#REDSTAR ♪ ♫

game information: Developers Rockstar North, War Drum Studios, Rockstar Vienna PublishersACE (2), Rockstar Games Release DateOctober 29, 2002 PlatformsPlayStation 2, PC, Macintosh, iPhone, Android, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox Discounting Grand Theft Auto 3, there's no other game that offers anything like the experience you'll have with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The game of fast cars and ruthless criminals packs more action and excitement into the first few hours than can be found in the wholeety of most games. Released almost a full year after the previous version (and right during E3 - thanks, Rockstar), there are a number of compelling, albeit minor, changes to the model that captivated us so much last year. I played through a lot of the game on the PS2 and have been hard at work this past week playing through it once again on the PC. For those of you who've already experienced the joys of the previous game on the PC or PS2, let me spell out the major differences and improvements in store for Vice City. The story is much stronger this time around with a fully-fleshed out protagonist. The missions themselves are often longer and sometimes involve more kinds of gameplay than before. Buildings play a bigger role as well as the game permits players not only to enter structures but also buy them, opening up a new range of missions and rewards. Add to that more weapons, vehicles and a host of other surprises and you'll see that Vice City raises the bar for the series. The only downside is that the overall design of the game does not have the same impact that the previous game did. Hey, if it ain't broke ... If you've played Vice City on the PS2 there are fewer surprises in store. The two games are wholly identical in terms of content (making things a bit easier on our strategy guide guys). All the missions, bonuses and characters are completely identical to those in the console version. But the PC version benefits from better graphics, a slight tweak in the controls, a custom MP3-driven radio station and a customizable character skin. If you've never played either game on any system, you're in for a real treat. Vice City tells a much tighter, more personal story that GTA3. While the anonymous nature of the character in the previous game made it a bit easier to loose yourself in the role, the main character in Vice City is tied to the overall narrative much more tightly. The story plays out in a series of cutscenes that set up the action of each individual mission. The game takes place in the 1980s, before the events in GTA3. You play as Tommy Vercetti, a gangster who's just finished a 15-year stint in prison. Once he's out his bosses send him down to Florida's Vice City as the point man for some new operations. Once there Tommy teams up with a shifty lawyer (think Fredo) and the two begin plans for a big drug score. Once the drugs and the money disappear, Tommy finds himself fighting to discover who's cheated him while fending off the existing criminal elements of Vice City. As you might imagine, this type of scenario does involve a fair bit of violence. What you might not expect is how the game can walk a line between humor and horror while presenting all this material. Vice City itself is a fully developed island town that lives and breathes like a few other game settings before it. Cars drive up and down the streets, boats ply the water ways, news copters zip by overhead and everywhere you turn the citizens of Vice City are going about their business. The crooks, cops and citizens of the city are all capable of a level of dynamic behaviors. But even if you're not shooting at them, they still have agendas. You'll see rival gangs fighting each other in the streets and traffic accidents escalating in to fist fights. And while you'll spend plenty of time walking amongst these encounters, the real heart of the game is stealing cars and driving from crime to crime. The list of cars available in the game is far too long for us to examine each of them in turn but some general comments should give you a good impression of what to expect. You'll find lots of small sporty cars and lots of large family sedans and wagons with plenty of gradations in between. Large delivery vans, city buses and trucks give you a slower but more damage-resistant ride. It's just what you got in GTA3, there's just more of it this time around. Although it's not new for the series, I should probably say a few words about the rules of the road at this point. Rockstar's struck a great balance between offering you consequences for your actions and letting you run around without worrying about the real rules of the road. Cops aren't too worried about speeding, running red lights or even causing crashes. This keeps the pace of the game high and also ensures that, when you really do do something to cheese off the cops, it becomes a dynamic part of the game rather than an inconvenience. The pace of the game is also helped in that crashes aren't as catastrophic as they might be in real life; you can take a few hits and keep on going. Getting back to the vehicles themselves, the motorcycles are a fantastic addition for the series, not just in terms of the "cool" factor but also in terms of some new gameplay opportunities. At the most basic level, the four types of motorcycles found in the game offer a really fast and nimble mode of transport. Zipping in and out of tight spots in traffic is much easier from the seat of one of these two-wheeled demons than from the driver's seat of your sedan. (A cute little scooter, called the Faggio, is included for your velociphobes.) You can shoot ahead of you while on the motorcycle which makes them a great vehicle for the game's chase sequences. Tons of ramps are laid out all across the city. While they're placed fairly obviously, they never seem terribly blatant or out of place with the rest of the environment. Naturally some of the placements are a bit too obvious ("what's that giant ramp doing pointing out over the river?") But for the most part, the ramps are positioned unobtrusively. Once you get a helicopter, you'll even begin to see how many ramps there are on the roofs of buildings. Quite a few of these are laid out in courses, letting you ramp from one building to the next across large sections of the city. While the motorcycles let you tilt up or down for some of the trickier stunts, you can take most of the jumps in a car or on a bike. There are a lot more boats this time around and they're more often the focus of missions. You'll be called on to take part in boat races, boat theft , and boat destruction missions throughout the course of the game. Completing certain mission strands will even grant you respawning boats at particular locations. The boating model is slick with just the right amounts of drifting and sliding to make water seem distinct from pavement. The only really difficult part of driving a boat is getting on and off without falling off the dock. Which brings me to one of our pet peeves - namely that you can't swim. I wouldn't mind so much if the game weren't set on a pair of islands. As Such you're frequently near the water and there are plenty of times that you'll find yourself drowning to death three feet from shore. It's particularly frustrating when it comes right before the end of a mission. Rockstar's explanation that "Gangsters don't swim" seems to dodge the issue a bit. And although they're not available until later in the game, planes and helicopters are also on the menu. You'll unlock these as the result of completing certain missions or buying certain properties. Some missions even require you to use these vehicles. But to be honest, once I managed to secure a few helicopters for my own use, the PS2 version lost a bit of its structure for me. But that's merely me responding to the wonderfully open-ended nature of the game. For almost a full week, I rarely even bothered to take on any new missions, preferring instead to soar high above the city or swoop down narrow streets in my nimble copter. The control system as conceived on the PS2 was quite convenient and the PC version maintains the efficiency throughout. But the PC controls surpass those of the PS2 in a few key areas while falling short only in one admittedly crucial area. (While you can easily replicate the established control scheme with a gamepad, I prefer to focus on the new keyboard controls in reviewing the game.) The translation of the controls is pretty straightforward. The game comes with configurations for both the WASD and arrow key style of play. There are a few inconveniences here (like the sprint key being mapped to the right shift key, a problem for us WASDers) but since you can set up the controls any way you want, you can easily change this yourself. Mouse support is probably the biggest story here. Fanboy preferences aside, being able to use the mouse to aim your weapons makes this a much easier, more convenient game. I'm not knocking the Dual Shock system but the analog aiming definitely takes second place to the mouse for me. For those who aren't quite familiar with the difference, the aiming on the PS2 is handled with the analog stick. The centered position represents no movement of the reticle while a full press in any direction starts moving the reticle in that direction. The mouse allows for more precise controls as the reticle stops moving once the mouse stops moving. The new aiming controls make some of the missions much easier. Sniping Haitians from a distant rooftop or shooting fools from the skid of a helicopter is much simpler this time around. Those two missions took several tries on the gamepad; I got through them both on the first try with the mouse. But driving with the mouse is, as the French say, le crap. It uses the same scheme as the PS2 aiming controls: the mouse moves away from center and the car turns in proportion to the amount you moved your mouse. Having to move the mouse back to center to go straight again is a bit of a pain. Perhaps if I laid out a grid on my desk .... The alternative of course is forcing the player to keep moving the mouse to stay in a turn. And my desk isn't big enough for some of the really hard turns I've needed to make. It's better then to go with the default keyboard steering. While it doesn't offer the same incremental control that analog inputs provide, the thoughtful use of small, short taps almost duplicates the finer controls available with analog devices. Again, as I said at the start, this could be fixed with the use of a gamepad, but then you're going to lose the mouse control or be forced to switch back and forth every time you get in to a car. Besides getting in and out of cars, you'll also be able to get in and out of many of the city's buildings. Vice City has a number of locations that you can explore, from police stations to mansions to shopping malls. There are even lots of missions that take you inside one or more of these structures. While there's a brief load as you move in or out of some buildings, the rest of the game continues outside. You can look at the window of your first hotel, for instance, and see the traffic passing by on the street. When you step out, that's the traffic you'll see. You can also buy a lot of the properties in the game. You'll acquire some properties as a result of finishing particular missions. We can't really get in to those without giving away some key story points, but you will find yourself set up with a few choice pads around the city. You can use these buildings as save spots, naturally, but you can also use many of them to store extra vehicles. I've got a hotel on the north side of town packed with various police and FBI cars, for instance, and a mansion with a fleet of sports cars. Some buildings give you even more mission opportunities. While there is a definite core story in the game, you're pretty free to take on extra side missions that support the main story without necessarily advancing it. This gives you a chance to go and try something else if you hit a roadblock in the main story path. Sometimes a little time away from a particularly difficult mission (and the missions here are a bit more difficult than in the previous game) is all you need to bring a fresh perspective to the problem. In this way, Vice City offers almost limitless playability. While you won't necessarily stumble upon any significant content, you'll be just as happy spending odd hours driving around looking for the small rewards scattered throughout the game. Apart from the vehicle missions that put the player in the role of ambulance driver, police officer and even pizza delivery guy, the game does not offer the same kind of dynamic story-telling and quests that worked so well in a game like Pirates! . But it makes up for this with the kind of depth of story-telling that's just not possible in a purely dynamic game. The missions here can be much longer and comprise multiple parts. On the one hand, this makes for much more interesting and engaging gameplay. On the other hand it can require a bit of backtracking if you fail. Fortunately the new game puts a taxi cab right outside your recovery point (hospital or police station) and takes you right back to your uncompleted mission. If you can't tell from the screenshots, the visuals are breathtaking. Vice City differs from Liberty City in that it at least gives the appearance of being somewhat clean. There's a pastel glow to nearly everything that hides the nastiness that lies beneath. High rises, sprawling golf courses, industrial ports and a host of other locales are all rendered with fantastic detail and fit in well with each other. The transitions between particular areas and neighborhoods of the city are seamless and very natural. The weather and time of day effects are brilliant; you can feel the warmth of the sunrise or the dampness of a thunderstorm in the colors they use. If you've got a fast enough car and a straight enough road, you're bound to see some of the content popping in. Pedestrians appearing in front of you aren't such a big deal. It's the cops on the street and the rocks in the ocean that are the biggest problems. Luckily the problems with this type of streamed content are rare. Also on the subject of going fast, I'm glad to see that Rockstar has done away with the irritating blur effect that comes as the default graphics mode on the PS2. Once you get your hands on a helicopter, you can take to the skies and see just how good the draw distance is. At the higher altitudes you lose some of the details but that's a small price to pay for seeing the entire city laid out below you. Once up in the air, you may notice that there are some huge areas of the city that never really get featured quite as they ought to. But that's like complaining that you did not get soup with an eight course meal. Again, having played GTA3, it's the little details that impress me most in the sequel. You can see the back of Tommy's shirt fluttering as he drives down the street on a motorcycle. Another nice touch is that the hood of your car will fly off once it raises up. (In the previous game, the hood being up was part of a distinct damage state. You had to damage your car even more if you wanted it to come off.) The smooth frame rate and stunning visuals are even more impressive when you consider the overall stability of the game. Where GTA3 definitely took some knocks for performance, so far we've yet to have any technical problems at all with our versions. I've had a small bit of trouble getting my Audigy card to work but with a game this dense, that's only a very minor annoyance. I'm soothed by the incredibly quick load times. On the PS2, I could always count on a little sandwich-time while the game loaded up. On the PC the game loads in less than a tenth of the time it takes on the PS2. Overall, the system requirements are quite reasonable. In fact, the game is so well designed that you can probably even get away with running the game on a system a bit lower than Rockstar's planned minimum spec. We've run it on a range of machines at both ends of the spectrum and were pleased to see that it ran well at 640x480 on even 500MHz processors with 256MB of RAM. A lot depends on the video card though, so if you're even considering playing the game on anything less than the recommended spec, you better make sure you make up for the deficiencies in the video card department. Although if you have a 128MB video card in a 500MHz machine there might be something wrong with you. Apart from the streaming pop-in, the cutscenes tend to show off a few other small problems with the graphics. Mitten-hands and some minor clipping are the worst offenders here but, as with most other annoyances in the game, they're immediately cancelled out by more impressive features. In the case of the cutscenes, the real stars are the script writers and voice actors. It's rare that game dialogue carries any real emotional impact but nearly every scene in this game pulls it off. The script it witty without being goofy and mature without being overly coarse. There is obscenity in the game, of course, but it suits the story. But it's the voice actors who steal the show. I'd be curious to know how much of the profits from GTA3 went in to hiring talent for the sequel. Nearly every member of the cast is a fairly well-known personality in their own right and they all, without exception, voice their roles remarkably well. Burt Reynolds, Luiz Guzman, Dennis Hopper, Gary Busey, Phillip Michael Thomas and a few others all lend their talents to the game and really enhance the experience. Of course, Ray Liotta's voicing of the main character is as perfect a job of casting and reading as I think anyone could expect. Where Grand Theft Auto L 3 made good use of brand new music, Vice City offers a set of radio stations that play over 100 tunes from the 80s. You'll hear songs from artists as diverse as Lionel Richie, Wang Chung, Ozzy Osbourne and Run DMC. The music really helps to make the game work, much better than any newly commissioned works could. The commercials and talk radio options on the dial are humorous enough to stand on their own apart from the game. Paired with it, they offer the occasional laugh and help to bring the game world to life. While the radio stations are great, most players will eventually try out the new MP3-driven radio station. The setup for this is super easy. Without even referring to the manual or readme file, I dove in to the directory, found a folder called MP3 and loaded it up with all my favorite hits from the 80s. A little Police, a little Talking Heads, that song from Musical Youth (you know the one) and I'm good to go. Once the tunes are in you'll see a radio station called MP3 Player on your dial. Just tune in and listen to the songs you've put in the folder. They play the music make me jump and run, after all. What did you think of GTA: Vice City, Spaz? Finally, and let me assure you that Rockstar sees this one coming a mile away, we're still disappointed that there's no multiplayer mode. I've finally come to buy into Rockstar's response that they won't add multiplayer to the series until they can make it as engaging and interesting as the game's single-player mode. Our only concern at that point is that Rockstar eventually does do something new and exciting on the multiplayer front. If they're going to deny us something even as simple as a four-player mayhem mode, what they finally come up with needs to be really, really impressive. In the meantime, the nearly infinite playability of the title puts complaints about missing multiplayer to rest. Verdict In the end, any criticism I can offer on this game is merely nitpicking. The occasional weaknesses of the game are few and far between and the overall momentum of the game propels you past the dull spots so quickly that you'll only begin to notice them once you start looking for things to criticize. As a matter of personal taste, I think I'd prefer to play the game on the PS2 for the simple reason that it feels more fun in a living room environment. (Plus it gives me something to do while the wife is playing The Sims.) Kicked back on the couch with the surround sound turned way up, you'll find that you're pulled in to the whole experience much more immediately than is perhaps possible in a desktop format. Gamers who have more comfortable, EAX supported environments around their PC will find it more difficult to favor the console version for these reasons. Still, the new additions and control tweaks for the PC are slowly but surely tearing me away from the television. Heading back to play the title on the PS2, I'm more aware of the frustrations of aiming and the lack of a custom soundtrack. Those additions are powerful enough to almost justify playing both versions of the game. While Vice City is a better title than its predecessor, it does lack a lot of the surprise and discovery of the first title, at least in terms of design. I won't hold that against Rockstar too much. After all, there's not much incentive to innovate when the previous game is still selling like crazy. Still, the few additions they've made make Vice City a better (if not as unexpected) a treat. system requirements: (minimum) Memory: 128 MB Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6200 CPU: Intel Celeron Grand Theft Auto: Vice City File Size: 915 MB OS: Microsoft® Windows® 2000 / XP

game information: Developers:Visual Concepts Publishers:SEGA, ACE (2), Ingram Entertainment Release Date:January 8, 2001 Platforms:Xbox, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Pc Just because the NFL's regular season is over, that doesn't mean it's too late for Xbox gamers to get fired up all over again for NFL 2K2. When it debuted on the Dreamcast two years ago, the Sega Sports franchise was the first real challenger to Madden's throne with its solid and intuitive gameplay. Now in the year 2K2, NFL 2K2 arrives on the Xbox, as the first Sega title for the system, with the enhanced graphics and improved audio elements like you expect from Microsoft's console. Rather than improving the areas of their NFL game that needed help - like the franchise mode - Visual Concepts instead built upon the game's strengths and focused on giving gamers more of what they've always liked about Sega football. The substance over style formula has always worked and will continue do so, but NFL 2K2 is screaming for a little more flash and glitter to go along with those meat and potatoes. Features Fully licensed by the NFL and NFL Player's Association Animated sidelines with chain gang, teams and camera crews Natural lighting effects Advanced playbooks and play calling system Realistic TV presentation with improved commentary, replays and telestrator usage Players with faces and facial animations New quarterback behavior system Revamped passing system Gameplay In football videogames, the passing system is the most important element. You get the sense that the team behind NFL 2K2 worked on fine tuning the passing game before anything else when preparing their game to make the transition from Dreamcast to PS2 and Xbox. The passing mechanism is easy to learn and difficult to master, just what football gamers are looking for. The animation, pace of the game and passing mechanics all flow together so that you'll instantly know what's expected of you when you drop back to make a pass with your QB. Brett Favre is bound by the same rules as Jon Kitna, but you'll notice the difference between them when you play because one does everything with ease and the other has to make a perfect throw every time to complete the pass. This is how it's supposed to be done. And the Maximum Passing feature which allows you to fine tune the throw to a specific place around the receiver is still one of the best inventions in videogame football. The pass defense is just as sophisticated and advanced as the offensive system. Defensive backs make decisions to cover receivers a certain way and take away some options from the offense, just like in the NFL. It doesn't matter if you've got favre throwing passes to Jerry Rice out there, if the DB is taking away the sideline, you're not going to complete a pass to the sidelines. You'll have to try something else. As you become more familiar with the game you'll begin to recognize coverages and the routines of players on both sides of the line of scrimmage. This makes the passing game a never-ending exploration of NFL offensive theory. The running game in 2K2 seems similar to the previous, Dreamcast versions of the game. It's not bad, it's just not as intuitive as it should be. I have no problem with a defense stacking the line of scrimmage and simply having more tacklers going against my blockers on a running play. But too often in 2K2, what should be a nice 5 yard gain ends up as a run for no gain simply because the blocking routines are too sophisticated for their own good. There are tons of no-talent running backs in the NFL who make it to the Pro Bowl year after year because they follow the basic rule of "follow your blocking." So then in NFL 2K2, why do fullbacks and offensive lineman spend so much time changing direction and wandering around the line of scrimmage looking for somebody to block? This ends up being a great way for them to end up running into your ball carrier. This of course, only sets him up for a bone crushing hit from a speedy linebacker. The franchise mode is as thin and undeveloped on the Xbox as it always has been on other systems. The question is why? As great as the between-the-lines gameplay is in NFL 2K2, it's not so great as to make it impossible to get some decent Franchise mode features throw in there. Again, this section of the game isn't as logical as it should be. The menus during the offseason where you're supposed to concentrate on building your team up for the next season, are difficult to understand, navigate and use. For example, when you propose a trade and the other team objects, rather than being able to fine tune the trade and perhaps switch the players involved in the deal, you have to back out of a couple menus and propose an entirely new trade with all of the new information. Free agency is simply take-it-or-leave-it shopping trip. There's no bargaining or haggling over years or salary like in real free agency. You simply see how much a guy wants and for how long and make a decision to pay him or not. Surely VC can do better than this on the Xbox. The outstanding passing game in NFL 2K2 makes for some damn fine multiplayer gaming. Since games among friends usually degenerate into a hailstorm of Hail Mary passes, it's nice to have a solid passing system to support wide open aerial attacks. And by support I mean that NFL 2K2 will still force you to make some outstanding plays even though you're just playing with friends. Graphics The first thing you'll notice about the looks of 2K2 are the player faces. They have them! Now every game has to make its leaps and bounds where appropriate and it just wouldn't have been right if Sega brought football to the Xbox with those strange blank non-faces we saw in Dreamcast's NFL 2K1 and 2K. They actually used photos of real NFL players when they could so that stars like Jerry Rice and Brett Favre really look like themselves. If you're some special teams scrub though, you'll just look like a plain old face in the crowd. The player models aren't as angular and sharp as they have been in the past although you can still see their cubist roots if you squint your eyes. The uniform details are better than they've ever been right down to the Korey Stringer memorial "77" patches on Minnesota's uniforms. The animations are all effective although still a little unnatural. They move so quickly it can look a little herky jerky at times. Edgerrin James doesn't run with a herky jerky style in real life. Some guys might, but not everybody should run like that. Actually, the animation suffers from the same problem as the player models and other visual elements: they seem limited by NFL 2K2's Dreamcast roots. Meaning that the players and animations look more or less like they did on Sega's machine, but the additional power of the Xbox has made them look and move as well as possible. The camera work especially in the replays is excellent in NFL 2K2. Seamless transitions and optimal angles that would make directors at ESPN jealous will have you smiling from ear to ear. Plus there's great commentary to go with those replays. Audio In fact, NFL 2K2 has the best commentary in a football game to date. You can have all of the professional announcers you want, but they can't hold a candle to Dan Stevens and Peter O'Keefe. Their insight and interaction with each other is genuinely interesting but the best part is they actually comment during replays and talk about what you're seeing. That's a feature most of us remember from watching football on TV, it's amazing that up until now, guys like Madden and Summerall have yet to say anything about what we're watching during those automatic replays. The player chatter, where they call one another out by name, is still there and very welcome on the Xbox. Even if they do all sound like the same guy, you'll find yourself turning up the player chatter volume on the options menu. The crushing hits and grunts of players is all good stuff as well. The crowd even seems to be an educated football crowd, booing and cheering in time with the action on the field. Verdict NFL 2K2 is a competent entry in the Xbox football derby along with Madden, Microsoft's resurrected NFL Fever franchise and any other football title that may come along. Its combination of pick-up-and-playability and decent gameplay should make it very appealing to Xbox owners. But the problems of the game add up in a hurry. Beginning with its outdated rosters and team ratings (ie. Pittsburgh and Chicago are poorly rated, New York Giants are great) all the way through to its underdeveloped Franchise Mode, 2K2 does many things that will justify you waiting until next club NFL 2K3. If you love the series and want to see how it turned out on Xbox, NFL 2K2 is worth the purchase. It can't match the polish and NFL intricacies of Madden and doesn't look as good as NFL Fever, but it has the middle ground locked down.

game information: RELEASE DATE: 16 Aug, 2017 DEVELOPER: Codemodeon PUBLISHER: Codemodeon Plate-forme: Pc Description: Axel Rix, a young soccer player. Since being selected for the England National Football Team he was the center of attention. Nowadays, things are not going well for him. In his last couple of games, he was the main reason behind the loss, especially with his inaccurate headers. The media and the supporters are started being so heavy on him. Increased pressure on his shoulders made him behave like a lunatic and lastly, he has been kicked out of the national team. His career has taken serious damage. He can’t bring himself to this situation. To get back to his once successful days he starts to train really hard. While he keeps on working, extraordinary things start to happen around him, which will eventually lead him to become the hero of another story. Header Goal VR is a physics-based, action pumped virtual reality sports game with a simulation like interaction dynamics. Through its story-based levels you find yourself in the place of the character Axel Rix who is a young soccer player. Your main goal is to hit thrown balls by heading while targeting various objects in a soccer training field. Each stage has a unique level design. To achieve a better score, you should have a plan. Even hitting the targets in the right order makes a great difference. You will start to feel like Axel within the immersive atmosphere of the game. Being able to hit a virtual ball in the most natural and realistic way makes Header Goal VR the most entertaining way of heading a ball. I have a problem with this game even before I have started to play it. You see, like it or not virtual reality is still a niche of the total gaming audience making it quite nerdy. But being nerdy and sporty are not things that usually go together. At school, I never kicked a single football because I was too busy playing the latest SNES games and I would never in a million years think about doing a header on a muddy, leather football (soccer ball for everyone else). But yet… that is what this game is asking me to do, only in VR! But here is the surprising part (for me anyway) ... I enjoyed it! In fact, I dare say I had so much fun that I was playing it for hours. The story of the game goes that you play a fictional character who goes by the name of Axel Rix (maybe this is a play in Belgian starlet Axel Frix) and you literally have to header the ball into the back of the net and towards various targets to score points. Some targets move, some are big, some are small, but they are all possible to get. Playing the game standing up you really do have to header the ball in pretty much what I might imagine you have to do in real life. So whole body back, then rock forward, but just with the head and neck. Hit enough targets, score enough points and you get to move on to the next level. I was so surprised at just how much fun this game is. It’s as close to heading a real football as I ever want to get. While I am not willing to test out if it will improve your heading skills in the real world, in VR it sure feels very real, almost to the point I could feel the ball impacting with my head! In terms of value for money, I would have to say it is worth every penny. There are enough challenges and party pass-around opportunities to make this a real showcase for how good VR can be. The only thing that really surprises me about this game is why it hasn’t been made a lot sooner! SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 7+ Processor: Intel Core i5 4590 equivalent or greater Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 / AMD Radeon R9 290 equivalent or greater DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 2 GB available space

game information: DevelopersTeam Cherry PublishersTeam Cherry, Skybound Games Release DateFebruary 24, 2017 PlatformsPC, Macintosh, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Wii U It’s not hard to get lost in the deep, subterranean world of Hollow Knight - and I mean that in more ways than one. The expansive catacombs of Hallownest have countless paths to explore and secrets to find. But more than that, it’s rich with lore, history, and purpose that drew me into a 2D Metroidvania kingdom I wanted to uncover every inch of. The deeper I went into Hollow Knight, the more I was surprised at just how much content and freedom it has to offer. I could wander in basically any direction and find bosses to fight, upgrades to collect, and secrets to uncover. But what’s truly captivating about the exploring this long-dead kingdom is its atmosphere. Art, music, color tone, sound, and a million other little details combine to give each area of the map a distinct sense of place, and those areas jigsaw together in a way that feels intentional and alive. World Wide Web There are far more of these distinct biomes than I ever expected to discover, and the edges of each one blend together with the next in ways that help them make sense in the world. For example, walls on the border of the Fungal Wastes, even impassable ones in other areas, will be dotted with its telltale mushrooms. The lush environment of an area called Greenpath feels bustling and humid, a stark difference to the cold, dark caves of the Forgotten Crossroads. The bubble-filled region of Fog Canyon isn’t technically underwater, but the muffled filter over all of its audio goes hand-in-hand with jellyfish enemies and a brighter blue tone. Hallownest’s capital city, the City of Tears, is a metropolis in a huge cave where it’s always raining. But it wasn’t until 10 hours after I first discovered this place that I stumbled across the Blue Lake, a massive body of serene water positioned just above the underground city. Hollow Knight doesn’t shove this connection in your face, it just lets you explore its world and piece together the story for yourself as you sit down and enjoy a moment of quiet. Hollow Knight's larger story is told in a subtle way, but its lore is so deep that I feel like I could write a book on it. In fact, Hollow Knight tells you very little about what’s going on, and instead sends you into a world full of monumental events that all happened long before you arrived: wars and heroes, love and culture, disease and destruction. The aftermath of Hallownest's troubled past is left for you to discover and comes through loud and clear, but only if you take the time to listen. It’s told in a very subtle way, but teaches you so much about Hallownest in the process that I feel like I could practically write a book on it. It’s a tragic tale, one full of fallen heroes and terrible decisions, but it still manages to make time for beautiful, calm, and hopeful moments throughout. And it’s easy to enjoy those moments, because Hollow Knight’s hand-drawn art is simply beautiful. It’s a world that manages to feel cohesive despite its citizens being adorable bug-people in a dying cave. The story (and your place in it) is picked up as you go. Some of it through dialogue with the adorable and quirky characters who still reside in this decrepit kingdom, some through important story events, and some just by observing your surroundings and the clues strewn about it. After my second playthrough, I have a fairly clear picture of Hallownest’s history, but it’s a picture I assembled myself. As much as I genuinely loved being pushed out of the boat and told to start kicking, Hollow Knights ’first few hours can be a predictably sink-or-swim experience as a result. It’s an unashamedly challenging game that does a great job of silently teaching you how to play, but it still felt a little bit daunting to start - especially when death means having to fight your way back to your corpse to reclaim your money, called Geo. You have to find a map seller named Cornifer in each area before you can start keeping track of where you’ve been, and even then you have to equip a specific charm to see where you are on it in real time. That, coupled with fact that getting good at the combat takes practice, means I spent my first couple hours just trying to figure Hollow Knight out. But once I picked up the rhythm of its combat and the pattern of exploring its initially restrictive cave systems, Hollow Knight clicked in a way that made me never want to put it down. After Greenpath, the second major area, you reach a point where there’s no clear “correct” direction anymore. Like any Metroidvania, your path options are gated behind things like ledges too high to reach or gaps too far to jump until you find the necessary upgrades, but there are enough options that don't result in dead ends to keep to you exploring for quite a while. Hidden around the Kingdom of Hallownest are traditional Metroidvania abilities like a dash and a wall climb to help you better navigate its caves and reach new places. These new movement abilities also allow you to move through new paths in familiar terrain faster and more efficiently, giving the obligatory need to retread old ground (which does happen a fair amount) fresh life. Suddenly your wall climb turns that small gap between platforms into a shortcut instead of a hazard. New movement abilities allow you to move through new paths in familiar terrain, giving the obligatory need to retread old ground fresh life. Thankfully, there is also a flavor-filled quick-travel system called the Stagways. Stag stations can be found and unlocked across Hallownest, allowing you to call The Last Stag to take you between them. What could just be a jump between points instead becomes a quest in itself, and I almost always spoke to the stag after unlocking a station not to travel, but to hear his gruff but optimistic take on whatever new stop i brought him to. Hollow Knight's world also undergoes more concrete changes as you progress. Railways and elevators will unlock permanently, opening shortcuts that loop back to earlier sections and easing the burden of backtracking. One early area eventually even morphs into a much harder late-game section in a way that makes it feel like your actions in Hallownest have real weight. Hammer Meets Nail The combat in Hollow Knight is relatively straightforward, but starts out tricky as you learn to time quick directional sword slashes with jumps and dashes. It rewards patience and skill massively - killing enemies is a matter of sharp timing, learning attack patterns, and having quick reflexes more than just the upgrades you earn along the way. You can find upgrades to your weapon damage, increase your max health, and equip charms with a variety of abilities, but more importantly, I just got better as I went. A boss that gave me tons of trouble at the start of the game was a pushover when I returned for a second playthrough. And while your timing requires precision, the combat itself is somewhat forgiving. Hitting enemies lets you collect a resource called Soul which you can stop and channel at any time to heal, as long as you don’t get hit. So while the all-or-nothing nature of dropping your Geo on death gives exploration a sweaty-palmed tension, Hollow Knight also gives you the tools to take a breath, gather Soul, and get your health back up. There are a decent amount of smaller enemies scattered around each level as well, acting as weaker baddies that let you recover Soul and collect Geo in relative safety. But there are just as many scary opponents too, and dying far from a checkpoint is a real risk. The enemy variety is impressive to say the least, with nearly 100 different types to fight, and even ones with similar behaviors looking dramatically different depending on what area of the map you find them in. A charm system allows you to customize your own methods for killing those enemies as well. Each charm takes up a set number of notches (which you can earn more of along the way) and range from small effects, like extending your attack distance or gathering more soul on hits, to large trade-off changes, like doubling your health but preventing you from healing at all, which can dramatically change how you play. Thankfully, you can freely swap them out whenever you sit at a bench, which also serve as Hollow Knight's save points and healing stations. That meant I could come up with specific combinations to counter different scenarios on the fly. I had my favorite loadout for general use, a loadout that upped the amount of Geo I got and collected it automatically, and a loadout for moving more quickly. If you prefer using Hollow Knight's Soul-consuming damage abilities instead of swinging your sword (called a Nail) you could equip charms that increase Soul damage and even change your attacks entirely. For some harder boss fights that didn’t give me an opportunity to heal, my loadout even shifted to maximizing my temporary health at the cost of unequipping charms I had grown to rely on. Through all that experimentation, it never felt like there was a wrong choice. All the charms are good, and they all work, and it’s up to you to determine which you like the most and which work best for the scenario in front of you. And if any situation will push you to test those choices out, it will likely be one of Hollow Knight's copious amount of boss fights. Seriously: there are dozens of different bosses, ranging from small and quick enemies to large, deadly brutes. These contains challenges are some of the best thrills available because they force you to find a strategy, learn when it’s safe to attack or heal, and get better each time you get crushed Because believe me, you will get crushed. Those hard losses sometimes slowed my momentum, but there is almost always some other path to explore. If I was having trouble pushing through in one direction, I’d just wander down another until I got stronger (or just better) and decided to face that tough fight again. Soul-Searching For Secrets In fact, a staggering amount of Hollow Knight's best content is entirely optional. You could probably beat the campaign without seeing two-thirds of what it has to offer, though the quest to get an alternate (and much better) ending will pull you in front of significantly more. Bosses, thoughtful story, and whole sections of the map can remain hidden, which adds to that feeling of actually exploring this world when you do stumble upon them. None of Hollow Knight's optional content feels like filler. The key here is that none of this optional content feels like filler. I actively wanted to find every secret I possibly could and learn what was actually going on in the story. It all felt unique, significant, and wonderfully put together. Even after the 30+ hours it took me to truly beat Hollow Knight, I was excited to go back for more. Having so much to do at any given time can admittedly be overwhelming at points. There can be so many open paths on your map that the burden of deciding which to explore next can make you doubt which is the “right” way. But the beauty of Hallownest is that there is very rarely a right or wrong choice, and it’s unlikely two players will explore these caves in the same order. Hollow Knight has also been getting free post-launch content updates since its launch on PC last year, all of which are included on Switch (and more updates are on the way, according to developer Team Cherry). Those patches have added new areas and new bosses, and one even added the ability to add custom markers to your map. The simple act of being able to visually track when I need to revisit an area or which paths I’ve yet to go down is a godsend. It has helped me take stock of what needs to be done alongside the other late-game amenities Hollow Knight makes available for completionists, like maps that will eventually track certain collectibles. But so much of what’s worth finding past the point where you can “beat” Hollow Knight is pure, concentrated lore. To really get a picture of what you’re doing (and to properly inform an important choice you have to make) you need to explore. I love that those key moments in the story tie into some of the best gameplay challenges it has to offer as well. For example, one of the final secret areas basically transforms Hollow Knight into a Super Meat Boy-style platformer with very little combat. Platforming challenges exist all throughout the world, with some of the most thrilling requiring you to use your nail as a pogo stick while you bounce across spikes, duck tales-style - but this area is something else entirely, and tells you about the history of that location with its themes. And, as I mentioned before, the music adds to that setting and art one thousand times over. While each location has its own theme and boss fight music, individual melodies and instruments will shift in and out as you move from screen to screen. The mood and tension of a scene are often driven by that music, and the soundtrack has quickly become one of my favorites. Verdict Hollow Knight is a Metroidvania with a well of content to discover that’s as deep as its labyrinthine caves. The world of Hallownest is compelling and rich, full of story that’s left for you to discover on your own, and built with branching paths that offer an absurd amount of choice in how you go about discovering it. With such a high density of secrets to find and fun, challenging enemies to face, it’s worth spending every moment you can in Hollow Knight. System Requirements: CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E5200 CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 4 GB OS: Windows 7 VIDEO CARD: GeForce 9800GTX (1GB) PIXEL SHADER: 4.0 VERTEX SHADER: 4.0 FREE DISK SPACE: 9 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 1 GB

game information: Type: Multi-player Genre: Party game, Casual Developer: Everglow Interactive Inc. Publisher: Everglow Interactive Inc. Release date: 7 Aug, 2017 Plates-formes: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS Mini-games madness Party Panic chose a simple art style with goofy characters, and you know right from the start that you are here for the laughs. There is a whole range of hats and outfits that can be found in loot boxes so that each player can customize their own little avatar before a round begins. If waiting for someone to choose their perfect hat is boring to you, fear not because you can use the opportunity to punch them in the face and wreak havoc in the house. And then the four players (completed with competent bots if Skynet has risen and there are not enough human players) battle for points in a series of mini-games. I found the mini-games to be hit or miss. There are the classics like “the floor is lava” and “bumping someone off of the map” that never get old, but also a boring “bounce on immobile zombie heads”, a dreadful “search bushes for gems” or that “boxing” one that sounds fun but the time stunned is way too long. The vast majority of these are good and entertaining so that the weaker ones do not harm the enjoyment much. Even better, the developer is planning to add the possibility to customize which mini-games are in the selection. Awesome! What I am not too sure about is the fact that it is not a zero-sum game, meaning that everyone can collect as many points if they perform well and there is not one single winner. The points contribute to an overall score that will determine the true winner. I am not too fond of this system because it often pushed players to just optimize their own scoring rather than having to strategically band against a specific player or these sorts of things. But that’s just a small nit-pick, in practice it just works and people have a good time. Additional game-modes Besides the mini-games there are two other game-modes. One that I absolutely love, the gauntlet. Pick a number of traps, and the game chooses them randomly from a selection to form an obstacle course as some TV shows do. Some obstacles are hilariously infuriating with tons of spikes and axes that are nigh impossible to dodge, and succeeding is exhilarating. The other game-mode that I absolutely hate is trophy island. The game drops the players there without much of an explanation, it’s just some sort of huge sandbox playground with secrets to find after succeeding all sorts of trials and exploring the map. I guess that the more patient explorers will have a good time trying to find the secrets, but it’s not ideal when looking for immediate fun. Technical details and online play The game can be played in single-player with bots only for the mini-games, so there is not much of a point if you are alone. Local play is the best for this game. All the game modes can be played online, there is even a server browser and as I write these lines there were many lobbies available. And the lobbies are quite fun, it is possible to move around, kick other players and mess with the furniture. Online play is not exactly perfect, the menu is very fiddly to use, sometimes people have some buttons that fail to respond, and there can be various degrees of lag that make the fighting appear more random than it really is. Unlike many other games, key rebinding is possible. I will also add feedback from another review, JimDeadlock: Which party game to pick? The main difference with YamaYama is that the experience is more diversified, however, YamaYama is consistently good while Party Panic has ups and downs. In terms of longevity relative to fun, Party Panic takes the advantage. You laugh more in this one, and over a longer period of time. There are so many mini-games plus the gauntlet that several hours can be sunk into the game. Before I write my own conclusion, here are a few more words from fellow reviewer JimDeadlock: The mini games, are non-stop fun and hilarity! This is my first experience of this type of game - I normally stick to quiet, singleplayer puzzlers and suchlike. Everyone was bashing their opponents, sabotaging each other's progress, laughing at others ’failures and cursing their own. Organized chaos, with the silly-hatted on-screen characters squeaking and giggling the whole time. Fantastic! Verdict Party Panic is an absolute must-have in your toolset for party games. So far this is the closest to Mario Party that you can have on PC. The game is far from perfect, a bit rough around the edges plus some game-modes or mini-games are a bit weaker. However, most of the mini-games and the gauntlet are gloriously funny and a blast to play with friends. Plus it can be played online! SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: OS: Windows 7, 8, or 10 Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: Dedicated GPU Recommended Storage: 500 MB available space Additional Notes: OpenGL 3.2+

game information: PLATFORM PCPlayStation 4SwitchXbox One DEVELOPER Nexile PUBLISHER Ukiyo Publishing Ltd REVIEWED ON PlayStation 4 RELEASE DATE June 9, 2020 In 2017, the world was first introduced to Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. The bizarre upwards climb of a man in a cauldron amused and frustrated millions, with its unique take on difficulty and losing progress. With no checkpoints and gravity more than happy to pluck you from the sky, you could spend hours reaching a new area only to fall back to the start of the game. Foddy stated the game was made for “a certain kind of person, to hurt them”, and Jump King is here to follow in his punishing footsteps. The first thing you learn from Jump King is that the aim of the game is to reach the top, and that there is a “smoking hot babe” waiting for you there. To the unnamed knight you play as, this is apparently all the incentive he needs to embark on this so noble quest. The babe is waiting, so it’s time to dust off your jumping boots and leap into the action. As you may expect from a game with jump in the title, your method of propulsion is very much leg based. You hold down X to charge your jump, and release it to spring upwards. The longer you hold the button, the further you’ll travel, and you have no control of your leaping knight once he leaves the ground. If you underestimate your jump, chances are a long fall will be waiting for you. Jump King is made up of one long vertical stage, and much like Getting Over It, there are no checkpoints to help you get back to where you slipped up. You might perfectly hit 10 jumps to progress up a few screens, but one mistake and you’ll be face down in the dirt, possibly lower than where you started. Because of how punished you’ll be from just one misstep, the game outright requires you to master every jump to ensure you can make it to the top. There’s almost a puzzle element to figuring out what power and direction you need to jump in. Some platforms require you to bump off the walls to land in the perfect spot, whereas others area have wind to take into account, or even ice to send you careering off an edge and downwards again. These varied environments offer even more jump mechanics to learn, and more opportunity for failure. So far, so good, right? Well, yes, but the crushing loss of progress you’ll have to endure over and over again is horrendous. The level of patience required to even think about arriving at the babe at the summit is not to be taken lightly. As a concept though, it's hard to deny the unusual take on difficulty isn’t oddly compelling. Despite the overwhelming odds of failure, the simplicity of the game means victory still feels attainable. That doesn’t mean there won’t be hard times though, with a lot of grieving for lost runs. When your knight is lying flat on his face in the dirt, back at the start of the game, you will feel like giving up. At the more regular fall points, there are characters waiting to deliver a line of often chastising dialogue. The bottom of the game is home to an old hermit, who isn’t shy of laughing at you every time you arrive back in his domain. The experience of fighting your way to the top of the tower is made all the more cerebral by the lack of music throughout. There is simply nothing to distract you from the pure jumping-ness of Jump King. It’s unusual choice to forego all background noise, and I initially thought it was an issue with the console port. Sitting alone with only the repetitive jump sound effect as company is a challenge in itself. If you are somehow able to overcome the odds and meet with your hot babe, there are multiple extra game modes that offer an unimaginably more difficult challenge. New Babe + mode offers an entirely redesigned and harder version of the original map, whereas Ghost of the Babe takes you to an entirely new location. I can’t pretend I made much progress in either of these evil concoctions, but for those seeking more challenge there’s plenty available here. In many ways it’s hard to recommend Jump King. It’s an incredibly frustrating game but that’s by design, and only the most level headed will be able to appreciate the enjoyment of platforming mastery. The lack of background music and the mocking words as you fall over and over again make for quite the oppressive experience, but for those with the dedication to make it to the top - the satisfaction of victory and the smokin ’hot babe await. system requirements: Memory: 2 GB Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 510 CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 Jump King File Size: 1.17 GB OS: Windows 7

game information: Publisher: Blue Mammoth Games Playerbase: High Type: Fighting Game Release Date: April 30, 2014 Plates-formes: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Mac OS, Microsoft Windows Super Smash Brothers is a platform fighter franchise that has reigned since its release in January of 1999. No other game has come close to taking its crown, especially with the latest po[CENSORED]r release for the Wii U and the Super Smash Bros Project M mod. However, Blue Mammoth Games presents a competent challenger to the stage for the genre. Brawlhalla brings 18+ characters with unique playstyles, abilities, and weapons for players to unlock and master. The best part about Brawlhalla is that it is free-to-play with a free six-character roster that changes weekly. It is also one of the first few solid PC (including Mac support) platform fighter games in a genre that is dominated by console releases. Gameplay is easy to pick up, very spam-heavy, yet difficult to master. Make sure you check out the game controls before jumping in, because you'll want to know how to pick up items, throw items, use a light attack or a heavy attack, dodge, etc. You can use mouse + keyboard, keyboard only, or a controller. Battles are fought by either points or lives and are usually timed. Health is shown in the top right-hand corner by a portrait of your character and a colored bar. The colored bar ranges from white to yellow to red, each shade respectively representing damage sustained. Like Smash, the more damage you take, the farther you'll fly across a stage when hit. I enjoyed how simple it was to start playing Brawlhalla. Anyone who has played Smash will have an easy time getting the feel of the game, though there are some interesting mechanics (like throwing an item and quickly picking it back up to interrupt an opponent). I thought the controls were fluid, the game's engagingly fast-paced and challenging, and fun. I also liked the cartoonish style of the characters and the detailed background art for the stages. Items, Maps, and the Shop There are very few items in Brawlhalla. Universal items that all characters can use are mines, bombs, spiky balls, and a horn that calls a creature to horizontally charge across the stage. I haven't decided whether or not the small amount of items are necessarily a con because I personally dislike items in Smash (* cough SUPERSTAR cough *). It is noteworthy that each character has two unique weapons with separate moves / abilities. Characters can only use basic attacks until a weapon is equipped. Once wielding a weapon, access to abilities is opened. These weapons, along with the characters themselves, have skins available in the cash shop. There are 7+ stages available (called "Realms"), and they're all pretty small. Most have platforms, some stationary and some in motion, with poles to jump off of and edges to camp. Certain Realms are designated for 1v1, while others are for bigger free-for-all brawls. One of Brawlhalla's best qualities is that it is not pay-to-win in any way. There's not even pay-for-convenience. This keeps the game pure, making it all about the skill. So how are the developers making money? The same way as League of Legends, through skins. Through the Shop players can purchase skins / costumes for characters, weapons, and even specialized Taunts (like "face-palm") with real-world cash. The Shop is also where players can use the farmable in-game currency to unlock new characters. The farmable currency is earned by simply playing the game, completing daily missions, and logging in Game Modes Brawlhalla features several game modes, ranging from the local Couch Party to a competitive ladder ranked mode. Couch Party is a local co-op mode that allows up to four players. Single Player has three sub-modes: Tournament / Arcade Mode, Training, and Versus Bots. Tournament / Arcade Mode is where a player fights in a tourney with computer-controlled characters in 3-stock – 4-people free-for-all battles. To advance from each round, you must be either the only survivor or the highest scoring player. For practice, you can jump into Training, where you can try new characters and familiarize yourself with their abilities, speed, and movement. Online is a game mode where you are randomly thrown into a four-people free-for-all timed battle. Custom Online is where you can create your own room with customized settings, and ranked is the 1v1 or 2v2 competitive ladder mode. Shortcomings? Honestly, nothing immediate comes to mind other than the fonts (the character bios and menus look a bit lackluster with the current typography). I think one thing that's not a major con is that none of the maps are really that huge or special (like Hyrule Castle's tornadoes). I'm not going to complain — even in Smash, most people opt to use the smaller stages. I do think that one weak selling point of Brawlhalla is the unfamiliarity of the characters or the maps. Unlike Super Smash Bros, players haven't played with the characters, background music, or maps in other games. However, you can't really hold this against Brawlhalla because it's by an indie developer. They don't have a large pool of po[CENSORED]r titles to pull content from like Nintendo. Final Verdict - Great Brawlhalla is a solid game joining the platform fighter scene. Being free-to-play as a PC game with fluid controls and no huge lag issues, it's a great game and is also backed by a strong community. I would definitely recommend Brawlhalla, and do believe it is paving a new path in the console-dominant platform fighter genre. system requirements Memory: 1 GB Graphics Card: Intel HD 3000 CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Brawlhalla File Size: 350 MB OS: Windows

GAME INFORMATION: Developer: Landfall Publisher: Landfall Release: 1 April 2019 Plates-formes: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, Mac OS, Linux When I was seven years old, my dad broke our Atari ST. We had been playing about with some primitive CAD software, plotting out simple shapes to render low polygon urns when he fell eerily silent. His face slackened, transfixed. His eyes became locked to the screen. Clicking over and over, the man began adding vertices anywhere they would fit, hundreds of them, tracing the outline of some impossible, non-Euclidean solid. With each fresh click the Atari took longer to respond, until at last the monitor was a nonsense web of overlapping edges and clipped geometry. “Dad,” I pleaded, the maddening nest of garbled lines reflected in his glasses. “Dad, don’t.” But he was as unresponsive as the Atari itself, possessed by some unseen force, sliding the mouse to the render button and clicking a single, inevitable click. The 3.5 ”floppy disk drive let out a pained, mechanical shriek and the operating system bombed, the system’s guts irreparably confounded by my inscrutable father’s failed attempt to conjure a ten-dimensional, Lovecraftian artefact on something as powerful as a calculator. Dad stood up from his chair, said nothing, and walked out of the room. The Atari ST never worked again, precipitating a fraught relationship with my father that would take two decades to begin to repair. Last week, while stress-testing Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, I made so many ninjas fight one another that my PC juddered to a halt, overheated and blue screened, engendering more empathy and forgiveness for my father in two seconds than a decade of family therapy could ever hope to achieve. The slapstick scrapping sim has been in early access for almost a year now, and since its launch the developers have been piling more and more ridiculous unit types into the game’s silly, wonky, physics-powered combat sandbox. There are now pirate queens and pumpkin catapults, skeleton warriors, lance-wielding jousters and medieval archers who fire snakes instead of arrows. Want to see who’d win in a fight between Zeus and fifty guys armed with harpoons? Well now you can. Want the insides of your machine to fizzle as your tortured CPU attempts to simulate the individual limbs of eight hundred halflings piling on to a single velociraptor? Check you’ve renewed your fire insurance and go for it. Though the roster of fighters has ballooned in the months since launch, the idea remains gratifyingly straightforward. You’re shown a top-down view of a battlefield, where an enemy army patiently awaits. Using a limited budget, you must compose your own army capable of defeating your opponent using a mixture of strategic positioning, raw numbers and luck. Some units, like the bird-flinging scarecrow or the Viking longship, are prohibitively expensive, limiting you to one or two per army. Others, like skeleton warriors, are cheap enough to spam entire legions of them. Victory usually depends on trial and error, breaking enemy formations with hard-hitters and then overwhelming them with little guys. Once you’ve laid out your army, you press the big go button and stand back as the battlefield lurches into life, your loyal troops marching into battle like they’ve just woken up from general anesthesia and don’t remember what legs are. TABS looks absolutely stupid, about as realistic a depiction of battle as a couple of marionettes tumbling around inside a washing machine, but underneath the bonnet there's a frankly incredible physics simulation taking place, way beyond anything the likes of the cowardly Total War has dared to attempt. Slow fights down by holding the left mouse button and you can really savor the technical detail - and begin to appreciate why armies of more than a few hundred units can make a dusty GPU start to wheeze. Swarms of projectiles trace elegant arcs across the battlefield, landing with a satisfying thud in wooden shields where they wobble with perfect accuracy. Soldiers ’desperately flailing legs clamber believably over piles of ragdoll corpses. Sword tips connect with torsos and send fighters tumbling arseways. There’s a new Da Vinci tank unit - a kind of merry-go-round armed with a ring of cannons - which if you zoom right into it, reveals there’s a tiny Da Vinci hurtling around inside. What a treat. Your googly-eyed fighters are far from plausible humans, but they have an undeniable spark of life about them. When a mammoth gets his tusks lodged in an archway, you can’t help but feel a pang of pity for those poor, panicking lines of code, desperately trying to extricate themselves from the virtual masonry as angry, pitchfork-wielding farmers descend. Battles are short and snappy, and always end in a comical freeze frame that you can pan around at will, a beguiling three-dimensional tableau that encapsulates the cartoonish pointlessness of war better than anything else I’ve played. TABS is still a physics sandbox first and foremost, more of a fun toy to fiddle with than a game to really chew on, but an expanded list of challenge levels helps to give the latest version of the game a fuller sense of shape and direction. Players can now upload their own challenge levels to a community workshop too, giving you an effectively endless configuration of enemy armies to fight against. The next update promises even more curation, allowing players to design their own units from scratch. Since I last wrote about the game it’s gained a first-person mode, letting you possess a unit and march it around the battlefield. In some player-created challenges, taking direct control of a unit to override its tiny AI impulses is essential to victory, but in regular battles the ability to clamber inside the brain of a Minotaur offers an amuse bouche of control in an otherwise entirely hands- off meal. But it’s far more entertaining to stand back and spectate. Totally Accurate Battle Simulator is all about goofy chaos, and wrestling control from the engine in an attempt to bring some order to actions feels contrary to the turbulent, beautiful, senseless spirit of the thing. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 7 Processor: Intel Core i5-2400 @ 3.1 GHz or AMD FX-6300 @ 3.5 GHz or equivalent Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 or AMD R9 270 (2GB VRAM with Shader Model 5.0 or better) DirectX: Version 10 Storage: 4 GB available space Additional Notes: Only runs on 64 bit systems

game information: Developers:ACE Team Publishers:Atlus Release Date:August 31, 2011 Platforms:PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC Rock of Ages might be the weirdest game I've played all year. It takes the tower defense genre in a creative new direction, tossing in charmingly bizarre story sequences and clever adaptations of classic art. But problems start when you have to build your defenses, with the time limit becoming an exact annoying problem - especially against the A.I. and when using a controller. Battling another human opponent offers a more spirited competition, though, making multiplayer my go to way to rock some rolling stones. The core gameplay of Rock of Ages is simple: take direct control of your rock, guide it through the course, and smash down your opponent's castle door. Smashing the door takes off a chunk of the castle's life bar based on how hard you hit it, and between rolls you're given downtime to build defenses. Defenses range from towers to slow your opponent, to animals that can smash into them and push them around. You get currency for smashing the door and destroying things on your opponent's path, so a high degree of strategic spending occurs between your rock's rampaging rolls. I like building defenses; I just wish the system for it functioned better. Using a controller is slow and clumsy, leaving me feeling inaccurate with my placement. It's also sluggish, and I often felt more rushed, impotent and frustrated and less like a strategic genius. You see, your building phase only lasts as long as it takes to build your next rock (done to the left of the screen with what ostensibly look like faux-slaves) for another roll, and if you spend too much time creating towers your enemy will get a head start on you with their own attack. Defenses are important, but in my experience it's vastly more important to roll ahead of your enemy to win. Chances are if you're playing a human they weren't able to build anything all that useful to stop you either. Overall building is better with the mouse and keyboard on the PC version, but then you also sacrifice analog controls for your rock. Some of the most prized and beautiful pieces of art appear in Rock of Ages, but never in the way I expected. The campaign takes you through the ages, ranging from ancient to modern times. Each historical period you play has art drawn directly from it, only animated and voiced in an utterly ridiculous manner. I found myself laughing or smiling all the time during the campaign, due to nothing more than seeing traditionally serious paintings come to life and act beyond silly. The campaign story is inconsequential, but Rock of Ages is better for it. You're not inundated by a shoe-horned in tale, but instead just given enough of a premise to have a range of charmingly idiotic characters introduced. Having mastery over your stone makes all the difference in Rock of Ages, too. Constructing towers makes up only a small part of the fight, as most of the time is spent guiding a rock down a harrowing course. I get so much satisfaction when I pull off an awesome jump, smash through my opponent's defenses, and manage to run a course like a pro. Just like classic games such as Marble Madness, surviving the course and fighting the physics of your rock is simple, yet engrossing. It's even better with a pair of players, either in the classic War mode, or in the great, multiplayer only Skee Ball mode. Yes, it's just like skee ball in the arcade, only now a pair of rocks race down the same track, pushing one another around and competing to see who can be the first in the many holes at the end of the course. A skilled player can score crazy multipliers if they manage to aim their ball correctly, though this is risky since it gives the other player a chance for a cheaper, albeit lower-scoring shot. The mode sounded so stupid to me when I first read the description, but in truth it's the most addicting mode in the wholeety of Rock of Ages. Editor's Note: This article was mistakenly published with an 8 in the Gameplay break down score instead of a 7.5, which was what the editor intended. It has been changed to reflect the original intent of the author. Verdict Rock of Ages remains fun despite its problems, and makes for some great local competitive play. The campaign gets annoying at times because of the time constraints with defense building, but is quirky and funny enough that it ultimately remains worth the time. If you’re looking for something unlike what you’ve played before, it's time to let Rock of Ages rock your world SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: OS: Windows XP / Vista / 7 Processor: Dual Core 1.6 GHz or better Memory: 1.5 GB or higher Graphics: 256mb video ram or better (GeForce 7 series or higher / Radeon HD3000 series or higher) DirectX®: 9.0c Hard Drive: 1.2 GB Sound: Windows supported Sound Card Internet: Online play requires Broadband Internet Connection

game information: Developers:Quantic Dream Publishers:Sony Computer Entertainment, Quantic Dream Release Date:May 25, 2018 Platforms:PlayStation 4, PC It's a testament to the breadth of Quantic Dream's branching storylines that I felt terribly guilty as the credits rolled after my second playthrough of Detroit: Become Human, as I'd played against my personal moral compass to test how far I could push the story's exploration of the morality of artificial intelligence. This was very much the opposite of my mostly peaceful first run, and Detroit obliged my wickedness to a surprising degree, leaving a trail of bodies of those who had previously survived in my wake. And while it never seems to know when enough heavy-handed expositional dialogue is enough, Detroit: Become Human manages to be a frequently moving melodrama that bends to your choices with meaningful results. Each of those playthroughs took around 10 hours to complete, and during that time Detroit's pace rarely lags thanks to the deft juggling act it performs, alternating between three android characters across multiple chapters: Kara, a housekeeper who must care for a little girl named Alice , Connor; a prototype police model whose assignment is to round up ‘deviant’ androids, and Markus; a carer model who believes androids should share equal rights with humans. The trio of performances is excellent. Bryan Dechart is delightful as Connor thanks to his deadpan innocence, which makes for a great foil against the whirling dervish of his cynical partner, Clancy Brown's Lieutenant Hank Anderson. Valorie Curry brings quiet strength to Kara, and excels at selling her love for her ward, Alice, who is quite possibly the least charismatic video game child to have ever existed. Jesse Williams employs all of his dreamy Gray's Anatomy warmth as Markus and is never unweable, no matter how you choose to play him. The trio of performances is excellent. ased on your choices, you can change their personalities and the tone of their individual stories. In my first playthrough, for example, the relationship between a humble Connor and the android-hating Anderson played out like a knockabout buddy comedy. In my second, I let Connor's ambitions take over, and his story was of a different genre. Though Markus appears to fundamentally remain endearing no matter what you do (unlike Connor, who really can be played as a hero or villain), there’s a tug-of-war going on within him that throws up some of Detroit's most interesting moral quandaries. Kara's story seems less tonally flexible but is the quietest and most intimate, which provides a welcome contrast to all the running and explosions you can opt into in the other two stories. For the most part, supporting characters adapt to the way you choose to play, but there are occasional misfires. When I played as ‘nice’ Connor, for example, Anderson was far too aggressive toward him to be believable. When I played as ‘mean,’ or even ’indifferent’ Connor, his fury made a lot more sense. At one point, Markus gained a lover very abruptly, and I felt I’d missed a slow burn somewhere. It’s noticeable when your choices feel they’re going against the grain of a more robust story. I found all three of Detroit’s central characters to be dramatically interesting, which meant putting them in compromising situations - or worse, killing them - was a real fear throughout. It’s testament to the writing and performances that I found making decisions “just to see what would happen” teeth-clenchingly hard. I'm a Real Boy The backbone of Detroit's story - meaning the one that’s relatively fixed in place despite the choices you make around it - is big, ambitious fun that takes Phillip K. Dick's question of whether androids dream of electric sheep to the nth degree. In doing so, however, it does suffer from a multitude of plot holes. Marcus appears to gain magical android powers when it suits him; Hank is impressed when Connor solves the most basic of mysteries; and one twist makes absolutely no sense if you look back on that particular storyline after having finished. Detroit is audacious and silly as hell, but it’s got real heart to it. These were noticeable (and often pretty funny), but they weren’t deal-breakers for me. Detroit is audacious and silly as hell, but it’s got real heart to it. There were enough moments of quiet tenderness to keep me emotionally invested, and the stakes were suitably high - particularly in its final act - to keep me thrilled. With this in mind, there is a lot of clumsy exposition and dialogue I was willing to forgive, as one would while watching a fun B-movie. But occasionally, Detroit ignores the standard writing rule of “show, don’t tell” to such an extent I was yanked out of the story. Bad guys spout monologues that spell out Detroit's themes in capital letters. (There's a compartment for androids on public transport, in case you did not get what Detroit was going for here.) Select side characters, like Hank's harrowed police chief and the inexplicably wise and mystical Lucy - are loudly cliched, so we understand what their roles are without any real character development. With the remarkable performance-capture technology - and performances - Quantic Dream has at its disposal, there’s no real reason for such heavy-handedness. Nor do I think Detroit is incapable of subtlety; some of the scenarios here are unusual and profound. But I wish its ideas had more room to breathe before being trampled by someone spelling out the meaning for us. Characters are certainly capable of non-verbal expressiveness. The level of detail you can see in their faces is astounding; Facial hair, blemishes, freckles, and moles are rendered in stunning detail, particularly in checkerboard 4K on the PS4 Pro. The animation is just as good; as Kara and Alice hurry through the rain on a freezing night, hunched over and miserable, I could have been watching two humans from the side-streets. The world here feels very real, built with a sense of history. The world here feels very real, too, built with a sense of history. This is a miserable, dark version of a future Detroit where androids are so omnipresent that they’re old news, sold in chain stores for the price of a discount mobile phone. Little details from the sidelines tell the story of a burst tech bubble, like basements filled to the brim with discarded models or a street performer advertising the fact he is playing “human music.” Though the path you are guided through in Detroit’s world is as linear as previous Quantic games, I felt like there was more time to enjoy these beautifully detailed environments. One of my favorite sequences involved chasing graffiti tags to find a particular location, which ended up being an eerie, silent excursion in a forgotten corner of the city. There’s also a marvelous scene in an abandoned amusement park which still creaked with enough life that I got a sense of what it might have been, once upon a time. Face the Consequences The way you interact with Detroit’s environments hasn’t evolved much from Quantic Dream’s usual formula, which is unobtrusive and mostly works. Action sequences are generally executed using timed button presses, swoops of the thumbstick, and occasional motion control, which evoke the action you are performing on a case-by-case basis. An android detective mode allows you to scan your environment to reconstruct crime scenes, and fast-forwarding and rewinding through these is a lot of fun, as is a new ability to ‘pre-construct’ scenarios before you execute them. I would have liked the opportunity to play around with the latter ability more than I was allowed to, in fact. Detroit: Become Human struggles to justify its multiple fight scenes. Like Beyond: Two Souls before it, though, Detroit: Become Human struggles to justify its multiple fight scenes with meaningful interactivity. Clicking on buttons at just the right time while struggling with an angry android encourages a welcome sense of participation in the fight, but you have to screw it up disastrously to fail. I understand that making combat a proper challenge runs the risk of introducing an immersion-breaking sense of trial and error, but I was left wishing the stakes were just a little higher after I’ won ’each fight without really trying. Why make them interactive at all if the input feels so meaningless? Of course, the way you play Detroit is primarily through the choices you make within it. While there’s that backbone of a story that can’t be shattered, which can sometimes result in frustration when it makes a decision for you to keep you from straying too far off the beaten path, I found its branching paths to be multiple and deep. Quantic Dream has been smart in making this multitude of paths transparent through flowcharts introduced at the end of each chapter, showing you just how differently it could have played out if you’d made another choice, enticing you to play through again. Not every alternate choice leads to a drastically different story, but some will. Sometimes it might lead to the same result, but by a surprising new means. Sometimes it might change your relationship with another character and unlock a path that wasn’t there before. Sometimes it might result in death, whether that be of a supporting character or one of the central trio (they can all die at points throughout Detroit), or a dramatic action sequence with unexpected consequences. Comparing endings, not only between my first and second playthroughs but with other players, was astounding, particularly when I assumed everybody’s story had wrapped the same way as mine and found that nobody’s had. For me, this is the biggest draw of Detroit. One playthrough really isn’t enough to see what it has to offer, and characters and world-building are interesting enough that it was a pleasure to go back to see what I’d missed in scenarios that are deceptively complex. Verdict Detroit: Become Human is a poignantly pulpy interactive sci-fi drama where your choices can impact events to a greater and more satisfying degree than in most games of this type. Though I wish its story had been handled with a softer touch, especially considering the subtlety that can be conveyed through its tech and performances, its well-written and acted central trio were vital enough to me that I found myself feeling genuine distress when they were in danger and a sense of victory when they triumphed. Most importantly, Detroit offers a multitude of transparent branching paths that entice further playthroughs, and choices have a permanence that raise the stakes throughout. System Requirements: CPU: Intel Core i5-2300 @ 2.8 GHz or AMD Ryzen 3 1200 @ 3.1GHz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.2GHz RAM: 8 GB OS: Windows 10 (64 bit) VIDEO CARD: Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 or AMD HD 7950 with 3GB VRAM minimum (Support of Vulkan 1.1 required) PIXEL SHADER: 5.0 VERTEX SHADER: 5.0 FREE DISK SPACE: 55 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 3072 MB

GAME INFORMATION: Developer:sGuerrilla Games Publishers:Sony Computer Entertainment Release Date:February 28, 2017 Platforms:PlayStation 4, PC There’s something about being dropped into a brand new game world and finding it to be dense with deeply considered lore, terrifyingly aggressive creatures, and tantalizing questions that leaves an indelible mark on the memory. Horizon Zero Dawn is one of those games, and it carves out a unique identity within the po[CENSORED]r action-roleplaying genre. Coupled with wonderfully flexible combat and a story that touches on unexpectedly profound themes, I found it hard to tear myself away from Horizon even after I’d finished its main campaign some 40 odd hours later. HORIZON’S PREMISE IS A BIG MYSTERY THAT BEGS TO BE SOLVED. A sense of urgency is established from the get-go, as Horizon’s premise is a big mystery that begs to be solved. The questions raised by protagonist Aloy and the primitive, feral machine-infested open world she inhabits kept me guessing throughout: what’s at the center of it all? Although Horizon suffers from sometimes corny dialogue that belies its smarts, the broader ideas it prods at - the nature of creation, for example - are remarkably ambitious. Aloy's personality helped me care about her journey on a more personal level. Nimbly voiced by Ashly Burch (known for her performance as Borderlands 2’s Tiny Tina), she's a charming character to watch and play as because of the wry wit that tempers her big-hearted heroism; some of my favorite smaller moments came from Aloy’s sarcastic interactions with other characters who didn’t get the joke. Though you have some say on the way she responds to situations in the interests of dialogue flavor, she remains largely a well-intentioned character, which is in step with Horizon’s broader story. Fighting Machines There’s much more flexibility to be found once Aloy’s out in the big wide world. Horizon’s combat is its most compelling feature, thanks to the variety found within 26 distinct species of animal-like machines that roam its great far-future expanse. These beasts have several weak points that can be scanned using Aloy’s Focus (a lore-friendly device that gives you Witcher-like heightened senses), and hitting different points can have different results that change the way a fight plays out. Horizon's combat is its most compelling feature. Send a piercing arrow into the bulging ‘cargo sac’ of a giant fire-spewing Bellowback, for example, and you'll set off a massive explosion. Down a flying, ice-shooting Glinthawk by destroying the armored sac on its chest to temporarily freeze the bird, or shoot the cannon off the back of a tiger-like Ravager and pick it up to blast a T-Rex-esque Thunderjaw, who you only just noticed approaching from the corner of your eye during the fight. It’s breathless stuff, and there are no hand-holding tutorials telling you how to best approach the beasts, which makes for more rewarding wins. After I learned how to fight competently, Horizon continually made me feel like a ridiculously accomplished warrior without sacrificing the vital sense that every major battle could easily result in my death, in large part thanks to the ferocity of the machines themselves. Though they patrol on set routes, even the 'herbivores' will immediately attack when you’re spotted, and will continue to scan for you if you manage to find a hiding place. On the offense, these robotic beasts are authentically animalistic. Snapmaws - enormous, mechanical alligators - will swipe with their tails and spew ice blasts from their mouths, while tiger-like Ravagers will charge at you with alarming speed for a full body slam up close. Dodging their attacks requires constant use of Aloy's roll move, all the while using the quick on-the-fly crafting system to build ammo specifically to counter the threat. Her upgradable bows feel great to use thanks to her Concentration skill that slows down time. For Aloy’s part, her arsenal is largely tricked-out ‘primitive’ weaponry. Her upgradable bows and elemental-infused arrows - your primary weapon - feel great to use thanks to her Concentration skill that slows down time, allowing for dead-eye aiming. She also has access to a handful of more elaborate devices like the Ropecaster, which shoots out ropes to immobilize enemies, or the Tripcaster, a weapon that creates explosive tripwire traps at a range. Though these more creative weapons sound great in theory, in practice they’re annoyingly slow and fiddly when you're up against multiple threats, and I found the most challenging machines were too fast and too powerful to use them in a genuinely effective way. Fun to play around with on weaker enemies during more casual hunts, then, but far from crucial when you're up against a wall. Not that Horizon encourages you just to blindly wander into every fight and start shooting. A lot of the machines roam in packs, with larger beasts flanked by velociraptor-like sentry bots called Watchers, so if you’re not careful you can be outnumbered and devoured within seconds. To counter this, there's generally a silent path to take: hiding in swatches of tall red grass and drawing machines in gives you a chance for a stealth kill, and if by some misfortune you're spotted, Aloy's Concentration skill is vital in helping you land an arrow right in that Watcher's prying eye before you make a quick escape. It’s a shame luring specific machines away from their packs is so time-consuming, though; often simple hunts for a single animal evolve into massive fights against several types. Alternatively, Aloy doesn’t have to do all the work herself, as she’ll discover how to override the machines ’brains in the field while exploring her world (to tell you how would ruin a wonderful surprise). Overriding has different effects depending on the machine - some become docile mounts, for example, while others will fight on your behalf, killing their own kind. As you upgrade your skill tree, these overrides can last for longer, which allows you to essentially build up a small army of loyal, vicious steeds. Watching them wreak havoc on the field from a place of safety is smugly satisfying. The Big, Big Wide World You don’t just fight machines in Horizon. While not as engaging as their mechanical counterparts, there are human targets too - many of them po[CENSORED]te the bandit camps peppered throughout this massive open world. Though you’re free to take them on as you please, I found it’s best to take a stealthy approach through the tall grass and pick off these heavily armed NPCs one by one. That’s a largely satisfying approach, aside from the fact that, like in other half-stealth games like Uncharted 4 or Watch Dogs 2, you can’t hide bodies. It’s a design decision that sticks in my craw when an NPC’s curiosity piques after he or she spots someone sprawled on the ground with an arrow sticking out of its chest from a mile away. Clearing these enemy camps is one of the many incidental side activities scattered across horizon, a variety which also includes digging in ancient bunkers for clues from the past, tracking machines through dedicated hunting grounds, and climbing to the top of a giant brontosaurus-like Tallneck to unlock more of the map. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before in other games of this ilk - the Tallneck is basically a walking Far Cry tower - but thanks to the promise of XP and loot that you can trade for currency to buy better weapons, it’s all very compulsive. Horizon's ‘post-post apocalyptic’ landscape itself is beautiful and terrifying. On top of that, Horizon's 'post-post apocalyptic' landscape itself is beautiful and terrifying, so journeying through it in search of things to do between main quests - not that you ever have to go too far - is usually a reward of its own . Snowy vistas, autumnal forests, and vast deserts are stunningly realized, even capped at 30 frames per second as it is. (That's true on PlayStation 4 Pro as well, where it runs in a stunning 4K mode.) Frozen mountain peaks or the calcified remains of a skyscraper make for eerie, quiet jaunts, made more unnerving by the Lost World-esque horror that sits in Horizon's underbelly. One of the most thrilling moments in my playthrough was when I got lost early on, skirted too close to the water’s edge, and accidentally walked across the giant tail of a half-submerged Snapmaw before sprinting to safety with sweaty palms. Being killed in Horizon isn’t Dark Souls-style punishing, but as you save via spread out ‘campfires’, the threat of death also equals the threat of losing some progress. It’s enough to make these moments of terrifying discovery into Horizon’s ‘water cooler moments’ - the ones you look back on and shiver. Aloy moves about the world with near Uncharted-like ease, too. Developer Guerrilla have done a great job at making her base movements - such as climbing, rolling, rappelling down cliff faces - fluid and responsive. Though I noticed the occasional pop-in and judder, Horizon’s visuals keep up with Aloy, and impressively, I didn’t notice any significant glitches in its massive open world. The Human Element Elsewhere, settlements and camps form a rag-tag civilization. Humans of this world have been reduced back to a tribal state, and each tribe has its own identity shaped by historical victories and grievances and various theories on the nature of their strange existence, devoid of a sense of their true history. Guerrilla has done an enormous amount of seductive world-building here, and I spent a great deal of time just wandering around settlements listening to elders tell elaborate tales of gods to children or seeking stories of misplaced vengeance in the crowds. Main missions cleverly weave current-day politics into a quest to solve the mysteries of the old world. It’s at these settlements that you’ll be given your missions, both the urgent, high-stakes main quests and the side-quests that pop up as little exclamation marks on you map. While the latter are as lengthy as the main missions, they do quickly fall into regular fetch-quest patterns: go and find this thing, kill some things, return, collect reward. Though these make for a great excuse to destroy more machines and there is the occasional compelling storyline, I would have liked a little more originality to keep them from blurring together into one, and better rewards for completion in the late game, where XP ceases to matter next to the search for frustratingly scarce useful weapon mods. Main missions, on the other hand, cleverly weave current-day politics into a quest to solve the mysteries of the old world. I found myself switching between chasing the ghosts of the past in the deep, lonely bunkers of lost technology and solving the murder of a tribal leader, using my focus ability to track bloodstains and trace clues before facing off against a tribe of cultists in a climactic battle. Horizon encourages you to chase your own story, but help others a little on the way too. Its ultimate reveal - prior to a frenzied, heart-in-the-throat finale - is smart and provocative, and a great pay off to the journey. Verdict Across a vast and beautiful open world, Horizon Zero Dawn juggles many moving parts with polish and finesse. Its main activity - combat - is extremely satisfying thanks to the varied design and behaviors of machine-creatures that roam its lands, each of which needs to be taken down with careful consideration. Though side questing could have been more imaginative, its missions are compelling thanks to a central mystery that led me down a deep rabbit hole to a genuinely surprising - and moving - conclusion. System Requirements: CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K / AMD FX-6300 CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 8 GB OS: Windows 7 SP1 VIDEO CARD: Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 2GB / AMD Radeon R9 280 PIXEL SHADER: 5.0 VERTEX SHADER: 5.0 FREE DISK SPACE: 150 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 2048 MB

game information: Platform: PC, Mobile, Nintendo Release Date: 05/28/2020 No. of Players: 1 Category: Simulation, Strategy Developer: Gamious Publisher: PLAYDIGIOUS Turmoil is a game in which you compete against others to mine 19th century America. It’s an innovate concept with a scope for fun, developed by Gamious and published by PLAYDIGIOUS on the Switch. As an environmentally conscientious person, I kind of feel bad for liking this game. It’s kind of like organizing a vegan barbeque, and then invite over a cannibal. In this game you are pitted against three oil-miners and you have to try and stay ahead of the competition. Simple really. You use oil rigs, dowsers and drills to excavate the expensive black goop, and you use your myriad of horses to transport it to the store. There is a good degree of economics, as you are challenged to sell when the price is high and store it up when it’s low. You have to be mindful of spillages, sturdy rocks and be aware of gas (especially after having baked beans for lunch) The game at its very core (pun intended, and get ready for a lot more of them) is really enjoyable. I cannot express the ecstasy of finding a bit of oil in the ground. Even after playing for several hours, there is a satisfying “gulp” noise when you make contact. It’s the unfiltered sound of success and liquid gold. Turmoil's learning curve is nicely paced, meaning that you grow to understand the game without it chucking too much at you. This is fitting of your character. You are never left feeling like “What the frack is going on?”. You play as one of four new-starters trying their hand at the oil industry. I think that’s why the game has charm. Otherwise, if you played as ultra-rich oil baron who created a monopoly, it may seem a bit bleak and perhaps a little too close to home. No, because of the pastoral music and the relaxing vibe, it is reminiscent of Stardew Valley, but for cut-throat capitalists. The town is also being built up around you during play, which is a really nice touch of the wild west atmosphere. The game has room for failure: There is a lot of spinning plates with Turmoil, both short-term and long-term. You have to make sure you have enough money to spend on your yearly outputs but also make sure you can upgrade your equipment at the end. You can take out loans, but if you are in debt at the end of the year: that’s game over. However, the game is forgiving, perhaps a little too much and I never felt any genuine worry about failing. This is a new port onto the Switch for a preexisting game. The transition is not seamless, but it’s a very easy game to pick up and play on the go; It fits the functionality of the console. This version of the game includes the downloadable content, The Heat Is On which is essentially an additional campaign but with some extra mechanics. It’s great value for money but I’m not sure what it adds to the game? Um, a very basic card game? And magma which doesn’t do much? And two new characters? It doesn’t really scrape much further from the surface, but it does allow you to try a harder version of the game. However, that I think if I were to pay full price for the DLC, I may feel a little short-changed. Ironically, despite a lot of underground mining, this game does lack depth. Whilst each of the levels give you that little buzz, the premise never really grows beyond the competition. Midway through both campaigns, you are asked to buy shares in the land in order to become the mayor. This is a cool premise, and it was something different, but it comes a little too late. Plus the pay-off at the end doesn’t feel like it’s worth the journey. I wish there were more special events or areas or more growth There are other gripes with this game too. It’s a little frustrating when you purchase something in town, you are entitled to the upgrade. But the upgrade doesn’t permanently grant you the upgrade - no, that would be too simple. In the field, you have access to it, but you have to repurchase it every time you want to use it. Wait, what? So you save up for the whole and spend tons of cash on the most expensive drills and then you have to pay again to use them? It really puts a dampener on the game. Like why on earth did I just save all the money? It seems like an in-game con. It’s like buying an expensive course in a restaurant but they charged extra every time you used their cutlery. Obviously it’s not as big of a deal than I’m making out, but it’s bothersome. Maybe I’m just a fiscally tight Yorkshireman but it just seems highly inconvenient to shell out every time. On top of that, it can be really fiddly to purchase upgrades. Good luck to you when you try and upgrade pipes - you will divine help if they’re close together. The fiddly moments are noticeable on the Switch and there are a few too many of them. They can sometimes really mess up your game. You can tell it’s originally game meant for a different console. It adds extra iritation, especially when you’re against the clock and you’re trying to be slick. These annoyances are small, but they do significantly stack up across the playthrough. Was this game awkward in places? Yes. Did I find it slightly repetitive? Yup. Did I continually come back to it day-in, day-out to play it? Hell yeah I did - it's worth playing. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: OS: Windows Vista / 7/8 / 8.1 / 10 Processor: 2.5 GHz Memory: 2 GB RAM Storage: 150 MB available space

game information: Develope:rTeam Meat Publisher:Team Meat Release Date: October 20, 2010 Platforms:Xbox 360, PC, Macintosh, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 4, Wii U, Nintendo Switch, Wii It's no coincidence that Super Meat Boy shares its initials with Super Mario Bros. This is a pure platformer that boils gameplay down to nothing but running and jumping. Meat Boy's goal is always the same: he must reach Bandage Girl, who is ever in another castle. Doing so is never an easy task thanks to the numerous dastardly traps in the way. One prick from a buzzsaw, spike, or monster's jaws will splatter Meat Boy's bloody pixels (which remain as a grisly reminder of your failure during your next attempt). Even though you only have two maneuvers at your disposal, the developers never run out of clever ways of obstructing your path. In a game like this where you need to be able to make precision jumps and turns, the controls have to feel just right. The developers understand this and, just like Super Mario Bros., it feels good to control Super Meat Boy. He has a nice weight to him and a beginner player will get the hang of it almost immediately even on advanced stages. Super Meat Boy is an extremely difficult game. Make the slightest mistake and you'll have to restart the stage over from the beginning - there are no checkpoints. You might die a hundred times before you are finally reunited with Bandage Girl and the game gleefully keeps track of every death in the Statistics menu. It's such a tense experience my hands hurt after a while and I couldn't get a good grip on the controller any longer because of the sweat. But you have unlimited tries and most stages take less than a minute to complete once you know what you're doing. When you are triumphant you are rewarded with a replay of all your attempts running at once - dozens of Meat Boys flying across the stage and being eviscerated by traps. It's such a tense experience that my hands started to hurt. Even though Super Meat Boy is primarily single-player, it's a great game to play with friends. Since you often have to make many, many tries before completing a stage it's perfect for passing the controller around and letting everyone have a shot. Your first time through the game you'll be so laser-focused on just completing each stage it's likely you'll miss the many secrets. There are warp zones that lead to secret areas where you might find new playable characters from recent indie games. Commander Video from the Bit.Trip series on WiiWare is here as well as that kid from Braid. These guests have their own behaviors that might help you in a tight spot. Commander Video can float for a moment, for instance. You can usually switch to a new character on the fly unless you're fighting a boss. There are also precariously placed bandages to collect that can be spent to unlock even more characters. Meat Boy isn't in this alone. The developers' influences are obvious, as the hilarious cut scenes reference everything from Ninja Gaiden to Adventures of Lolo to Mega Man 2. A Donkey Kong-themed level is named "Weibe," after Donkey Kong champion Steve Wiebe. The rocking chiptune soundtrack is the best I've heard since Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game. Find a warp zone and the visuals will shift to a more pixilated, 8-bit style emulating the NES, Game Boy, or Atari 2600. Super Meat Boy pays tribute to classic platformers while simultaneously claiming its place on the throne with the best of them . Those cutscenes I mentioned are very funny, but they don't have the polish of the rest of the game. It is these scenes where you can tell Super Meat Boy was made by just two dudes. But I do appreciate the game's bizarre sense of humor. I mean, it's got a hero made of raw meat who is in love with a band-aid that is kidnapped by a fetus that won't stop flipping people off. If that's not a recipe for a good time I don't know what is. Nintendo Switch Impressions By Tom Marks - January 11, 2018 Seven years after its initial launch, Super Meat Boy has made it to nearly every platform under the sun - most recently it released on Nintendo Switch with a (temporarily) exclusive two-player Race Mode. Even after all these years, Super Meat Boy still stands as one of the best platformers around. It runs smooth as butter on the Switch and feels as sharp as ever, even if Meat Boy can sometimes be a bit hard to see on the handheld mode's smaller screen. The new Race Mode isn't a revolutionary addition for anyone who has already played Super Meat Boy, but it does add an interesting and fun multiplayer twist that fits well with the console’s emphasis on local play. Verdict Super Meat Boy is one of the best modern platformers around. It's infuriating, exasperating, and arduous, but it's also delightful, thrilling, and hilarious. The NES games of yore were simultaneously simpler and more challenging than today's games, a quality perfectly emulated here. Invite some friends over and pass the controller around - you're gonna need all the help you can get. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: OS: Microsoft® Windows® XP / Vista / 7 (Windows 8 is not officially supported) Processor: 1.4GHz or faster Memory: 1 GB RAM Graphics: Graphics Card made within the last 4 years (Pixel Shader 3.0, Vertex Shader 3.0) DirectX®: DirectX® 9.0c Hard Drive: 300 MB Controller Support: Microsoft Xbox 360 Controller or Direct Input compatible controller

game information: Developer:ARC works system Publisher: Bandai Namco Games Released: January 26, 2016 Platforms: Xbox One, Playstation 4, PC, Nintendo Switch Who’d have thought: matching one of the most iconic action anime of all time with one of the best fighting game developers in the business turns out to be a good idea. Dragon Ball FighterZ , from developer Arc System Works, successfully adapts the fast and thrilling pace of a Dragon Ball fight into a three-on-three 2D fighting game built around a beginner-friendly combo system and some of the most gorgeous and true to the source cel- shaded art styles around. Despite the visual chaos, Dragon Ball FighterZ's mechanics are actually deceptively simple and easy to learn. There are just four attack buttons: light, medium, heavy, and a special attack button typically mapped to a projectile. There are no complicated special move input commands, like dragon punch, charge, or 360 motions. If you can throw a fireball in Street Fighter you can perform just about every single move and technique in FighterZ. That’s great, especially since you’re required to handle three characters at once. The one place where its simplicity goes too far is that each character has two highly damaging auto combos that you can execute by just mashing either the light or medium attack buttons. Add on to that the ability to use a safe-on-block homing attack that can quickly close the distance and enable those auto combos to land, and you have a system where low-skill tactics are very effective. A skilled player will still likely prevail because a well-timed down + heavy attack can punish those homing attacks. But it can be tricky to time those, especially if lag is involved, which makes it frustrating when your opponent decides to spam the move. More importantly, it’s just not a very entertaining fight. FighterZ is fast, fluid, and cerebral. But when you’re matched with another player of the same skill, FighterZ is fast, fluid, and cerebral. It hits that sweet spot of being easy to learn, but hard to master, but most importantly, it feels like Dragon Ball. There’s just something so satisfying, and so uniquely Dragon Ball about taking someone up into the air, smashing them away at high speeds, teleporting behind them, pinballing them back, and then finishing it off with a huge energy blast. The roster of 24 characters is pretty great. Oddballs like Ginyu earn their spot on the roster with unique mechanics, such as summoning individual members of the Ginyu Force to perform an attack instead of having a traditional projectile, or Nappa’s ability to plant Saibamen that eventually grow and fight. Arc System Works has found a great balance between making each character similar enough that they’re easy to learn and also adding enough depth and nuance to give them their own distinctive feel. It starts off fine, but by the end of 10 to 12 hours of this slow-moving and derivative plot I had all but checked out. In the single-player campaign, FighterZ's lengthy original story involves an invasion of mysterious clones and the mysterious appearance of a new character in Android 21. It starts off fine, but by the end of 10 to 12 hours of this slow-moving and derivative plot I had all but checked out. Clearing out weak clone fighters between important fights feels like padding. Sure, you level up and earn new skills, but their benefits, such as slight boosts to health, defense, or special attacks, are hardly noticeable once you’re in an actual match. They real reason to play the single-player campaign is the fanservice converations between unlikely pairings. The real reason it’s worth playing for Dragon Ball fans is the special fanservicey conversations before a match. Pairing Gotenks and Ginyu causes them to get into an impromptu pose-off with each other; another has Piccolo and Tien chatting about how Piccolo is a better grandfather than Goku; and just about any scene with Yamcha is worth seeking out because of how painfully aware he is that he’s by far the weakest fighter in FighterZ. Canonically, at least. Seeking out moments like these was by far the best part about the Story Mode. If you want to test yourself against the AI, FighterZ's unique approach to Arcade Mode is definitely the way to go. As you fight through specially themed teams of fighters you’re graded after each battle, and that grade dictates the path that you take: high, middle, or low. There’s no real difference between the paths outside of their difficulty and the specific characters you fight, but it can be extremely difficult to remain on the high path the whole way, which gives you something to strive for as you play. The downsides are that there’s no way to restart a losing match, and sometimes the difficulty spikes can be huge from one match to the next. The most charming parts of FighterZ can be found in the lobby. The most charming parts of FighterZ can be found in the lobby, in which your chibi avatar can communicate with other players through emotes and funny stickers that use screen grabs from the show, which you can find more of in loot boxes. While loot boxes are almost always terrible, they’re actually not that bad here. FighterZ is very generous with in-game currency, and by the time I had completed story mode, a few runs of Arcade Mode, and some combo challenges, I'd unlocked a ton of stickers, more titles than I would even want to choose from, and all but seven avatars - all without spending a penny. As far as online play goes (in the beta, which Namco Bandai reps say is representative of the final version), my experience has been about 50/50. There were times when it was so smooth I might as well have been playing against someone right next to me. Other times, it was an infuriating lag-fest that would usually end with a disconnect. That’s something we have to hope Arc System Works will stabilize soon. Verdict Between the accessible auto combos, homing attacks, and simplified command inputs, Dragon Ball FighterZ is an inviting gateway into the world of fighting games for newcomers - whether you’re a Dragon Ball fan or not. Those easy controls can open the door to some spammy behavior, but just as often it’s satisfying in a way that does right by the Dragon Ball name. Dragon Ball FighterZ has enough depth and complexity to glow as brilliantly as a Super Saiyan. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: MINIMUM: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required) Processor: AMD FX-4350, 4.2 GHz / Intel Core i5-3470, 3.20 GHz Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: Radeon HD 6870, 1 GB / GeForce GTX 650 Ti, 1 GB DirectX: Version 11 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 6 GB available space Sound Card: DirectX compatible soundcard or onboard chipset