Gadgets and humor are what distinguish No One Lives Forever 2 from your average shooter. That and you play as a super hot lady. The open gameplay allows for multiple ways to dispose of your enemies using such devices as banana peels, robotic explosive kittens, an eyelash curler taser, and nasty bear traps…
Everybody say…”BONIVA”!!!!
Ahhhh..now this is what Winter Games is all about. Grim Fandango is one of the many titles I bought a long time ago and just never played. We’re talking about 6 or 7 years that this game has been sitting on my shelf waiting patiently to be picked up and enjoyed. Over the summer I finally installed it and began playing it as an unobtrusive game I could bring down to the Cape, and Winter Games 2006 has given me the excuse to throw unobtrusiveness aside and dive right back in.
(Read on …)
Warm and fuzzy
Witness the fiery demise of Missing: Since January by The Adventure Company. The premise is this: A journalist and his friend have been kidnapped by a methodical killer and their captor has left a CD-ROM that gives you a chance to find them and perhaps save their lives.
It is a graphical mystery/adventure which advances by solving puzzles or playing arcade style mini games (bring your best mouse chops). Many times the answers to the in-game puzzles must be found by doing further research on the internet. Throughout the game you receive emails from the “team” working with you to crack the case. The implementation of the email function is a bit shoddy and a couple of the emails you receive contain the actual answers to the puzzles you’re working on. Where’s the fun in that? Though this aspect of the game could use some improvement, it doesn’t get in the way of your fun unless you let it.
The presentation of the game is very slick and the production values are quite good. (side note: I think I need to play something soon with terrible production values so I have something to say other than “great” and “quite good”. Something like “The voiceover production in Red Faction was pure balls!”) As the game progresses, clips of the journalist’s video tapes leading up to his kidnapping are presented as a sort of reward. These live-action video clips are very convincing and pretty much made the game worthwhile for me.
The end could have been better but overall I’d say this game is worth the money. You won’t see any nudity but there’s plenty of blood and gory imagery for you true crime fans.
Rating: BUY
because I have to tell you about both of them in today’s post. Two weeks ago I took part in the Penny-Arcade sponsored beta test of NCSoft’s new MMORPG, Auto Assault. This game has been described by people - and I mean “people” in the most vague way - as Guild Wars meets Mad Max: Road Warrior. “This could be good,” I thought, “I like automotive combat and a movie bold enough to feature a man in bondage gear named ‘the Humongous‘.” It’s at this point that I’d like to tell you how much I enjoyed the game and how you should look forward to vehicular mayhem. Unfortunately all I can tell you is that I couldn’t get the beta to start. So much for the Humongous.
I also sat down last night to log in some good hours playing Civ4. I’ve heard a lot of hype about this game and how great it is, but as it turns out, hype doesn’t always pan out. There are a lot of things about this game I don’t like. Primary among them is that the game’s strategic focus is totally altered. In Civ3 there was a lot of space and room to explore while in Civ4 you’ll be knocking on your neighbor’s doors within five turns. I enjoyed that exploratory feeling and I’ll be honest, I miss it. The graphics have made the game a little slow to play and it’s exacerbated by the totally new control scheme which irritates me to no end.
All of these things make me want to dislike the game, but then I find things that I really like about the game as well. Most of the city management can be taken care of on the world map, the auto-improve and auto-explore functions remove a lot of the tedium, and when you hit the classical era, the soundtrack changes to Mozart. Which earns them a lot of style points. I think I would like this game a lot more if I could accept that exploration is no longer a key part of civ building, but I feel like I’ve had my favorite toy taken away.
Outside of that, Winter Games progress. I’m in the Land of the Summoners in Final Fantasy 4, the templar Angelo just joined my party in Dragon Quest 8, I’ve got a good hand on WoW, and .hack … well, three out of four isn’t bad.
It looks like Ubisoft stole their Warrior Within map from Sierra’s “No One Lives Forever 2″.
The sad thing is that this crayon map is much more helpful than WW’s three dimensional waste of pixels.
Come on in, drink the water.
This weekend I had to take a break from Winter Games 2006 and play something from this decade. Now you see that screenshot up there? That would’ve been enough to entice me to play Battle for Middle Earth 2 and that’s just the menu screen. Based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, this RTS follows an immensely successful prequel. Ah RTS, we’ve been on again / off again for so long but every time we’re reunited it just feels so right.
