Video Games

Red Faction Armageddon Preview

I’m just going to come out and say it: Blowing stuff up is fun. Call me shallow, but there’s nothing quite like seeing a nice big fireball where a building, vehicle, or enemy previously stood. That being said, 2009’s Red Faction: Guerilla was a fairly standard third person shooter made special by it’s penchant for destruction on a grand scale, and a completely destructible environment. Sure, games like Battlefield: Bad Company had done it before Guerilla, but Guerilla made your very objective to blow things up. Now, THQ is releasing a direct sequel to Guerilla called Red Faction: Armageddon, which replaces the oppressive Earth Defense Force for aliens which have been unleashed from so much digging under Mars’ crust.

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood: The Da Vinci Disappearance DLC review (360)

The Borgia have fallen. Rome has been restored.
There is peace (relatively speaking) at last. Time for Ezio to put his feet up
right? Wrong. The year is 1506, and a new cult has arisen and come
to prominence from the shadows. Known as The Hermeticists, they are the main
antagonists you face in Ubisoft’s newest helping of downloadable content for
its flagship franchise.

Designer Affinity – Ken Levine

Sometimes it seems like a game was made just for you.  The features are exactly what you always wanted in a game, the story tells a tale that you’ve had in your head for years, and the message you take away sticks with you even after you’ve finished playing.  Often you’ll find that when you feel this way about several games they’re all made by the same company, sometimes even with the same Lead Designer behind them.  Such is the case with how I feel about Ken Levine at Irrational Games.

Torchlight XBLA Review

In late 2009 Runic Games took the PC Gaming world by storm. Out of what seemed to be nowhere, they introduced an isometric styled RPG named Torchlight that not only drew numerous comparisons to Diablo, but also brought up questions of is it actually better than Diablo. So having played its original PC version, I knew mostly what to expect upon entering the XBLA port of Torchlight. But some questions still remained; would the controls lend themselves to consoles well? As well as would the game look as good as it did on PC?

The biggest question of the two is obviously the one regarding the controls. Would Runic be able to map the PC controls well enough to an Xbox 360 controller where it didn’t feel too much like an obvious port? And the answer to that question is: Mostly. The standard controls such as moving around, attacking, and zooming in and out the camera all work well. Attacking is done simply by holding down the X button, which is nice because having to repeatedly tap a button during a battle would be very tedious and thankfully Runic Games knew that. But once you get into using the abilities, that’s when things can get complicated.

Monday Sales March 7th

Did you blow your game budget on that pre-order for Dragon Age 2?  Well, if you’re down to your last few dollars, you can still score a big stack of games because we’re off to an amazing start this week in terms of online game sales.  For starters, GamersGate.com is holding a massive four week sale to celebrate their 5th anniversary.  You can get close to ninety games at assorted discounts there, including 33% off on Dead Space 2.  That brings it to forty dollars, so grab it if you haven’t yet.

Battlefield Play4Free Preview

The spiritual successor to Battlefield Heroes, Battlefield Play4Free is the answer to everyone who wanted a more serious Battlefield
game to play online for free. It doesn’t have any of the cartoony
characters, colorful landscapes, or talkative classes. Instead, this is Battlefield 2 made into a free online game. There are similar maps, similar graphics, and overall, Battlefield Play4Free makes the impression that it’s made for the serious Battlefield crowd.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War II: Retribution Review

Ten years have passed and the war still rages in subsector
Aurelia. Emerging from the their brief victory against the greater daemon
Ulkair, the battered members of the Blood Ravens that survived were declared
renegade by the corrupted Chaptermaster Azariah Kyras. As the ragtag army
fights the multiple forces that have invaded the subsector for their own
reasons, they seek to find Kyras and stop him before he ascends into a greater
daemon himself. As always in the Dawn of
War series, the sheer awesome magnitude of the Warhammer 40k setting serves to inspire endless combat with Exterminatus-flavored
cojones. Relic Entertainment’s latest stand-alone entry in the popular series, Retribution, adds many new features to
the engine used in Chaos Rising and
strives to improve where it may have fallen short. One interesting switch is
that Relic has ceased using Games For Windows as the multiplayer support platform,
instead choosing Steam as a replacement. This removes the issues that people
often had with the slower system and also allows Steam members to join games
from outside the game itself.