walls, but the game has many other things to blow up, both for strategic or nefarious purposes. For examples, to proceed through a locked door, forget having to pick it, or find a key, just attach a LAM explosive to the door and bust it open. Nearly every door, besides mission crucial ones, can be removed via this design, and it allowed the player another sense of charting ones path.

Besides doors, various other objects can be disposed of. Chicken hanging in Hong Kong not your type of beef? Smash it. Boxes in your both, dematerialize them. Glass windows? Gone. The player can also destroy bodies. This is for those people who are moving over from Quake, and wish to destroy their fallen enemies’ corpses for their masochistic ways. I suppose it will also prevent guards from finding bodies, but given the stupid AI, I never tried it. Whenever an object that is destroyable is hit, it will turn a darker shade of gray, until it becomes black and explodes. This is a simple, but effective mechanic of showing how much damage something receives. It also has the bonus of informing the player if their attacks are doing any damage, since unlike doors, objects do not have apparent heal meters, and it isn’t until the player is strong enough that their attack may do any damage at all.

Gameplay:

Deus Ex is all about choices, or a semblance of choice. Choices of who lives and who dies, and choices of how to carry out mission objectives. Do you plan on sneaking your way past the guards, or would you rather kill them all? But how would you kill them? Would you dispatch them with their own turrets, move up close for a crowbar to the back of the head, or might I interest you in a fine sniper rifle with that? There are many ways to do things and this is the game’s biggest draw. When I played through the game I choose to have JC specialize in Melee weapons and pistols. I would sneak up to people and bash their bones to make my pleasure but if that failed, I could shoot my pistol to finish the job. However, it was gun combat that showed a major weakness in the game’s formula.

Guns are not accurate. JC must not move so that he can aim properly. While this may make sense for some of the larger weapons, such as the sniper rifle, it doesn’t feel correct for small arms like the pistol. Furthermore, even if JC stands extremely still, and the crosshair focuses to its maximum extent, showing maximum accuracy, the game will still not make it a perfect shot. Consequently Deus Ex is not a run and gun game. Any attempt to do this will usually result in the enemy having the upper hand (atleast until JC receives augmentations). Even towards the end of the game, when I had maxed my pistol’s abilities with upgrades; a laser pointer, increased range and more. I could still not use it as one would in Counterstrike, running and shooting. Sadly, this lowers the “choice” element described forcing the player to adopt a crouch, go, repeat. Thankfully melee was unscathed in design. A hit is a hit, and there is less of a dice roll of getting a shot off that kills.

The game is an RPG, and so consequently, JC has skills that he can build up and specialize in. As I mentioned before there are melee and pistol skills, but there are also heavy weapons, computer hacking, and many more. Skill points are earned through progressing through the story and discovering locations, so the game doesn’t force the player to kill people. Except that, having killed so many people, or atleast knocking them out, I was not rewarded for my skills at all, so I’m not exactly sure why they are “skill” points. One would assume that I would become more skillful from use of my pistol. Instead, I can visit a hotel and magically know how to use it better. I would have wished for some “reward” for my hands on-ness. I guess that the developers did not want the players that took the forceful, rather than stealth, approach to be rewarded too quickly by grinding their skill points. Through this way, the allocation system is somewhat of a weakness, though it does increase the player’s ability versatility, choosing to perhaps specialize in another secondary skill without putting effort into directly training it.

Because the game does not force, though it does hint, the player to play a certain way, the developers had to accommodate paths for the unskilled. This was another neat addition to the game. For example, there are generally two or more paths through any situation. One path may have the player, strong in swimming, swim through underground piping to infiltrate an area. The other may force the player to fight more enemies directly. Similarly, some paths may involve disabling security systems or traps, which those who are unskilled in demolitions or computers would have problems bypassing. They can however, take the front door and liquefy some people though. I like the choice of the paths given by the developers, they kept things fresh, but did add some confusion. I would traverse one path only to go down one of the other skill tree specialized routes, and end back where I started, losing time and more resources than needed. A minor plaint, which’s benefits outweigh the annoyance. You know, if I had that auto-updating map, or even a mini-map though, the backtracking by accident would probably have happened less often.

Weapons:

Deus Ex has a couple different weapon types, but not too many varieties as one would expect in an RPG. I.E. One sniper rifle found is the only sniper rifle found. There are two pistols types, and one machine gun. Etc. The weapon selection that does have the most variety are the melee weapons, probably due to their inability to be upgraded. Due to the limited weapon types, they have some special features that other FPS do not have.

For one, in the essence of an RPG, the weapons can be updated with state modifiers, but as I mentioned they didn’t seem to make a big different to me. (They will not make this a pure FPS no matter how many upgrades for weapons are procured.) A weapon’s range determines how close an enemy has to be to “target” them with the ridicule for increased accuracy. The bullets will travel large distances even without proper targeting though the chances of hitting the target are slim to none. There are also upgrades to decrease reload time, no Gear of War-esque action key to speed reload. In addition, the weapon’s capacity for bullets can be upgraded, for times when one does feel like having a firefight. As far as I could tell, weapon damage was determined by skills, and not by upgrades.

The player may also choose to change the ammo type in the weapon. If a robot chooses to clank on by, the player could load up some Sabot bullets in their shotgun, while traditional bullets would be just fine for the normal troops. For the tranquilizer crossbow there are also some different dart types some to knockout, some to light up the area etc. These different bullet types are an interesting touch, but most players will probably only use different ammo types when they run out of the former.

Inventory management captured the essence of the likes of Resident Evil 4, or Dungeon Siege, where the items picked up through the adventure take up a limited space in the inventory. Since there are not too many items in the world of use the non-expandable inventory is usually sufficient. Also, picking up more of the same item stacks them, allowing one to magically carry 5 cans of soda, but perhaps not have room for a pick lock. Not all the items in the game make sense for the space they occupy. Lockpicks are bigger than soda cans and pistols, and a beam sword acquired through the adventure, which lights up like a lightsaber when equipped, still takes up space in the inventory as though the sword were ignited the entire time. The inventory is also highly simplified, one cannot rotate objects to make them fit better. Thankfully, this is usually not required, I only once remember needing to move objects around to fit another item. Instead, I have qualms, not with the inventory system, but the item pickup system.

See, to get items off dead bodies, you need only to right click on their body and JC will strip search them of all their goodies. Unlike most RPGs, no inventory dialogue box comes up, and it keeps the pacing fast like a traditional shooter. Unfortunately, it means I pick up every knife I find, even though I’ve ditched the last 5. I’ve kept my inventory full to avoid this annoyance. Cannot pickup knife? THANK YOU. Here’s a tip to all you developers out there. It makes sense to automatically pick up items that the player already has. He is carrying around 5 sodas? Add another, if it stacks no problem. He is loaded out with this one type of ammo, obviously he is using it, so give him some more. For these situations, no problem, screw the dialogue box. But for everything else, it is probably wise to bring up some choice of the player if they want that item or not. If they do want everything, there can be a take all button, like Morrowind. Having to drop the same items till the end of time is ridiculous, especially since I must open the inventory, and then find suitable space on the ground to drop the item.

Augmentation:

The Crysis before Crysis was released, a spiritual predecessor. You want super strength? Get “Combat Strength” and bash open doors, and pop people’s skulls with your melee armament. You want to Jump high? Get “Speed Enhancement”. To get these though, JC must find the Augmentation containers around a level and then install them using a medical bot. They can be further upgraded using upgrade augmentation containers, though these do not require the use of a medical bot. I found it odd why a medical bot was needed for one and not the other. The game makes it seem like the upgrade containers contain more efficient firmware, so to speak, and so are easily integrateable, but I personally think they should have been installed through the medical bot also. I spent some time trying to find out why my upgrade augmentation containers were not showing up as available to install on the medical bot screen until I realized you could just install them through the inventory. I think the game could have made this clearer, and atleast go with “logic”.

Augmentations are the game’s bread and butter. Without this, I might have stopped playing it halfway through. However, I wanted to see what other augmentations I would find, and turn myself in the super-human I was supposed to be. And let me tell you, once you get enough of the augmentations going, JC is truly a killing machine. He can destroy missiles in mid-air, see in the dark and through walls, he can dispatch a tiny investigative prob, he can pick up huge objects and more. I felt a bit like Neo from the Matrix will all the special abilities, and it was better than some Matrix games out there. Many augmentations can be chosen and activated at once. The augmentations come in pairs, two per container, though only one can be permanently chosen, the other lost permanently, so the player must investment wisely. Using Augmentations requires bio-energy. Bioenergy can be recharged using bio-cells scattered around a level. These are useless at the game’s start, but at the end, they are more precious than health packs, since the player can heal quickly with an augmentation later in the game. This bioenergy teaches conservation, though spurred by intensity, often used it all up quickly, leaving myself with boring, weak and slow JC.

AI

The AI is average to retarded, in the strictly psychological sense. The enemies care little for cover and seem to have primarily three modes of function. Patrol; where the enemy will follow its programmed walking and exploring path, Attack; where the enemy will fire at you, and if out of range, will run to find you, and retreat; where the enemy will run defenselessly from you. Patrol is under the map maker’s direct hand, and the patrol routes on most of the levels are good, the enemies do not get stuck, and are made to give JC possibilities to get into position to attack or sneak by. Attack is where the poorness arrives in a black van with tinted windows. The enemy will fire and strafe you until you leave their sight. The next part is the predictability. They will then usually rush your position allowing you to predict where they will come from. Either that, or they tend to roam around the level helplessly, where you may find them later, wondering how they got there. Worse, the enemies seem to forget where you went very easily. You just need to run behind a shipping crate and crouch out the way, and they will quickly give up. “I guess it was just my imagination.” Really trooper # 467? The intruder alarm could still be blaring and the enemy will just go back to standing around normally.

Storytime! On one level I was hiding in a basement area. I crept up a floor to find a bunch of guards standing around, upon seeing me they started to rush around and fire their weapons. I retreated into my cave. Some of the enemies chose to charge headfirst. Due to their numbers they could overcome me, but that was about their only strategic advantage. This also made laying traps, and throwing out explosives quite effective. After I dealt with the attackers, I went back up a floor, and found that to “look for me” some of the enemies had run up another level of the building. They then began to rush down to attack. Sometimes, to gain the advantage against the enemy, it is as simple as hiding behind some boxes and taking pot shots.

Considering that this game was made in 2000, I shouldn’t assume that AI technology would impress me much, except this is the kind of behavior I’ve seen in 1990s games. As for the AI’s retreating, they will do this when they have taken a nearly fatal amount of damage. They will drop their gun and run off. I assume that they will never turn back to killing you, since they appear to go stand in corners, but I’ve never let one live to find out.

The AI of the robots is superior to the humans, but this is a byproduct of them not having to prove their sentience, and they be superiority tactically equipped. A huge robot has no need to charge you and so will keep on its patrol route, dealing fatal damage if you choose to rush it.

Sound:

Sound for this game is below average, but the voice acting is definitely better than average. Every character interaction is voice acted, which beats out some RPGs, such as Morrowind; which only had partial voice acting. Most different characters have uniqe speaking lines too, so two civilians would say diverse things instead of being cookie cutters of each other. No overflow of Nolan North here. Considering there are so many characters to voice act, that is another detail that makes Deus Ex noteworthy. Furthermore, even for the year 2000, the voices do not sound like they are being spoken into a microphone, and are clearly pronounced. However, unlike Chronicles of Riddick, there are not too many witty lines to go around for the Guards. Throughout the entirety of the game, the guards will have bored you with their repetitious responses to your presence. However, this is overlookable for quality of the non-guard lines.

At some point in the game JC will come to Hong Kong. Other reviews of this game have said that the accents for the characters sound extremely fake. For one character I must definitely agree on this mark, the newspaper lady sounds like she is trying too hard, but for the rest their voices and tone didn’t distract me enough to remove me from the setting. I assumed that due to the futuristic setting, with meat marts lying next to multi-billion dollar corps, that the little shops selling flowers and other useless items are a front, and guise to the true be-hind the scenes actions going on in the city. For that reason, it would make sense that the accents all sound fake. The game may not state this specifically, but I’ll just take it like that. It also supports why there would be so much police action in the area, and the freedom of the rival gangs in the area.

Sounds were a bit meeeeeh. The game is good with audio indicators of various actions: shutting down of augmentations, a sound for when the key chain works (So you don’t try and hit the key ring over and over), a sound to let the player know when a camera is about to spot them, the sounds of a turret swinging about to shoot at the player, BUT, some sounds are horrible. Picking up a wooden chair or grate and throwing it to the ground sounds like a wooden toy that a child would use. This is also a problem for other pickup-able objects, and strike actions. For knives, hitting a window and breaking it sounds quite good, with the tinkling of glass on the ground, but a knife hitting an unbreakable glass barrier results in what sound like smacking a metal grating under water. Why? I must hate the knife all around because another sound it makes is like a whip. Now I haven’t stabbed anybody in real life, but I can tell you it would be more squish than “woop-ish”. I can understand there not being 5 sounds for each action, since memory was more scarce in 2000, but I think the sounds that were chosen could have been less tinker-tonk.

Music was good with some reservations on its execution. The theme of the game, the one that plays on the title menu, doesn’t play much of a part in the initial levels, but it shows up boisterously and mixes itself with level action themes later on through the game, which I thought was kind of cool. That way it wasn’t all up in the player’s face like in Chronicles of Riddick. However, a method by which Riddick’s was superior was its dramatic-ques. For Deus Ex, sometimes the slightest enemy provocation will cause the action variant of the soundtrack to go blaring through the speakers. Get seen by a camera, even with no apparent danger? Action Theme. One weak guard sees you? Action Theme. It switches on too quickly. It doesn’t seem want to want to cooperate with the existing soundtrack, deciding to barge in and raid the metaphorical ear fridge. On Riddick’s front the action music sort of fades in, and was a subset of the level’s theme. While it also had the tendency to jump on, it felt more graceful. There shouldn’t be a technological excuse between the games for this, seems like a styling problem on Deus Ex’s end.

As for non-action oriented music, it was usually very atmospheric. There was an emphasis on the darkness of the setting, such as New York’s night scenes, or dankness of subways and caves, playing downbeat tunes. These worked well. I also liked the Hong Kong theme, which made it very obvious when one was in the bustling city sector, though it, and the party scenes, were perhaps the most obvious and easily noted soundtracks. (Action themes withholding)

Conclusion:

Deus Ex is a first person shooter/RPG hybrid with more focus on the Rolepaying aspects than a traditional first person shooter. It has a complicated plot which may scare off those who are looking for movie-style cinematic first person shooting experience. Also, the game’s length is more detrimental than advantageous, as the player is whisked off to locations that seem to drag the plot out. However, the game is exceptionally good in its sense of player choice, allowing multiple entry routes and solutions to puzzles. While the player’s choice in the main story arc is limited to a few choice opportunities, these opportunities stand out from other games in the genre as having noticeable changes in the storytelling, though not the conclusion. Sadly, the multitude of these choices happen within the first third of the game. Voices are good nevertheless sound barely squeaks by as acceptable in some situations. Music fits the emotions of the game, but breaks it too quickly for action encounters. The user interface is intuitive and gives the player the ability to be a detective with notetaking and image collection, though the use of paper maps for a player worth over a billion dollars makes the governmental bodies seem like idiots. Overall, I would recommend this game for those who like a story, and also wish to experience a game that allows the player to specialize in their own skillset and still succeed.

Misc:

The save games for this game are HUGE. I saved over 200 times, granted, but I wasn’t expecting my save games folder to top 3.64GB. That’s larger than the entirety of the game which is 2.4GB. Couldn’t they have used form sort of compression mechanism for save games? A little bit of extra load time wouldn’t be too concerning, especially since in 2000, there is no way that 3.64GB would be small change when harddrives were about 60GB at that time. I compressed my Save Games Folder using the Best RAR compression scheme and it gave it a 1/3 compression ratio, which while not perfect, is still much better.

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by Zott820

Do note this song is not impressive by todays standards or my hundreds of dollars in sound equipment. The bass is a little tinnier than it should be but I remember this song coming out of my Performa while I did my pre-game dance. After the first minute of the song, there is a transition into a more industrial theme. This was usually the song which played while I was creating/editing my starting town. I'm spent sooo many hours creating cities and unleashing disasters as well as building

At 2:53, this is the music I believe plays when a newspaper headline appears or the game prompts you with a llama related joke as was the style at the time. Will Wright loves his llamas. He failed by not creating a llama in Spore or at least have them as the number one downloaded character. The rest of the song shows off the other musical pieces from the game.

Sim City 2000 Remix Vs Original DOS version

Let's continue on to a remix of this main theme. Here's what the Sim City 2000 main theme would sound like in a modern game. Then compare with the inferior PC/DOS version:

To wrap this up, enjoy a YouTube user's Sim City 2000 theme on piano. His piano sounds retro enough to make me feel like its coming from my mac while the sound quality is crisp enough to know it's a real piano. Following up is the PSX version I use as my phone ringtone. It is named Downtown Dance and can be downloaded here: http://downloads.khinsider.com/game-soundtracks/album/simcity-2000-psx-rip-

I already told you I used to dance to this music so hopefully you don't see me dancing down the street to my own phone:

Sim City 2000 Intro Video

Updated to Include Easter Egg Music
I've added the secret easter egg music from Sim City 4. You can hear it from the ice cream truck driving around your city. There is also the secret Sim City 2000 theme hidden within Sim City 3000 hidden as the SC2KBUG.XA file. The next question is does Sim City Societies have throwback music?

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by BlueZero

Ok, so the first Starcraft is all about corrupt Terran forces (the humans) killing each other in the name of harvesting resources from other planets. So the criminals create mechs and other toys to do battle for control. There is always a ruling class, here the Confederency founded by criminals. Arcturus Mengsk creates a type of gurilla/terrorist group to overthrow this government. Our main man Raynor joins forces because he didn't like being arrested for shooting up an infested terran command center.

Enter the Zerg who are a formabile force and the Terrans are badly weakened. Arcturus Mengsk uses the Psi emitters to draw the Zerg to planets like a terrorist weapon to wipe out the opposing Terran forces of the Confederacy. The Protoss are the garbage men of the universe and totally Ion Cannon the planets with the gathering Zerg, causing human causalties in the process.Raynor starts to feel upset about using the Zerg for genocide and sees Mengsk leave his girlfriend Kerrigan behind on a planet to die. Raynor says "Oh no you didn't" and leaves Mengsk. Arcturus Mengsk becomes the new ruler and keeps the status quo of corruption.

Fast forward to the Zerg campaign where Kerrigan becomes uber powerful and infested. She does major work on behalf of the Zerg Overmind, who ends up discovering the Protross homeworld and decides to stop by for a visit. The Overmind embeds itself to the surface like the video to this page. The Protoss discover dark energy is the only way to destroy Zerg Cerebrates (the commanding officers). The Protoss leaders defy their Conclave's (Ruling Leadership Body) as well as their religion by seeking out the Dark Protoss on behalf of the honorable Tassadar.

Tassadar is one of the few Protoss who understands the Zerg will wipe their race out unless quick action is taken. Instead, the Protoss race bickers with itself and totally needs additional pylons. Tassadar leads the group, including the now allied Raynor, to the Dark Protoss area and becomes further enlightened. Skipping ahead beyond the Protoss civil war, Tassadar and Co. discover if they kill enough Cerebrates with their dark energy, then they temporarly disrupt the Overminds control. During this time, Tassadar infuses his giant ship with dark energy and suicide rams the Overmind.

The Overmind totally gets knifed in the back and disolves into a void in the sky, effectively dead. The Protoss world is a mess from the battle and everyone is going to rebuild. Kerrigan disappears and Raynor still feels guilt. The story basically ends without much celebration and the expansion pack Brood War is filled with tons of deception by Kerrigan and Duran.


I turned down an early copy of Starcraft 2 because I am crazy and don't want to spend all morning playing the game when I have other responsibilities. Fear not as I will pick up the game Tuesday evening and am especially looking forward to the single player and custom map settings online. I can't wait for all my favorite Starcraft 1 custom map types to be updated with new graphics and gameplay complexity. Starcraft 2, here I come!

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by BlueZero

It's been a while since this years Anime Expo 2010 and I've been lazy to upload the pictures online. Anime Expo is the place to test your cosplaying skills against the best. Biased Video Gamer Blog was present to bear witness to the realm of intricate and last-minute costumes playing homage to favorite video games and anime/manga series.

I only attended the event on Saturday. My friends went on Friday and were able to get a lot more pictures. Please forgive me for not getting a ton of pictures since there were so many good cosplay costumes that I took pictures of my personal interests . Follow along with the easy to navigate categories and enjoy my brief costume battle for video game characters. The full gallery is at the bottom.

Video Game Cosplay:

Assassins Creed Altair and Ezio

The Ezio costume is immaculate. The attention to detail to impressive; the assassin's symbol is there along with the wrist daggers. The Altair is overshadowed by his descendant because the Ezio costume stole the show.

Kefka

Maniacal laughter and handheld theme music. I wasn't the one who took this picture but I can see how evil the Final Fantasy villain can be.

Nintendo Gathering

My Video Game Cosplay Battle:

Tira Vs. Zangief

This matchup can only be determined by sex appeal vs manliness.
I unfortunately did not get to encounter Tira but did run into the Zangief. The Tira costume looks authentic and the hulu hoop weapon doesn't look like it is made of cardboard.

Here, Zangief is confused by Pikachu. Earlier in the day, I heard he did his signature crotch pile-driver move with another person. Looking at his barely there costume, that would be very awkward for both people. Therefore, Tira wins because I can feel comfortable with her costume while I start sweating about Zangief pile-drivers.


Eggman (Dr. Robotnik) Vs. Brain Age Man (Dr. Ryuta Kawashima)

The ultimate showdown between two doctors. Eggman is a genius without a formal doctorate while the Brain Age doctor Kawashima can only lower your brain age down to age 20. So IQ of 300 compared with Brain Age of 20 years old. I'll have to say Dr. Eggman won because his shoes and red beard were close enough. Also Dr. Kawashima's head wasn't floaty enough.

Warcraft Character Vs. Giant Prinny

Two really tall and large costumed characters. The one on the left I believe is the winner of the Blizzcon costume contest from last year while the Prinny is an official costume from the developer booth (I think it was Atlas). I am not a fan of either series so I'll say the hand made Warcraft costume trumps the official Prinny costume. Either way, both were impressive.

Obligatory Team Fortress 2 Cosplay

Anime/Manga/Comics Character Cosplay:

One Piece

Power Rangers and Robots

It's too bad I didn't get a picture of the Red Power Ranger who started break dancing in the buyers hall. He was wearing a kind of bike helmet which allowed him to spin his body around using his head. We captured a short video and it will be uploaded soon. Kudos man, you could have taken on the expo security who shut you down and kept dancing.

Super Heroes and Villains

The other anime and manga is in the gallery since I am again not well versed in this realm.

Land of Chocolate and Fast Food Cosplay:

Everyone loves sweet and delicious food. Starting off is Count Chocula, creator of one of my favorite cereals. Next, we have an Oompa Loompa who somehow escaped from Wonka's factory. You know it is packing chocolate in its bag. Finally, we have the results of the fast food war. My picture came out a little blurry but Ronald McDonald is holding the King's head. He is joined by other favorites including Jack, the Panda from Panda Express, Colonel Sanders, Wendy and the Carl's Star. I have to agree the portrayal is accurate as Burger King died after stealing Ronald's breakfast recipies.

Bookmark this page and share it with your friends!

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by BlueZero

I had already written a written a review for the remade Butcher Bay campaign for Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena, but now, having played through the Dark Athena Campaign, I can finally complete my review of the full box offering. This review will focus on the single player campaign of Dark Athena. If you are interested in my other review, I suggest checking out my Riddick Butcher Bay Campaign review. Most of the mechanics from that review stay true to this one, IE weapon selection wheel, and fast loading times.

Storyline: The story takes place just after the events of Butcher Bay. Johns and Riddick are resting in stasis aboard their ship when they are grappled in by a pirate vessel, the Dark Athena. This begins Riddick's adventure to discover new characters and new places; relatively.

The first portion of the game is sort of a refresher of the game's mechanics being another tutorial/dream stage. Unlike the first game's tutorial, this one felt more individualized, in that it could have been its own little mini-story. It served to introduce the new Drone that Riddick would be facing for most of the game which are a bit different than the usual human fare as will be discussed later. Unfortunately, since the dream sequence effect was used in the first game, its use was not as original and surprising when the game cut to the actual storyline.

Dark Athena starts the game off quickly. Riddick finds the usage of guns from the arms of drones. While the first game eased the player into the use of hand-to-hand, and then transitioned to firearms, Dark Athena does the opposite. After being able to shoot a couple bullets from drone hand guns, Riddick obtains the ulaks from a guard for more personal fights through the bowls of the ship.

Along the way Riddick finds that there are prisoners on the ship, and somewhat similar to the lower level prisons in Butcher Bay, Riddick must talk to these characters, find out what they want, bring the item they request, and advance the story. Unlike Butcher Bay, there are fewer optional questions. This means that the story, which was linear anyways, has that linear-ness especially stuffed down the player's throat. This isn't to say it is bad, linear games are good at building a cinematic experience, but the experience for story in this game is a mixed bag to begin with.

These fetch-quests from the prisoners grow tiresome and annoying since there are about four of them in tandem. It is depressing to bring one items to someone only to be commanded to find another item for another person in jail, only to have them give you yet another quest.

Thankfully, the game keeps these "fetch" quests from getting boring by introducing more spaces on the Dark Athena to unlock and play around in. These areas are not poorly designed either, so this choice plot advancement and design could have been far worse. Sections where Riddick is forced to backtrack are usually repopulated with enemies to dispatch, and thankfully makes sense within the storyline; meaning the guards do not suddenly appear out of nowhere.

After completing the fetch quests Riddick is able to release the prisoners and escape from the Dark Athena. However, this is where the game should have ended. Most of the plot points were tied up as far as I was interested in them, and it didn’t feel like there needed to be more from the game. Sure, the little girl may have been stuck on a ship, but it wasn’t Riddick’s problem to begin with. But, ala Butcher Bay, when the game feels like it is going to end, it doesn’t. There is another whole chapter of the surface of a planet, which is devoted to just pure action. There really is little character development, and gameplay, while following the same Riddick mechanics, feels very different.

After the interlude on the planet, Riddick returns to the Dark Athena to redo most of what he had already completed. He even fights the same boss again, one who I thought he had killed, but noOOoo, I guess a knife to the throat doesn’t do it now a days.

There are too many sections of the story that feel incomplete and unnatural. For example, the game never shows what happens to Johns. Johns has to survive, since he appears in the movies, which take place after the games, but still, what happened man? Last, we see him, Revas has him in her arms on the prison block, but then we never see him again.

On that note, during the part of the game where the prisoners are released and fighting the guards, I was unsure who died, and who lived. People I thought I saw bodies of lying on the ground seemed to be alive at later times. During that same prisoner release scene, apparently Revas and Johns were there, judging by the wall textures, but I never saw them anywhere close after the cutscene. The whole prisoner release scene did not feel fleshed out, and so in its raw state I wasn’t sure who lived, who died, and what happened. There are a couple other cutscenes like this, and I was disappointed that the cutscenes distanced me from the game rather than draw me closer into it.

Characters:

Revas: Evil Ship Captain, has two lives.

Riddick: Same from the last campaign, but this time with ulaks to kick ass with.

Spinner: Second in command, cooler than Revas but all talk, no substance. Doesn’t have much of a hand in the plot.

Johns: Irreverent

Dacker: Mercenary whom helps Riddick, but if you know about what happens to people who help Riddick, you probably know the rest. Stays in contact through radio links throughout the ship.

Prisoners: Men and women who need Riddick’s help, or not.

New Enemies:
Drones: Slow until you show yourself. They generally care little about themselves and will rush out into danger. Riddick can use their hand guns for as long as it has ammo and is quite accurate and deadly; one of the better guns in the game.

Alpha Drone: A poorly designed enemy that only appears in the second portion of Dark Athena. The game doesn’t tell the player how to defeat them. I tried bursting a air burst shots on one, once at a time, in the hopes to decrease his health slowly but surely. No matter how many times I tried this, the beast wouldn’t die. Turns out, you have to stack about five on an Alpha Drone bursting them all at once. After bursting the shots, it would put the enemy in a weakened state where he could be finished off with a melee quicktime event. I wouldn’t have known how to win against this foe if it wasn’t for a game walkthrough. The game gives no hints what to do. Worse, if the player fails to do the quicktime event in time, the 5 burst combo as to be done again. It goes without saying, that getting all these shots to hit their mark is difficult under pressure, so doing it twice sucks.

Spider Drone: Another very annoying enemy. The drones hide on walls before the player arrives, or they will crawl up the wall as the player arrives. A red laser signifies its presence. Once the Spider Drone sees the player and plays an alert noise it the player has about 2 seconds to dispatch the horrid device before it locks on the player and fires devastating shots. Once it does so there is no more two second grace period, the spider drone is ruthless. The shots’ damage is crippling, almost a whole block of health per dart; this is on the normal difficulty mind you. If the player leaves the area of fire and returns, the spider drone almost always gets the first shot off. The developers would have wise to either decrease the damage per shot, letting the player absorb the damage to dispatch the beast, or they would have reinstated the 2 second lag time to fire when the player gets out of range and then back into range.

New Weapons:

Air Burst Grenade launcher: Slow, but has unlimited ammo. Fires a yellow pellet that can be remotely detonated. Low Radius of explosion, but up to six can be released at once.

SMG: Fires many fast and weak bullets. Large Clip size. Not the best weapon, but good for rushing positions when the player doesn’t have the opportunity to reload.

Drone Gun: Fires Strong accurate bullets. Limited by mobility. Because the guns are part of the Drones, the bodies have to be dragged around. Riddick can either weld the gun and only move slowly backward, or he can opt to leave the gun position and throw the drone around manually for faster positioning, but lack of offense. The guns are limited to a small supply of bullets which do not recharge.

Gameplay: The game follows much of the same method as Butcher Bay. Guns are just as bad as they were before, and I still can’t recommend their use. I recall firing at point blank range at enemies and still missing. The shotgun also seems less effective than I remember. Therefore, go for the Ulacks or other melee weapon, and catch guards when they are alone. The stun gun continues to be a viable offensive weapon, especially in some of the earlier close quarter areas of the Dark Athena. It also works against drones, disabling their link to the human controller, and shutting them down. Curb stomp them to sever the connection permanently.

Dark Athena copies the Mech scene from Butcher Bay, except in space rather than a hanger. I was hoping for more originality, but at least they fixed it to make it more exciting. Mechs are now more representative of their visual strength and so the player’s cannot really go 1 to 1 with them. Therefore, when in mech suit himself, Riddick has to act decisively, for the enemies do not simply spaz out and die like before. Later Riddick is able to control a Drone, which makes up for the replicant mech scene.

The artificial intelligence seems about the same as the Butcher Bay Remake. Enemies would generally do a fine job of acting their roles. Drones would wander around slowly, and ignoring cover, since they were less concerned with life preservation. The humans on the other hand were good at taking cover from behind boxes. One thing about the AI that felt new was that when the grenade launcher, a new weapon, was used. Human enemies would not only dodge the grenades when you chucked at them, but when they landed on the ground, waiting for their remote detonation, the AI would seemingly avoid that part of the ground, as they should. This made the grenade launcher extremely difficult to use to kill enemies unless it was a direct hit, and players took into account the dodging, predictively firing the second shot as the enemy moved out of the way of the first. The AI while good doesn’t stop the occasional hilarity; enemies that walk right off cliffs. It happened only once making it funnier to see, a human retreating one moment, and gone the next, flying off into a gravity generator.

This game is hard. Just like Butcher Bay, it throws a large number of enemies at the player at one time and expects the player to be in able condition to be able to dispatch them with their equipment as given. Sadly, the given equipment is either not good enough, or the odds are seriously against Riddick. A few examples where this felt especially true include one where I fought two Alpha Drones at once, and another where I had to fight an Alpha Drone in a tiny room, not given any space to hide or avoid the behemoth enemy. Also plentiful and annoying were rooms where I had to take down 5 enemies, but only had the air burst grenade launcher. These enemies would all just rush me and I couldn’t even fire fast enough to take them down. Either that, or the enemy was far away and sniping me. An attempt to counter snipe was futile with the inaccurate guns, and their ability to dodge my air burst grenade launcher. Throwing the spider Drones into the mix made these scenes worse. These baddies had impeccable aim and dealt disastrous damage. Thankfully, the hardest parts of the game were at the end, usually planet side, or else I might not have finished the game. The odds are really that much against Riddick, hiding doesn’t either since the planet is a sunny outdoor daylight, and sadly that is like 1/3 of the game mechanics thrown out the window. One reprieve is that if Riddick dies, he will recover one block of health. This will stack, so that if Riddick dies twice, he will come back with two more blocks of health than when he went through the checkpoint. Dying became necessary to survive, if that makes any sense.

Getting around the game is a bit of a chore due to vague objectives and enigmatic level design. One such moment was the following: I had just opened up a vent but since I couldn’t jump and grab the ledge now in view after countless tries I figured it must not be the right way and backtracked through the game. Finding no suitable path, I simply quit. It took me many more tries after returning to the game to grab onto that ledge, which turned out to be the correct path. Other situations of inability to grab ledges were also present. I never quite figured out if I had to press a button to get Riddick to grab a ledge or if it was automatic. Sometimes it felt automatic, other times it didn’t. I know that pushing a button was required for overhangs, but they had a visible indicator thankfully. On that same note, there were situations in the game where Riddick had to do a lot of dangling and grabbing. One “stage” planetside had me doing this for 5 minutes over a watery death, with no enemies to bother me. It felt like it belonged in a game like Uncharted, based on its design, rather than the sneaking/shooter that is Riddick. I’m fine with a couple jumping up here, shimming across here, just not so much that it feels like a chore, or breaks the flow of the game. Heck, it would have worked better in the tutorial stage, to introduce Riddick’s move rather than the near endgame it was. Riddick in not Nathan Drake, don’t make him hop around like he is.

It is this getting lost and stuck that caused me to pine for a map or hint system. Sadly, the developers chose to remove the toggle able room map compared to Butcher Bay’s. Instead, room maps appear on the ship’s walls, which are not immensely helpful at finding goal oriented routes. There was one time, one time, where the game gave me a hint on where to go, and what to do. I was in awe when it did, for I hadn’t seen a hint through my entire play through of Butcher Bay, and indeed not one following this occurrence. I had reached a puzzle that required me to drag a drone through a vent and use its gun to shatter a window. It seems simple, but since the drone and window are in different rooms, it doesn’t “feel” right. The developers threw in a hint which appears after a certain duration telling me what to do. THANK YOU! I liked this a lot, but why is it not more prevalent? I could have used it for fighting the Alpha Drones, I could have used it when I wandered around for twenty minutes finding the proper path. Such a great figure doesn’t have to ruin a game, or remove the sense of exploration. It doesn’t even have to have a path mechanic like Dead Space or Army of Two. Just throw up a hint. Or make it an optional one, with a window to open if the player chooses. In either case, I like what was done for that room, but the hint system overall could have been more robust to remove the tiresomeness.

Graphics:

The game engine is the same one that I reviewed for the Butcher Bay Remake, so I won’t go too much about what I have already talked about. Instead, I will say that this game does utilize the more advanced features of the new engine that were not utilized for the remake. The developers did not want to change up the gameplay of the original Butcher bay too much, so it makes sense that not all the features of the new engine would be used for that particular campaign.

For Dark Athena, it seems that the developers did a better job with the use of light sources. This isn’t to say the lighting is better, it seems about the same, but there are parts of the game that are designed to specifically to use flashlight/searchlight graphics of the new engine. IE There is a level where the player has to stay out of the light as he climbs some cargo crates. If he is spotted with the light, then the enemies open fire on him. The light sources gracefully scan the sides of the cargo hold, as the accompanying shadows move smoothly.

Another good use of graphics was the water in this game. This game has perhaps some of the best water in a game that I have seen. This comes with a large caveat, the water is not interactive. You can shoot into it, fall into it, or throw things into it and it remains in the same motion that he had before attempts to distort it. This was a little sad to see, since it was so beautiful and it called to me like a kitten to be touched and played with. However, water plays absolutely no part in the game besides an instant death hazard, ala Mario, and so it makes sense for the developers not to waste time programming particles effects for it. Especially since this may have decreased the visual splendor. Best water in a game I’ve seen sans Crysis.

Another cool graphical effect that really had me oohing and ahhing was the bump mapping on the broken glass of a mech later in the game. The red emergency light reflects off the strange angles of the shard but not all over. The alpha blending and selective overlay really caught my attention during that part of the game. If I am not mistaken, the original engine for Butcher Bay had bump mapping back when it was on the Xbox, but the implementation on the HUD just looks so good, that I’m considering it a bonus of the new engine.

Yet one more highlight on this roll was a gravity room. Here enemies would die and fly towards a spinning gravity generator. Bodies of the fallen would slide off platforms and so would their weaponry It was clearly different than most other games, especially since it wasn’t just gravity manipulations that affected the player, but indeed all the enemies in the game too. It is one thing to do a puzzle using gravity, but to have to dodge the enemy, and avoid being sucked into a gravity well, that’s different. It is too bad that the bullets from the gun did not curve, but one cannot have everything.

Sadly, the game fails for destructive environments. Even when Riddick gets a grenade-launching weapon, it doesn’t even make a whole in the game world. The only thing truly destructible that I found were wooden doors on the planet, but they were not satisfying one bit in their already halfway demolished state. The Butcher Bay remake had a cool mech scene where the floors would just explode when missiles hit them. How is it possible that a remake has more next-gen features than its sequel AND uses the game engine made FOR the sequel. Even the Dark Athena mech scenes don’t have destructible environments. Red Steel for Wii has destructible environments, and that is working with the Wii’s limitations. The materials of the Dark Athena must be light-years ahead of the Butcher Bay Prison, for it is tough to believe it could be so indestructible.

Sounds and Music:

The voices in this game are the highlight. There is enough diversity in the accents and voice actors that characters do not sound the same. This is so much better than walking into a room and having all the characters yell at you in the exact same way. I didn’t feel as though the characters were distant from their characters either.

The voices fit the personalities. Riddick maintains his terse verses, but other characters are much more outdoing. The prison section of the game probably has the bulk of the dialogue there. The crazy former captain sounds out of his wits and feeble. The crazy prisoners jump around their cages, swearing at Riddick and threatening his death. I will admit I was slightly masochistic and make sure to listen to all of their swears and insults. There were more interactions than I expected, each with a slightly different animation to accompany it. I am glad that the game did not skimp in the voice acting category. Unfortunately, Johns, who I quite liked the character of in Butcher Bay, says absolutely nothing throughout the entire game. It is possible that the developers did not hire his voice actor back for a second showing. Johns only has a slight showing but I would have liked him to at least say “Riddick” once in the entire game.

AS for the enemies that Riddick fights, I was amazed at the freshness of the guard voices. By this I mean there was quite a plethora of things for them to say. It was rare for me to hear the same death taunt multiple times when fighting Drones, a testament to the voice acting quantity. They insulted me in so many ways that I can’t even feel insulted, but just stunned with the sharp selection of their vocabulary. I guess the developers knew that their game was hard, and gamers would be dying a lot. My accolades to all those who wrote and acted the voices.

The voice syncing is as good as the Butcher Bay Remake though still not perfect. I never felt that the characters were miming their words, something that helped to listen to some of their extended dialogue scenes, but they did not match up 100%. This did not bother me too much, having played games from long ago, where voices would emanate from motionless faces, ala Perfect Dark.

I can’t really speak much about the music. During the sections of the game I was focused on the gameplay and did not often notice it. The stuff I did notice were the songs carried over from Butcher Bay. In fact, a lot of music was reused between the campaigns. I will forgive them since it wasn’t bad music, it is just that having to play through two games with the same music causes what is noticed to become repetitive.

As for the rest of the sounds, many of the weapons from Butcher bay were carried over, and so the sounds and their quality are the same. For sounds I especially enjoyed, one would have to be the full sounding boom on the rocket launcher. A good second is the mechanical creaking and hydraulics of the Drones, reminding me of the cybernetic Borg in Star Trek.

Multiplayer:

Despite my attempts to find a game, I never could. Consider it dead. It must have not been memorable enough on the PC scene for continued play. A shame since the multiplayer looked decent from videos I saw of it.

Misc.:

I had difficulty installing this game on Windows 7 x64. Apparently, the Direct2Drive version had some DRM that was not compatible with the new windows. The solution, go download the newest version of the DRM off the website of the DRM developer. I had to override the included Tages installer with a newer version during the installation of the game. I found it disappointing that I had to install DRM of my free will to get the game to work. I guess you could also use a Crack for the game, though I did this the more legal way.

Instead of collecting cigarette packets this time around, the player can pick up bounty cards, which tend to have humorous writings on them, and allow unlocking of bios on prisoners and other characters.

The Alpha Drone’s Missiles, during your first encounter with the beast, seek Riddick through walls. And the missiles clip through the walls. What is up with that?

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by Zott820

After some unacceptable delays due to E3 and six hours of press conferences, I've finally had some time to upload the rest of the Fanime 2010 cosplay images. As promised, here are the rest of the video game as well as anime costumes. Take a deep breath and enjoy the second part of our gallery.

I've finally uploaded 50 images in this post from the Fanime convention! This post took a long time to create because Wikidot's image uploader was always encountering an error when I upload more than one file at a time. Please fix this Wikidot, both Firefox and Internet Explorer have this issue. The current unsorted gallery is at the bottom. The images will be sorted in the following categories:

Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead:

No wonder the Blu Team lost, it was composed entirely of Scouts and Spys! I can't comprehend the power of the left Scout's hat since I am getting a Scribblenauts vibe from it. I was taking a picture of someone behind him and he said "If you are going to take a picture, do it right." So then I said "Ok, then the other two Scouts get over here." Thus, this picture was created.

Now for two characters who were destined to meet surrounding the sandwich.

Enter the Burger King and the Team Fortress 2 Heavy. The King lives on providing burgers to people by force and the Heavy brings the heat. The Heavy will trade in his Sandvich for the Burger King Whopper. This is a marketing move made in heaven.

The Reenactment of Bill's Death

The best part about this pic is that normally cosplayers count down so people know when they are going to walk away or change poses. With L4D, it's ironic here because the other people counted down from 30 and it made me thing of the bleedout in the game when your character is about to die. These people were on top of their characterization with pill bottles, first aid supplies and more.

Fighting Games:

Mmm, Bison is taking on the double team while standing firm.

Final Fantasy:

Anime Collection:

The Teen Titans are here except for Cyborg. Of course you can always click on these pictures for the super high resolution versions!

Valkryia Chronicles:

FAIL?:

Star Wars:

There is still tons of extra pictures to see since this post is too long as it is. Please check out the rest of the pictures in our Gallery!

*Some images provided by my friend MrBiggMan66

The Nintendo cosplay images are in my prior post. Visit for a partially warped view of our favorite characters. Fanime 2010 was a lot of fun and I look forward to future anime conventions. Leave comments and feel free to identify cosplay I missed or mislabeled.

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by BlueZero

It's difficult to organize the absolute splendor surrounding the Fanime convention in San Jose which went on May 28th to 31. With this being the first anime convention I attended, (I grew up with the censored Pokemon and Yugi-oh style cartoons) I did not know what to expect. My rationale for going was I wanted to see which video games were going to be represented since I have always assumed anime converges into video games. The Fanime crowd really knows how to do cosplay justice!

Enter the Fanime 2010 Video Game Cosplay: Nintendo Pictures

The Legend of Zelda:

Introducing Captain Falcon:

Captain Falcon gets his own category due to being such an epic character. Gaze at the true glory of the one and only Douglas Jay Falcon.

This man is truly the stuff of legends. It was difficult to believe this seems to be the same person who set the precedent for Captain Falcon cosplaying. I didn't take a photo of the back of his costume but take my word it is authentic with the number "7" and the right icon.

My friend was able to take pictures of what I call "Child Captain Falcon". He stayed in character and only spoke with Captain Falcon's sayings like "Yes", "Show me Ya Moves".

Smash Brothers:

These costumes were created using a range of detail levels. The other Smash Brothers characters were represented above. (Toad isn't in Smash but the person was wearing a g-string if that's a consolation price). Speaking of revealing clothing, Zero Suit Samus and Pikachu have teamed up to prevent Solid Snake from completing his mission. Wait until I post the other Snake pictures.

Misc.:

There is so much more to show. Continue to the rest of the Fanime 2010 Cosplay Media. It includes Street Fighter, Team Fortress 2, anime characters and much more!

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by BlueZero

The teaser website Spartans Stand Tall has finally revealed the new God of War game. In a similar fashion to God of War 2 where they had a teaser website for the PSP God of War, it has happened again. Since God of War 3 is still new, I will avoid to avoid these spoilers as I discuss the new game (set before the events in God of War 3).

The background behind the Spartans Stand Tall website is the URL is shown when you get the platinum trophy for God of War 3. The website showed rain and flashes of lighting and it wasn't until today they actually named the game. God of War: Ghost of Sparta will feature Kratos busting heads right after the conclusion of the second game. It's pretty certain Kratos is going to murder a few more hoards of mythical monsters, beasts and probably civilians. Based on information unexplained in God of War 3, there is a 99.5% chance Kratos is going to visit Atlantis at some point in the game. The developers has almost fully completed their version of Atlantis to be used in God of War 2 before they changed direction. Be on the lookout for random islands and sea gods. This PSP game is being developed by the same studio which created God of War: Chains of Olympus.

The US Playstation God of War post says Ready at Dawn Studios is once again developing a Kratos game with promises of more gameplay, graphics and overall content. Images are taken from their official Flickr page and I have to assume are actual screenshots even if they look almost better than PS2 graphics. Kratos' quest in Ghost of Sparta will be to face his past (like he always has) while gaining more power (like he always has). The Playstation blog post says the goal is to prove himself to the gods (Kratos needs to stop doing this) and the game will "reveal the origins of lost worlds and finally answer long-awaited questions about Kratos’ tattoo, scar, and family." Yeah….well he had the tattoos in God of War 1's flashback when he was a commander of the Spartian army. Thus I think they are just for decoration. As for the scar, I'm not sure what they are talking about besides the scar from being stabbed with the Blade of Olympus in the 2nd game. I'm guessing he has some sort of eye scar. Maybe Kratos has a Lenidos moment where he gets a blade barely missing his eye. The scar really isn't a draw for me. There really are no long awaited questions about Krato's family. His wife tamed him, his daughter maybe kept him sane. Here's hoping the wife is also a Spartan warrior who used to fight in Krato's army.

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by BlueZero

I came across this game when I saw it in a video highlighting a 48 hour game creation competition. This game came in first in the competition and I was interested to know what made it so good. The video did not yield any answers on its own and so I decided to play the game myself and figure it out.

I’m glad I did for this game was actually quite fun and its simplistic design doesn’t hold back the gameplay. I shall review this game as I do normal commercial games.

Graphics: Most enemies consist of a couple spites, at the minimum they have 2 frames for walking, such as the main tiger protagonist. The graphics are nothing special. The background is unchanging per level and a representation of some of kind of zoo and corresponding kennels. This background looks like it was drawn in Microsoft Paint and took no longer than 5 minutes tops. Still, it sort of fits the style of the game. I wouldn’t have let it go if it were photo-realistic in this cartoon world, so for that reason it is not bad.

The part when Graphics start to hurt gameplay occurs when the 3 or so different types of blocks are not varied enough in their appearance that they become confusing. There are cloud blocks, impermeable dark metal blocks, and light metal blocks that allow the tiger’s passage through them. In actuality the impermeable block on is only slightly lighter than the passable varieties. This messed me up in a couple of situations, with I trying to pass through what I mistakenly could not. I would have increased the contrast on the blocks or atleast made a completely different color to lock it on function.

Based on the placement of clouds in the game, I assumed that the developers originally thought of having them disappear after the tiger stepped on them, ala Mario games and other plat formers, though they act as normal solid blocks as it is.

The best part of the graphics would have to be the guts that fly out of those consumed in the tiger’s hunger. It isn’t so much gory as delightfully humorous to see the red “guts” fly out in all directions; macabre, but light.
The game runs in a window, no full screen is available, but I would personally prefer the crisp graphics in a window that stretchy pixels in full screen. The window for gameplay is at a generous resolution as it is.

Sounds and music: Simplistic but delightful. The synthesized music in the background doesn’t hurt the ears and I did not find myself hating it even after hearing it repeat itself through the levels of the game.

There are cutesy sounds, with an “oh no” male’s voice, and a couple of “wha wha whaaa” as if a minor epic fail had been done at the starving of the tiger. Besides sounds corresponding to win/loss conditions there really aren’t too many other sounds (Besides the once again sadistic yet hilarious chomping sound), which is fine, the game doesn’t need them.

Gameplay: What I liked best about this game is that it is very cute and the developers were aware of it, making the game light-hearted, but still focusing on the gameplay aspects. The player must guide his girthy tiger through stages to get to the “Do not feed Animals” Sign. On my first play through I was unsure where I was supposed to go, and what was or wasn’t landscape. For this reason, the sign was probably not the best indication of the level end, but it isn’t too much a problem after grasping what is supposed to be done. Luckily the developers were very wise in allowing the player to play around with the levels. There are no lives and so players have the chance to just try out strategies and get used to new enemies and obstacles that appear. For example, the game doesn’t tell you what you can and cannot eat. While not try and eat everything? Alas, the man with the tiny net is not edible as he captures your “hero” and puts him back working for now wages as an attraction. NO, tigers need to eat. Eat the zoo keeps as they run, and eat the dart men. These dart men’s darts do not harm the tiger as a one hit kill as I originally suspected. Instead they make the tiger slower and unable to jump high for a limited time. Not too bad until the tiger dies from hunger. Like I said, he needs a lot of food to maintain his girth and strength. Why else does he take up a large horizontal space in the world?
Due to the one screen nature of the game, probably making it easier to program, there isn’t much opportunity to break away from the basic elements of the game. The tiger needs to avoid the net man, as he slowly followers the player in purely horizontal directions, he must dodge tranquilizer darts, and he must eat men, all in a limited time span. No bosses, no scrolling screens, and a mostly linear game.

Despite all this, the game is challenging. Eating people replenishes the hunger bar, and yet it decreases so rapidly, that for the tiger to frolic in the clouds or stop and wait would mean death. There are a couple levels near the end that are very strict in this regard, preventing the player from even missing a bite if he hopes to survive the stage. Another reason to like this game, the difficulty ramps up but without too much penalty for doing so; if you fail, just start the stage again. The game is short and can be beaten in 10 minutes, but in those ten minutes I was more entertained than horrible games that I tried to persuade myself that were good for the hour(s) I spent on them.
While there isn’t enough substance in the game to really push it to commercial size, indeed much of its charm comes from its brevity and simplistic mechanics, I think it would have been cool to have a map editor on the side. I know that I’d just fill the screen with food, but still, it increases the lifespan of the game past what the developers might envision.

Installation: The game installed easily enough except that it unfortunately required the Microsoft XNA development kit be installed, which I wasn’t pleased about. I had to install that separately requiring more work on my part to get this game up and running. I wish the game could have had what it needed to run packaged in with it besides making me install things on the side.

Conclusion: Go play this game. It’ll give you a quick break from work or school (besides the annoying installation). The graphics will not impress you, but the sounds will make you smile, and the music is good. A good show for something made in merely 48 hours.

Interview with creators: http://www.popten.net/2010/04/qa-with-the-winners-of-sid-meiers-game-competition-zoo-escape/
Download the game here: http://wolverinesoft.org/game/144/zoo-escape

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by Zott820

What you will notice from the video is that this challenge appears extremely easy when you hear about it. It's not easy at all and many failed attempts are chronicled on YouTube and other viral websites. I consider the Cinnamon Challenge a video game in its own right as first it was recorded on video and any challenge is a game.

Thinking back on the video, I am reminded of Smash TV where there is ""Big…money! Big…prizes! I love it!". While the person in the video didn't get free toasters (he was next to a toaster oven if that counts), he did successfully battle with the horrible tongue burning monster created by cinnamon. The victor is now able to say he completed one of the Internet challenges after not being able to finish the Saltine Challenge minutes before. (6 Saltines swallowed under 1 minutes). The Cinnamon Challenge would never work in game form because it would turn into having to push a button really fast similar to where Mario Party 1 destroyed people's palms for the "rotate the controller" mini-games.

Now you will never know what is going to pop up on a gaming blog. We have officially raised the bar with entertaining content. We'll just have to see how we are going to top this when we go back to our virtual electronic gaming.

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by BlueZero

Will we ever get sick of Crysis? Yes eventually, but until that time comes I implore you to check out the video above. It has a decent analysis of what we as gamers should expect out of the upcoming Cryengine 3. If you don’t know, Cryengine 2 is the engine that runs Crysis, while Crysis Warhead had a slightly updated version, which we’ll call Cryengine 2.5. If I recall correctly, Farcry used Cryengine 1, but that’s getting off topic. Cryengine 3 then is the next iteration of this hardware eating beast.

As you may be aware, Cryengine 3 and consequently Crysis 2, are going to be compatible with home consoles. But you didn’t really think that those consoles would be able to run a game, that kills even some modern gaming computers, at anything less than 480p and keep up the graphical fidelity uncut did you? Yes? Pleeease. Therefore, as the clip shows there are some concessions to be made. Some are minor, I don’t mind the antialiasing, or lack of, while some are more major, empty hills in the distance, what is this; Flight Simulator? I also like some of the details that the video brings to our attention that I wasn’t even aware of to a large extent. I knew that Crysis had wind, but I didn’t know that weapon fire created “wind” in the sense that it displaces trees around gunshots, even if only by a little. Now that’s attention to detail that I like.

It is my home that Crytek will fix a couple of these issues present, largely the shadow refresh rate on the trees, but the others would be good too. Regardless, I appreciate all optimizations that Crytech is doing when porting the game to Consoles. I was underwhelmed with how Crysis Warhead was supposed to run better. I hope that these optimizations up the frame rate but do not take a hit to Crysis 2 on the PC version’s prowess to glorious detail. I expect that to be a benchmark for graphics for years to come.

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by Zott820

Feel the Action
Introducing the first game to use the Wii Vitality Sensor: Luigi's Mansion 2 (Working Title). The Wii Vitality Sensor measures your heatbeat and determines how nervous Luigi is in the game. Become very excited to scare intimidating ghosts or relax your body to sneak around. The Wii Remote vibration feature allows you to feel your heart beat in real time as your play the game.

New Places to Explore
Professor E. Gadd is missing and it's up to Luigi to find him! Your favorite character Luigi reluctantly sets out on a new quest armed with his Poltergust 3000. Explore new frighting rooms as you discover hidden secrets, coins and powerups. Beware, the Boos are back and are as scary as ever. Use the Wii Remote's precision aiming to shine your flashlight at darting ghosts and light your way through the dark rooms. As you progress through the game, upgrade Luigi's equipment to do battle with humongous bosses and apparitions.

Bring a Friend
Don't go on your adventure alone! Mario teams up with Luigi in an all new special online mode. Through the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, earn points for defeating enemies and finding treasure. Score the most points to show your friend who is the top Mario Brother.

Key Features

• Wii Vitality Sensor Included
• Nintendo WiFi Connection Enabled
• Wii MotionPlus Compatible

Luigi's Mansion 2 is slated for Spring 2011.

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by BlueZero

I purchased this game from the Direct2Drive store for $7.50. I had heard average reviews from other sources and so did not immediately pioneer myself a copy. Seeing as I would have likely had to pay more than $7.50 if the games were bundled, about $30 at the time of this writing, I decided to splurge and see how the game was first-hand. I have completed all the new mini-campaigns on expert, and played the new gametypes in multiplayer.

There are three included campaigns and a couple extra multiplayer missions plugged into this mix. First, let me talk about the single player experience.

Single Player

Tiger Ace: In this mode, the player takes control of a single tank and drives it around wiping out the enemy. While initially one has to be careful not to die with all the anti-tank guns and PIATs, the commander upgrades slowly make the Tiger an unstoppable ace.

This campaign was only slightly challenging on Expert. As long as the player was careful around the anti-tank guns than his tank had no problem clearing out everything. It also helped that the computer on the third mission would repair your tank if you stood still, whether intentional programming or not. This made the difficulty on that one portion decrease by quite a lot. Without computer assistance, the Tiger crew has no means in which to repair itself; this is where the caution comes in. While the tank becomes nearly unstoppable in the late campaign due to the turrets great rate of fire, the tank still has to be careful of the enemy getting their shots off first. The damage by them is low, but their small irreversible input adds up over the course of the mission.

A cool difference between Tales of Valor and the main campaigns of the past is that the commander upgrades transfer over to the next mission, and more importantly, are almost completely new. For the Tiger Ace campaign, the special weapons were useful in that they increased the speed of attack or movement and imparted special bonus powers. Besides the natural abilities, such as firepower and speed though, the rest of the available upgrades were generally not as useful nor utilized as much as I wanted. IE, the anti-personal mine launcher required close range to be effective, but it was better to switch to explosive rounds than move close to short-range attacking position. Another more useful example is the smoke screen which has an appealing pop, pop, pop sound as smoke canister are launched to cover the tiger’s movement. Still, I appreciate their inclusion as they give slight replayability, since the player can choose to use different tactics on the next play through using those special powers. There were also some innate special powers that appeared to either become available after a set time or set damage. These include being able to deploy a tank commander (For some reason he can un-deploy, but he doesn’t seem to die, so I’m not sure why that is needed at all), as well as tank awareness. I wasn’t sure what most of these innate powers did except they appeared in the notification window the left side. I wish there was a better indication or help dialogue to explain their addition to the strategy of the command.

Since the three new campaigns each has three missions each, the CPs are capped at a certain amount per mission. This unfortunately tips the player off that there are more missions, and is a psydo-spoiler, but also prevents the units from becoming super powered at the beginning, and the rest of the missions being boring with nothing new to unlock.

With the use of the command trees and the upgrades for your Tiger Ace tank it soon become a powerhouse. Even on the expert difficulty it is easy to destroy tanks with one shot with the Tiger Ace. While this is actually quite realistic, the gun soon becomes an 88 machine gun, dropping everything around it at probably 2 shots per second. Ultimately, it made this campaign feel more like an arcade game than the more realistic approach the campaigns in the original game had going for them.

Two of the three missions are tank based. One of the three Tiger Ace missions had the five members of the tank crew navigating enemy territory to escape. I much enjoyed this mission. It was one of the harder missions in the campaign, mainly because it wasn’t a run and gun mission; it was perhaps the only mission in COH that seemed to advocate stealth over brute force. Furthermore, since the tank crew was on their own, they were given the ability to revive their fallen squad mates. This was a necessity for when fighting was no other option. It didn’t make the squads invincible, but did prevent squads from dying nearly instantaneously under heavy fire. As an added element of avoidance of, British sappers build sandbag defenses and the like during this mission, forcing the player through new directions of movement lest they wish to be brutally slaughtered. These sandbags and traps also appear in the later mission through mission persistence, adding nice continuality.

Causeway: My least favorite campaign of the three new campaigns. Here the player takes control of two nearly indestructible squads. Even on expert the only way I lost one an entire squad was when a building containing one of these superhuman squads collapsed, killing all inside, but I digress. With these super powered squads, the player mows down infantry and tanks without even a wink.

Able squad is a machine gun squad, and it does a fine job at spraying an endless supply of bullets. It apparently only takes one bullet to kill the German infantry of all varieties and so volksgrenadiers do not even have a chance to move into position before they are lying on their backs. Baker squad is the anti-tank division. While it takes longer for Baker to kill tanks than it does for Able to kill infantry, they are also still extremely over powered.

The combination of these two squads is what makes the campaign boring.

I’ll post a walkthrough now, since it really is too simple a formula.

The first mission is all about attacking the enemy. Simply rush these units in, and kill anything till they reach the final point.

Mission two has the squads defending a point from a counterattack. This is even more boring than the first mission, since by now the player has likely gotten enough CP points to spend on upgrades for the squads to make them somehow more destructive. Just let them sit in the square and they’ll be fine for the most part. There is too much delay between the attacks too, causing situations of idle boredom. Furthermore, it is better to not explore the countryside with the units, since apparently it slows down the spawning phase of the enemy for reasons I cannot understand, making the lengthy wait for pathetic units to kill lengthier. If one is bored, they can lay mines in fun shapes.

Mission 3 changes the formula a bit, but the squads are still juiced up like Bane. You also get another super unit, who I’m not sure is a mission necessary unit, or expendable. Besides the new unit the super-squads are not even worth managing except occasionally to heal using the new unit, and to revive the rarely fallen squad members. The real challenge in this mission comes from the tension building “timed” encounters between allies and the enemy. Your allies don’t stand a chance, but by using the super-squads, you need to work quickly enough to wipe out the passive resistance.
As far as storytelling for this campaign, it is up to standards in both narrative and design as the original company of heroes, it is simply the gameplay that fails due to its simplicity. It loses all the strategic nature that makes Company of Heroes a great RTS.

Falaise Pocket: This third Campaign is the second best in terms of design. It consists of three missions that are more of less the same. They are all "defend the base" missions. There isn’t any base building, in fact, none of these new campaigns had base building, but you have to occupy outposts where you can build units. Unlike the traditional build method, the units are called in from off the map, so that has to be carefully coordinated. Units will not just appear outside the building, and immediately help you defend, if that was one of your goals.

What makes this campaign superior to Causeway is due to the conventional Company of Heroes strategy. Despite this, it still isn’t the most fulfilling gameplay. The computer is content just wasting its almost limitless supply of units, rushing them in, with the chance of breaking through the players lines. Sadly, this is very effective.

The first mission has the player wake up troopers, by occupying buildings, and defending a panzer legion stationed around the map. The panzers are relatively useless and will not help the player. In addition, it is better they don’t since once the enemy reach your panzers an air raid will bomb them out of commission. This is a sad since it dances with that rushing mechanic of the enemy. Once the enemy reaches your panzers, they don’t have a chance of surviving, since the planes make short work of them. In this way, the attacking units don’t even care about their own lives as long as they get past you and to those helpless tanks. On expert this is quite difficult too, as the enemy will not keel over instantaneously, unlike Causeway. The Germans are not granted any super-soldiers.

The second mission is more or less a repeat of the first mission except, instead of defending tanks the player has to defend outposts. Once more, the enemy does a lot of rushing.

Lastly, the final mission has the player defending a retreating convoy. The enemy doesn’t do as much pushing on this map as the previous ones. Also, it was a bit misleading what was meant when the objectives stated to retreat my units. Do I press T for retreat? No, I have to manually walk them over to the exit marker. The same for tanks. Also what sucks, is that every time I build a new unit, I would have to walk them over to be evacuated also, only stationary defensive structures do not count towards the evacuation pool.

For a strategy without merit, I suggest the following; the convoy that is retreating can be manually commanded. HOWEVER, this does not count into the medal for retreating the convoy. What this does allow is a nearly limitless supply of units. The tanks have the engines crippled and their health low, but the convoy also includes engineers. By holding back vehicular units a bit and repairing them, or building repair bunkers, a defensive rush team can be made.

Sadly, the retreating convoy seems to think it is best to engage the enemy in their weakened condition. This is bad since once the British enemy begins to nearly timelessly build up a defense in your base, gob-smack in the center of the retreat line, none of the convoy will make it through without your help. They will simply fight and die. They will not just keep running by to get to the exit marker. Why must I do everything around here? It doesn’t help that the enemy can build their trenches and MG nests much faster than normal, and the units on expert are extremely overpowered, but I suppose this is part of the challenge.

None of the three missions are impossible, but with the amount of units the enemy rushes with, some strategy is lost for chaos.

All three missions reminded me of World in Conflict, and a couple spammy points I did not like about that game. Unlike World in Conflict, resources/points are not unlimited, but similar to that game the player’s units are against such overwhelming attacking forces that they die quickly if not ideally played, and are therefore expendable. The player gets extra munitions and resources for killing the enemy, this being important for the next point.
The command tree is a mix of all the Wehrmacht powers. As such, artillery and V1 rockets are available. By utilizing these effectively (especially on the second and third missions where they are unlockable) the player has a better chance against the odds. What this does though is make the player’s ground units bait; get the enemy together to fight your units, and the bomb them all to a charred mass. Once more, strategy is thrown out for just using your special powers. Feels like World in Conflict to me.

Multiplayer:

There are a couple of new gametypes in multiplayer. Honestly, the maps and gametypes are a novelty that will be played a couple times before returning to the normal victory point and annihilation gameplay.
For those that get tired of the new gametypes there are a couple of new units for use in multiplayer. These new units are strictly replacements, with one unit being a skin/voice pack, and so players must choose between the newly added ones and the vanilla versions. The new units can certainly throw off the enemy if properly utilized. These units are appreciated additions and if players find absolutely nothing in the expansion that they like, they can at least gain an advantage with more units to choose from to decimate the enemy.

Panzerkrieg has the player command a tank, of the 3 available for his allegiance, and try to dominate the map by capturing map victory points. Of the three tanks per side there was usually a light, medium, and heavy variety. With all but the best strategists, the medium tank was usually the best deal. The light tank died too easily for its own good, and the heavy tank, while powerful, was too slow to action.
Each tank has its own command points and upgrade structure. These powerups are what make the gameplay more than the average and offer a mild chance of replayability. I say mild since in most games it is possible to upgrade to the last unlock and so only six games are needed to experience them all. It doesn’t help that there are only 2-3 maps in which Panzerkrieg is usable on. If the gametype was compatible with existing and future maps, it would have been appreciated and increased its life span.

Tales of Valor seems to be leaking strategy. While Panzerkrieg is fun, I found that a lot of the time it was just a tank rush to a spot, where there was a duel, and then one of the teams had to respawn, repeat ad fin. The upgrades then made one of the two teams more powerful until they dominated the map. The best games were the ones where careful placement of defending infantry kept the enemy distracted long enough to come and engage them, but then they had a plan of their own, having their ally rush around back to support.

Assault lines: Of the new multiplayer gametypes, I enjoyed Assault lines the best, though found it to be played less than ideally. In it, the player chooses a class and similar to DOTA or HoN, for which it is based, they will attempt to assault an enemy base, killing bunkers, eliminating respawn points, until the enemy refinery is reached and blown to bits. While some people would choose the gunner classes for their pure power, those that stacked the defensive bonuses such as the medic’s healing and the officer’s speed and heroic boost often came out above. The best games had the teamwork that this gametype required.

Sadly, I found few games that emphasized strategy over brute force. I would have liked to see more team action going on with all the stacked bonuses I mentioned. Instead I find there to be a high level hero doing all the work and enemy team having no chance to defend against it due to all working independently. Sort of like DOTA, the team that loses the edge initially, loses the game in the end. In addition, I found there would be lots of gunner classes, and both teams would rush, leaving nobody but the weak computer to defend.

Stonewall: I played this gametype before in Company of Heroes Online Beta that is available in Chinese only. It remains relatively unchanged for the American release included in Tales of Valor. In this mode, up to four players defend against waves of enemies. There is an unlock tree for units, but no commander tree. For example, the player might spend manpower to unlock the sniper, or they might spend it on an upgrade that speeds up the building times.

The player can choose to either play as the Americans and defend against attacking German forces or vice versa. As a disappointment, there are no British or Panzer Elite units, despite being available in Tales of Valor, but not in COHO. I would have appreciated more strategic options in what is almost a cut and paste between COHO and TOV. Also, I feel that the enemy is strong enough to fight against a collection of both race choices together. The British want their appearance, they are a defense-oriented race, and this is a defense-oriented map! I suppose I will have to rely on third party solutions like Joint Operations to fulfill this market.

For those that wonder, the only differences that I seemed to see between the COHO and TOV renditions was the inclusion of the American narrator for actions on the map and a possible increase in difficulty. “Possible” only because it seemed as though there were more units thrown out per wave. Also, a couple of strategies were foiled. One being that as playing as the Germans one would build many bunkers and have them be repair depots to continuously heal the player’s tanks. In TOV, the bunker can only be a MG nest.

The gameplay is hectic, and the attacking waves are quite difficult. Sadly, I find that this mode pushes a niche strategy of buying only certain types of units, such as snipers. While one could unlock the latest and greatest tanks, it is probably a more wise to invest in the cheaper varieties and use the money to buy more of them. Weirdly the bunker is the same cost as in the normal game, which is outrageous considering that prices for everything else is adjusted to be lower and more in tune with the gameplay. IE a sniper costs about 10ManPower. A German bunker costs 100 MP. In addition, the bunker can only be a MG nest, not a more beneficial medic or repair center. When the bunker has a high chance of dying in late game when tanks roll in, its construction is a serious waste of funds. I could understand the significant cost if I still had the choice of its other two functions but as it is, the bunker is a wasteful investment.

After the player beats Stonewall, they won’t be back. There is only one map, and one difficulty setting. The player could choose between the races they want, but out of the two, that makes a minimum of two times beating the gametype. I found that since I nearly had to use a limited selection of units to win that there was little reason to play it again if I would have to use the same method. However, your mileage may vary. I could see someone trying different novelty methods to try to win, such as all mortars, or all snipers, while the rest do anti-tanks.

Direct Fire: Direct-fire is a new addition to Tales of Valor. It applies to all the new campaigns, but does not transfer over to multiplayer or any of the old campaigns. Frankly, I do not miss it. Tiger Ace is the only campaign where direct fire had any usable purpose. When trying to juggle multiple units with direct-fire it just becomes too much of multi-tasking. The gimmick is that you get to choose what to fire at. This works acceptable for a tank that has a long reload, and requires a precise and powerful one-shot-kill. The turret of the tank could then be primed in the direction of approaching tanks, something the game would not do automatically if the enemy is out of shooting range. However, when direct-fire is given and used with infantry, it is a little confusing, and seemed less effective than just letting the computer do it. Am I really that much better in control of a MG machine gun than the computer? The icon for direct-fire tells the amount of firing left, and shows a cool-down meter as well when all the shot power has been spent. As I mentioned though, my reflexes and microing skills are not as effective as the computer at finding that exact moment to choose when to fire. I was fine clicking on a squad with the right mouse button to issue an attack order and letting the squad do the rest, having to hold down the left button on the target to spray with machine guns seems a little bit a waste of my time. Sadly, even in the Tiger Ace campaign lining up the turret early was a waste since the turret becomes super-fast at firing and turning by the campaign’s end, negating the need to do a lot of microing.

Mission persistence: Tales of Valor overdoes the mission persistence. This feature was heavily emphasized as a selling point for Opposing Fronts, but also appeared in two levels in the original Company of Heroes campaign. It now makes an appearance in Tales of Valor. To put it in simple terms, the terrain keeps the damage from the last mission on the map. This has its pros and cons. For one, if you destroy everything on the map, then for the next mission you will have no buildings to position your men in. What sucks about mission persistence in Tales of Valor, is that each campaign’s 3-4 missions take place on the same map and you cannot proceed to complete mission objectives that appear on the next mission, even though you can reach them on the current map. This same disappointment struck me when I found out many of Opposing Front’s missions took place on the same maps. The freedom of choice and the interest of a new setting are dimmed. I will say that at least being able to navigate the full map in TOV beats the sort of “invisible boundary” that Opposing Fronts created with artillery lines, but not by much. Furthermore, the positioning of units is reset at the start of each new mission, lowering strategic interest. While I understand this was done for compatibility, it makes setting everything back the way it was a bore. The units are stashed in a safe spot when the next mission begins on that map.

Graphics: There are no extra additions to graphics that are worthy of mention. The same things that continued to amaze in the first game are still good. The graphics are beginning to look a little outdated in Direct X 9 mode, but I don’t have the horsepower to switch to the more intensive but artful Dx10 mode. The addition of ambient occlusion with Nvidia cards is nice, but I too didn’t have the horsepower for the slight increase in realism it provides.

Sound & Music: There are a couple more musical interludes for the cinematics but I did not notice any new in-game soundtrack. This was fine though, the game had excellent war music anyways.

There were new voice actors for some of the new campaign characters. They did as good of a job as on previous games. This almost sounds insulting by how little time I spend writing about it here, but it is good enough that there are really no glaring faults except for what is included in the glitches section. The writing for the voices also continues to be intact, with lines delivered naturally while still including those all-encompassing anecdotal statements that make the player feel they know all about the war philosophy.

I do have one complaint for the voices. In the Stonewall gametype the American voiceover artist sounds like he is gruffier, in a way that makes me want to clear my throat in empathy each time I hear it. It sounded natural in the first game, but in this most recent expansion, it just sounds off. I’m not sure if these lines are newly recorded or if all were recorded at the same time as the original game. Whatever the reason, I found the VO for this particular section to be distracting and not to my liking.

Glitches: I’m sad to say, that for a fully up to date game, this expansion still had its share of bugs. For one, mission selecting the third deployment of the Tiger Commander campaign left me unable to use the HE rounds, clicking on the icon started the switching timer, but there was no ultimate change in weaponry. This command tree power was also already unlocked too, so I am not sure what the problem was.

I know this isn’t a glitch per-say but bothersome to me. In the Causeway mission, Bravo squad loses its voice halfway through the second mission and for the rest of the campaign. It makes sense for the storyline, but they should have thrown a generic airborne sound in then because it is very awkward to be selecting units and not have that audio feedback telling me I am doing actions like attacking and moving.

Conclusion: Tales of Valor started out as a collection of downloadable content. I don’t have an objection for it being packaged together and sold, but the price for what is at heart a collection of novelty is a bit steep at the $30ish dollars at the time of this writing. Instead, I feel the pack would better suit a $10 dollar range. The campaigns introduce some new features, such as reviving squads, as well as some new methods of controlling them, but many of these features are either underused or novelties. Those gamers seeking an expanded Company of Heroes experience, akin to Opposing Fronts or the original game in design, should look to third party modifications. Tales of Valor seems like an expansion for people who might like to see what an arcade-like touch to the game engine may be like. The new multiplayer modes are mixed in their fun-ness, some have deepness and I could see myself playing those for a long while, but the rest will likely be a once through and then ignored. There isn’t anything especially notable in the sound department. The game retains its excellent sound, with some minor additions, one sadly gruff voice actor, and no new mission music. The same goes for graphics; they retain the look and feel of the original game, which is good, though nothing knocks our socks off. If you see this game on the cheap, go out and buy it for a change of stride.

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by Zott820

A Heavy Burden

Soldier Style

Only the soldier can fire a rocket with flair even after his target was destroyed. If only I were the Blu Soldier who dodged the rockets where I did not.

Halloween Hats

Here are some quick screenshots of the brown bag hats. While not active unless it's near Halloween, I for some reason have some to show. Yes, you are handsome and groovy!

Celebrity Kills

Here is a few of the famous people who have taken me down in Team Fortress 2. With the ability to have multiple aliases in Steam, people have developed some creative names for just humiliating players. These images have not been photo edited to add names, these are taken from me being mercilessly killed.

Strange Death Cams

For some reason, this next image makes no sense. Why is my head in the Scout's hand when it clearly isn't?

Slow-mo Demoman explosion. Shouldn't play with explosives when you only have one eye and are drunk. I bet there are tons of these kinds of death cams as I am constantly playing Payload and there are always tons of Demomen.



The rest of the gallery is below for your browsing convenience:

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by BlueZero

Everyone has hopefully played Crysis on PC or at the very least seen the original trailers to know that the game is a beast. As my friend recently said, "Will Crysis 2 run Crysis??" The technology behind the graphical, physics and other game engines are awesome. What happens when we push the limits of the physics engine by using the power of modern machines. Continue on and see how well Crysis can display thousands of objects and effects:

Unfortunately, I don't have the modding knowledge to even know where to look for the Crysis sandbox, so I'm going to be showing other people's videos. To start, here are 10,000 barrels (signature red to indicate they are explosive of course)

Notice at about :27 seconds into the film, the falling barrels seems in the middle seem to be hovering. Either the engine can not process that many physics calculations of the coefficient of gravitational attraction between objects is too high to keep them briefly suspended. At 28 seconds in, Crysis just gives up calculating the physics and has the top level far apart randomly. Then of course the player gets hit by a barrel and is not really effected probably because they are in "god mode".

At 1:07, a huge explosion occurs! The author and other mod people say looking directly at the explosion results in crashing or I assume really really poor framerates. Yeah, the game would probably crash from trying to render many explosions. 1:12 on appears to be too bright of a white to see the yellow of the blast. It's similar to Modern Warfare's white fallout and radiation.

A little before 2 minutes, we see a green tree is surviving the onslaught because it is too small to have destructible limbs. Skip ahead to 2:25 to see mini explosions on either side of the player. 3:05 shows the wasteland after 10,000 barrels ignited. The best part of the video is skydiving through the middle of the 10,000 barrels to Spin My Head Right Round - Primetime.

This other video shows what happens when you launch a nuke tank shell. You can just feel the atoms building while the fired round is just revolving on the tank turret. Watch out for that instant shockwave which shows off just how powerful the blast should be. The only problem is the tanks are still in one piece and the player is barely pushed back. I wanted to see him go flying really far away with ragdoll physics. Overall, nothing really exciting. So let's take it up a notch with this better Crysis Nuke video:

At the moment of impact at :38, we seem every single object get pushed with equal force towards the camera. The truck spinning out of control is pretty cool.

At 1:02, we seem the ragdoll physics of the person limited on the ability to show the amount of force. The best he can do is have his neck break and slide away. If the game had skeletal physics, I would want to see multiple fractures and bones breaking from that tremendous force. The trees are much more impressive although the tree trucks really should have been fragmented because the technology is already in the game. Perhaps the modder disabled tree destruction.

My favorite shot is at 1:16, where everything is normal with the man standing next to his car. 2 seconds later, the house and car are moving vertically. That man got crushed between his house and his car before getting skewered by trees. Strangely enough after the two minute mark, I can actually see that the tree trunks were splintered. There are also random fire effects coming from nowhere.

It is good fortune this video makes the nuke more potent, as it should be, compared to the first nuke video. Next on the modders list should be having a nuke take out a small village before moving onto skyscrapers being knocked over. When there is a physics engine, there is always a will and a way. Let's hope Crysis 2 doesn't settle for an adapted Crysis 1 engine to get it to run on consoles.

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by BlueZero

First, note the reference to the TF2 Fan video featuring the Engineer and addictive toast song.Engineer Toast Video. You can never get enough toast. At 1:46 in the video, the pressure reads an interesting level. Some might say the PSI was OVER 9000, because it was! When you get to 2:22, the Spy's face has traveled to anime land.

Moving ahead to 2:41 shows the amazing wedding being performed by the crazy priest from Half Life 2. Maybe since the Soldier won the Soldier-Demo war of 09, he was decorated enough to be the Spy's Best Man. The Pyro appears to be related to Chell's sister and the Witch from Left4Dead2. In this scene, we notice that all the Red Team are related to the Half Life and Portal (aka other Valve games) while the Blue team only has a Vortigaunt from HL2. At 2:47, we notice the Blue Engineer is recovering from being toasted, Chell proves the Cake is Not a Lie, and the cake has the flamethrower and spy gun united. The cake is also blue, red, and pink! At 2:52, the author has high hopes for Alyx and Dr. Freeman to tie the knot. This is impossible because Gordon Freeman doesn't say anything so he has no way to say "I do". They drive off and kill Frogger; they reference Frogger in the credits, otherwise I wasn't sure what it was.

The Honeymoon speaks for itself. The Pyro is dark skinned and is somehow huge even with her small stature. I was expecting the author to reveal the Pyro being male. Achievement Unlocked: Love Machine with a screw, haha, how clever.

The pregnancy section is the best part. We hear some of the best fitting music; it is both uplifting and cartoony. The gravity gun and the plunger were enough to deliver the baby. At 4:28, we get the reference to the awesome pic of the Spy having far too many cigarettes in his mouth. I believe the first appearance of this was from this Mock Meet the Spy Flash. I really though I posted this video on the blog but I couldn't find it. Anyway, 4:52 explains the entire creation of Spyro, the merging of a Spy and Pryo. There are now officially 4 teams: Blue, Red, Purple and Pink (Cupid who won the game).

There should have been one more plot twist at the end like the Red Pyro is actually a Red Spy. There is plenty of time to extend the story but it really did all it needed in 6 minutes. Overall, really enjoyed the work that went into this Flash video. After watching it, I am left satisfied and desire to post this last video:

Scout Goes to the Doctor NSFW Video

The art and audio speak for themselves!

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by BlueZero

If you have been living under a rock, this would be the episode where Ash gets Pikachu and really no action happens. Pikachu was just being an independent rat until a small boy decides to drive a bike really fast to a pet hospital. After a harsh crash, Pikachu decides it's time to save the day with a already super-effective thunder against the Sparrow.

First off, the voice of John Freeman is just as annoying, yet perfect, as the voice of Ash. This is an important first step to recreating the annoying first episode from the cartoon. Second, the overdramatic Kleiner (aka Professor Oak) really adds some great humor into the video. We all know he is making out with Ash's mother since Ash really doesn't have a father. This means Ash's mother is a gold digger as who wouldn't want to log some time with Professor Oak's Pokedex. "Gotta Catch Them All" Kleiner (that's hot). Third, the Gabe-dex has been in development for many years just like all of Valve's game commentaries. The voice actor for Gabe Newell is also spot on. I had to do a double take because my ears were fooling me.

Even if you never watched the original Pokemon episode, most of the horrible puns are still intact (shocking isn't it?). The creator has even captured the original music from the show and used it in the right places. 4:40 to 4:55 is just amazing. Alyx as Misty is a little disturbing as for some reason her face is very contorted for her brief time on screen. This is even true at 10:50 where she appears again. Also here, I glad that Barney, aka Brock, has no eyes visible. The Team Rocket with Breen and Judith must be explored in another episode. There is a lot of potential here with random purple Ekans, Koffing and blue Meowth.

Original Pokemon Episode 1

Overall, I really got a laugh out of this video. I look forward to future episodes which keep the same humor while doing the really uninspired first season of Pokemon justice. The moral of the story is when you pair either Gary's Mod or Team Fortress 2 with successful video games, amazingness always happens. Look forward to my next post to prove my point!

Update: Here is the Epic TF2 Fan Video proof you need.

Here is a random video I decided to add to this post:

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by BlueZero

Wow, so this last week or so there were a ton of birthdays for my friends and here I forget this blog is already a year old! Happy 1st Birthday BVGB! You have been good to me so far and have reached a significant audience with our limited scope. Shoutout to the original Kane and Lynch Gamespot review for once again pointing out professional game reviewers should be free from big business. While not being critical to this blog's development, it did provide a nice setpiece to work against.

With the First BVGB Post on post Jan 31st 2009, this blog entered the Internet with a lot of website wiki code construction and a little too much Russian. I have kept up the trend of the individual console/PC making a remark about each game. In Russia, game reviews you! Anyway, I am glad that I have settled the necessary Wikidot coding and have been able to secure domain names and hosting. I hope you guys are enjoying absolutely no ads on this website. While not permanent, be happy I am currently not being bought by other companys.

Also, with the transition to the custom domain name, the website lost significant organic traffic which it has really never recovered. The good news is that Google images is really prioritizing our pictures so people are seeing our content this way. If you enjoy reading these biased posts, please share the blog elsewhere on the Internet (forums, personal websites, blogs, social media, ect); many of our viewers have shared our content and we are glad you did!

May I now present you with the 5 most popular posts on this blog (starting with the most popular):


#1 N64 Texture Enhancement Projects/Packs

This post represented a significant amount of time organizing the amazing texture pack links from the various forums and sites into a convenient location. Bringing order from chaos was difficult. People viewing the post get to see what I consider the top shelf of emulated texture replacement for N64 games. I never did get around to p