Well, this is a game I picked up quite awhile ago, and have only just gotten around to playing now. It's a FPS-style fantasy game, so a little throwback to Hexen as well. There are RPG elements, and the game proudly tells you that you're not forced into being pigeon-holed into any one class, as you can learn any skills you like. The skills correspond vaguely to the classes of "fighter", "thief", "caster" with various sub-skills mixed in, like archery and so forth.

The plot is the usual fantasy trite kind of thing which you don't much care about, (something about a necromancer and crystals and a spider temple) and the characters are also hard to care about - you, the nameless faceless player, the succubus who inhabits you and makes suggestive comments all game, and the niece of some other wizard who owes you a great debt early on, and serves as the "romantic interest". As I said, who cares?

Visually it's quite nice, if repetitive. As are the enemies.

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Earth Defence Force 2017 - Sandlot - 360

After seeing it mentioned elsewhere on f13 with someone recommending it as a lightweight but fun co-op shooter, I decided to give Earth Defence Force 2017 a go. The fact that it was pretty cheap over at Play-Asia also contributed to my purchase.

So basically, you're a soldier, and you start off with some health, and a couple of basic guns. As you go through the game, the enemies drop Health (which heals you), Armour (which adds to your health next time you start a mission) and more weapons (which make stuff dead).
Most of the game you're simply ploughing through endless streams of enemies - and there's only a few types of enemies - black ants, red ants,  brown spiders, robot walker things, flying robot things in silver (and red ones for one level), and boss creatures, like the 4-legged walker, the Mecha-Godzilla knockoffs, and the flying monster generators.

You slowly increase in power by collecting the aforementioned Armour and Weapons.

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The latest in the FFT series delivers on the familiar SRPG formula that FFT practically invented. Grid based combat, job classes, and all the hideous interesting races from FFTA are back; the most godawful system system from FFTA also returns: Judges and Laws. However, rather than sending your character to jail (read: Game Over) for breaking a law, its only a slight cockblock: you lose your group buff, can't revive and miss out on some bonus loot. Also unlike FFTA's Law system which as the game advanced added more and more restrictions to each fight, there is only one law in effect* at a time. All in all, the Law system still blows, but it's not enough to stop playing.

The story ranges from childish to nonexistant; consider the following analogy: FFT : Song of Ice and Fire :: FFTA2 : Harry Potter. There are a ton of classes in game (more than 50, but some are virtually identical with a different name for each race: Soldier, Warrior, Moogle Knight etc.

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In the new Game Informer there’s a survey of (over!) 1,300 people. Apparently Game Informer is as confused as the public. See, the two questions posed here were about ‘which third-party publishers do you trust to make good games’ and ‘which developers do you trust to make good games?’ Full proper questions, with notes are below. But the results are absolutely dumb-founding and would’ve been great fodder for Game Informer to educate the public on how not to be gibbering malfunctioning retards. Instead, they went the opposite direction and continue to let the public be gibbering malfunctioning retards. Click 'read more' to find out why Game Informer occupies the bottom rung of the gaming press ladder.

Rohan Online - YNK Interactive - PC

Ever played Lineage 2? Like grinding, don't wanna pay to play? Definitely give it a spin already. If you need more convincing, read on.

Gameplay: Though they have lore, I won't bother. Gameplay revolves around picking a set race who only had one class for each of them. Assuming you CAN grind to 50, you will unlock two specialized classes you can pick. I'm not going into detail unless people ask but the basic premise is: Tough humans, Healing Elves, Ranger Half Elves, Wizardly Dark Elves, Spear-wielding Dekans (Half Dragons), or Ninja Dhans (think Japanese)

The old classic grind is there, although they add a sprinkle of quests. Now the translation isn't half bad, but who bothers to read anyway? This isn't WoW. So you pick quest and talk to people, get items and exp as reward. That's right. EXP. And WoW Daily gold is here too. Some quests are repeatable, gives less exp than the first time but same amount of gold. Easily best way to earn money.

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If you played and liked the original, stop reading and buy it. It's more of the same, just as awesome. Otherwise, read on.

EO II is, like its predecessor, an old-school dungeon crawling RPG. You form a party of 5 from 12 different classes and venture into a labyrinth to find a castle in the sky. The plot is weak, but stays mostly out of the way in your quest to whack foozles for xp. The feature that sets the EO games apart is the mapping feature. On the bottom screen of the DS, you map out the dungeon as you progress. For those of us who remember doing this with pen and paper, the feeling of nostalgia is amazing.

Also just like the good old days, this game is HARD. Trash mobs will kill you, often, if you're not careful. Money is always short; upgrading your characters' gear is a trade off, a game of "who's more important?" rather than just "oh look, new shinies for everyone and we're still rolling in cash.

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UPDATE: Crisis averted. Spore.com is back up and running.

So. The creature creator. The precursor to what will probably be the most talked about game this fall, unless Nintendo adds a taller white board as an expansion to Wii Fit thus making it the Wii Stairmaster, is coming out today. There's a trial available for the uhmm trial. Of the game. I don't even know where I'm going with this. Anyway, I got a copy of it to futz around with and found myself floundering around trying to make a human that didn't fall flat into the uncanny valley.

Lots more after the jump, including my widget where you can access the 21 things I made.

So, I see we're on version 1.0.2008.520. With Metal Gear Solid 4 coming out, I wanted to take a breather. But since it comes out Thursday morning instead of Wednesday morning (hey, fuck you Konami!), I've taken it upon myself to pound out fictional patch notes. Feel free to consider this a 'how to fix your game.' I've never really done this before, so if the language isn't quite right, feel free to tell me. Also, for Funcom – I relinquish all rights to anything written below. I simply want to see it all implemented to turn a game I like into a game I love. Furthermore, any posts in the thread following this that may have things that should be added are also free for you to use.

I'm going to just go ahead and assume you have played one of the LEGO Star Wars games.  If not, you suck.  If so, then you will be pleased to know that the Indiana Jones version surpasses those games within the first few minutes.  It's really as much of a sequel as you might think, however the puzzles are tougher right off the bat and the comedy has been kicked up a couple of notches.  If you liked LEGO Star Wars, you have to get this.  Shit, I hope you have played the Complete Saga of LEGO Star Wars, because that's gaming gold right there.

If you don't have any idea what I am talking about, this game is basically a shoot-em-up platformer in the nebulous subgenre of Ratchet & Clank.  It also has obscene amounts of unlockables, hidden items and visual comedy.  You'll play through the first three Indiana Jones movies as the characters from that chapter.  After completing sections of the story, you go back to replay using any character you have unlocked... one of which has a rocket launcher.

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There are some fighting games that hand hold the newbie player, showing them all the options within the game, what key combos to hit at what times and so on to gently groom them in how to play the game properly.

Def Jam: Fight for NY isn't one of these games. You get one tutorial fight and by fight number two you will be getting curb stomped (literally) by opponent AI that takes no prisoners. Button mashing rarely works while DJFFNY is also a 'slow' fighter, which has seem some people put off of this game. However, once you get past the getting-the-crap-kicked-out-of-you learning phase, DJFFNY becomes an excellent fighter.

Plot-wise, you enter a fantasy street gangsta world where the ownership of fight clubs is passed onto whoever can kick the most ass, with you playing the role of ass kicker for the good gangsta crimelord against an evil, corrupt gangsta crimelord (played by Snoop Dogg).

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If you can remember back far enough, Black (an FPS, in case the uber-generic name confused you) was released at a time when there was pretty much nothing else noteworthy coming out for the Xbox, which gave this title more attention than it deserved. It looked pretty, the press releases went on about "destructible environments" and FPS-on-console players *insert your own joke here* salivated at the idea.

Then Black was released and was pretty much forgotten a month after launch. This is because Black is the gaming equivalent of a one night stand - pretty enough, thrilling in some points, but when you say goodbye about 7 hours later there is not much else on offer to bring you back for a repeat visit. Although it contains a lot of destructible items and some fantastic set pieces that cause lots of pretty explosions, it all becomes a bit same-y after a while - move forward, headshot some guys, maybe blow something up or destroy something else, repeat.

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A pair of disclaimers: first, I love coop action RPGs to death. Second, I've only played this game multiplayer; so this doesn't cover the single player game at all (which I have little interest in). That out of the way, this game is fairly similar to the original Crystal Chronicles: players pick one of four "races"; there's a warrior, archer, mage, and some guy who does strange things with pots. Combat is fairly standard for those who have played the original...or any action RPG released in the last few years. The graphics are pretty good for the DS, and weapons/armor changing your characters appearance won a lot of points in my book. Connectivity between the DSs was good, but we always play in the same room so YMMV.

Things that make the game interesting: the magic combining system from the original returns (2 people casting fire makes Fira, 3 castings is Firaga, etc.) although classes being able to multicast on their own detracted from the teamwork aspect slightly.

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I didn't like Mario Kart: Double Dash too much.  This is mostly because it was too difficult to drive and grind sparks and juggle items and also drag Luigi on the pavement behind you.  Mario Kart Wii at least takes out the annoyance of driving with a thumbstick from that list.

I'm going to put it bluntly and say that this is Yet Another Mario Kart game.  You have characters of various sizes and various karts and wacky tracks to race around.  I think the tracks are somewhat better than Double Dash, even the ones that they brought over from that version.  The native tracks have a neat half-pipe thing you can do in some areas, and the functional shortcut makes a weak but notable return.  Also, characteristically years late, Nintendo copied GTA and added bikes to this version.

Why would you get this if you are already sick of Mario Kart, like me?  The Wii Wheel.  As cliché as it is to say, the Wii Wheel adds lots of fun to the proceedings.

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Well, after all the hullabaloo about this series on the 360, and even playing through Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 on PC and enjoying it well enough, I decided to give this a go.

And well, it's got a lot of suckage.

it might be Robot Jebus on the 360, but on the PC the controls have a severe case of consolitis, partly because of a non-intuitive implementation of the "cover system" which just feels awkward, but also because they have just ported the "press a button and then press up/down/left/right" system you need for a console controller right to the keyboard instead of redesigning the controls for a keyboard. The visuals have some severe issues, in that everything is down here from blurtown. GRAW2 suffered a little from this, but R6:V has a really bad case of it. To understand what I'm getting at, imagine a pane of fogged-up glass from the shower placed in front of your monitor.

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I didn't expect to be as entertained as I am for just $15 American.  This is a management type game, like Roller Coaster Tycoon, but it looks a lot like Dark Cloud 2 minus the combat and fishing and golf and photography.  Doesn't really play like that, though.

The executive summary of the introductory plot is that you are a new kiddie king who has just returned to rebuild the kindgom that was ruined by a miasma which I suspect was prevalent in the previous Crystal Chronicles game.  It's gone now, and so is the town around the castle, so you get to rebuild it.  The king isn't alllowed to fight, so you commission adventurers.  You tell them what to do and they go do it.  Meanwhile you press the flesh and kiss babies in town in order to improve morale.  You also get to pick more-or-less where the buildings go.  Most things cost gil but buildings cost element-something, which is obtained from finite sources like fully exploring sites and defeating bosses.

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