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Here are screenshots of the maps in the upcoming DLC pack for the XBOX 360 & PS3. Possibly a PC release also expected.
Here are screenshots of the maps in the upcoming DLC pack for the XBOX 360 & PS3. Possibly a PC release also expected.
Will Write, the master-mind behind the multi-million selling Sims franchise is coming out with his latest creation in the form of "Spore". Spore lets you start from the origins of evolution, all the way till total domination of the universe. Players start from creating a tiny single-celled micro organism and evolve the creature from its obscure depths of a pond to taking over the entire civilization. Sources have noted that it could take as much as 100 years to fully complete the game by taking over the entire universe. Read that again….a 100 YEARS!!! (Now, thats gonna be one long deadline to send in its review once its released).
Features:
- Take complete control of your creature’s fate as you guide it through the following six evolutionary phases:
- Tidepool phase: Fight with other creatures and consume them to adjust the form and abilities of your creature. It’s survival of the fittest at the most microscopic level.
- Creature phase: Venture onto dry land and help your creature learn and evolve with forays away from your safe haven. Carnivore or Herbivore? Social or Independent? The choice is yours.
- Tribal phase: Instead of controlling an individual creature, you are now caring for an entire tribe of your genetic craftwork. Give them tools and guide their interactions as you slowly upgrade their state of existence.
- City phase: Bring your creatures’ race into a new golden era by building up the technology, architecture, and infrastructure of their city.
- Civilization phase: Once your city is established, your creatures begin seeking out and interacting with other cultures. You can have them do so with an olive branch or a war cry—either way, the goal for your creatures is to unify the planet.
- Space phase: The time has come to move on to other worlds in your solar system. Make first-contact, colonize, or terraform, then venture further to find other solar systems scattered throughout a magnificently rendered galaxy. A ‘mission’ structure provides new goals and paths to follow as you begin to spread through the universe.
- A suite of flexible, intuitive creation tools leverages the creative imagination of the player. Creating an entire universe of creatures, plants, buildings, vehicles and planets has never been so easy or so fun. An infinite variety of design choices is just the beginning.
- The world you explore is populated with creatures, plants, buildings and vehicles developed by other gamers and downloaded from a central database. The server chooses creatures and civilizations that best match your chosen environment, your experience level, and your creature’s ability. In turn, your creatures are uploaded to the server to be shared with other gamers.
- With procedural animation, your creatures and vehicles move based on how you construct them. They behave and interact based on your input and by their in-game encounters. That means there’s no pre-determined path you must follow—the game evolves based on your decisions.
- Wonder what another gamer was thinking when they created and evolved a creature? Uncover information about each creature’s origin in the Sporepedia, yet another way to explore the truly endless universe of creative expression that is SPORE.
Spore takes place in a lush, beautiful, populated world with different organisms and creatures that will combine all genres of gaming into one entity, slated for a September 7 release.
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Lost: Via Domus (in Latin it means "The Way Home") is a game based on the hit TV series Lost from ABC. The series itself is now in its 4th season but the game’s storyline takes place in the period of the first two seasons. The game features some of the main characters and locations seen in the series but this time from the viewpoint of a whole new character not seen in the TV show and introduced for the first time in the game. You will play as another survivor of the Oceanic Flight 815′s crashed plane on the mysterious tropical island filled with so many secrets to discover and so many treats to avoid. After the game opening which is a complete replica of the TV show itself showing the plane breaking in two halves and crashing on the island, you find yourself in the jungle with no memory of who you are or how you have ended up there. The main character that you will play has lost all his memories and it is your task to find your identity and also solve the mysteries of the strange visions you are having.
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The developers have made this game an adventure game, a genre that is missed on the next-gen platforms. The gameplay is simple and playable by any gamer with any experience and it is understandable since the true and only target of this game are the fans of the TV show and the creators cleverly have made a game accessible to all of them. They even have splitted the game into episodes each starts with a "Previously on Lost…" showing what had happened in the previous episode giving the game a unique TV quality feeling. The story is a tie-in to what we have seen in the show. The main character is a photographer and we see his past through his memory flashbacks. You have the task to find out who you are and why one of the other survivors is eagerly trying to kill you.
As mentioned before, some of the main characters from the TV show are present here; Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, Saeed and Hurly are among them. Due to the problems made by the others in the island it won’t take long until you become a suspect of being one of them, so you have to gain the trust of Saeed and Jack in order to get the help you need from the other characters. To find your identity you will search the jungle and the remains of the plane to find any clues related to your past. While in jungle you will encounter the black smoke and you have to run for your life and hide between banyan trees. These and other mini games like this makes the game a little more interesting. If you are wondering what the black smoke is , or who are the others , you better stay away from this game because the game will not try to explain anything and it considers the players know what they are doing and what is going on with the island.
The graphics are acceptable; the jungle looks good though nothing like the scenery we have seen in a game like Uncharted: Drake’s fortune on PS3. The places you can visit are limited to some parts of the jungle, caves, the beach were the survivors have made shelters for themselves and some of the bunkers like Hydra and Swan seen in the show. The character models range from very bad to great, while the Locke or Kate characters are recognizable instantly; you have mediocre Jack and very bad Sawyer and Claire. The voice-overs have the same problem; it is a complete letdown for this game not to have all the actors lending their voices to their digital counterparts. The voice alikes do not sound like the original actors and this hurts the game a lot. The music is great and the new composed main theme song is beautiful and gets you in the mood of the show.
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The gameplay elements mainly consist of running around and doing errands for other survivors and in the meantime trying to unfold your forgotten past. There are some puzzle elements in the form of fuse replacements to correct the flow of electricity on some electrical boards mainly to open some doors. You find water bottles, coconuts, torches and other stuff scattered on the island to use or trade with other items like oil and lantern or a gun. There’s no special gunfight and you won’t shoot more than a couple of bullets in the game. Some flashbacks have been implemented in the game which you have to use your camera to shoot a picture at an exact time from someone or something and when done right by zooming and focusing correctly you will remember a part of your past and discover a hidden secret. The interaction with other characters is limited to exchanging lame dialogues and trading your stuff with them.
Lost: Via Domus is not a great game. Its audience is only the TV show fans and you can not consider it as a standalone adventure game. The game is simple and will not give you any challenge at all. You can finish it in less than 5 hours and it is quite expensive since you can buy many more great titles released in the recent months and a cheaper price tag would have made it a more valuable addition to your archive; but for the achievement hunters this is an easy one thousands game score. As a true fan of the show, I enjoyed the game a lot and the ending made even more questions for my already confused mind.
Mention the words ‘Final Fantasy’ to almost any gamer, and you will instantly be bombarded with tales of magic, heroes, and the eternal battle of good versus evil. The FF franchise has been around for nearly forever, spanning countless platforms and even producing a movie. Yet to those unfamiliar with this eternal franchise, the game can seem lengthy and rather daunting, with its endless scripts and gruelling battle sequences. Nevertheless, Final Fantasy for the PSP aims to gently introduce novice players to this fantastic world, while offering veteran explorers the chance to see where it all began.
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Story wise, the game echoes the timeless fight of good versus evil. The world is shrouded in darkness (Hint: try paying your bills on time) and as if on cue, four strangers arrive to help out, each bearing an elemental crystal. There isn’t too much of a back story to our heroes, so your focus will be on ridding the world of monsters and terrible evils, while still managing to get home in time for dinner. In the tradition of Final Fantasy, you can strike a balance with your four heroes, and have a party that consists of both brute force and magic. The classes on offer in this version are Warrior, Thief, Monk, Red Mage, White Mage, and Black Mage. The first three classes focus solely on brute attacks and melee weapons, while the other three focus on either the white or black schools of magic, with the exception of the Red Mage who can specialize in both. Each of the classes can be upgraded to a more powerful version once enough experience has been gained, and the game follows a straightforward and trouble-free upgrade process – kill monsters, gain experience, level up, repeat.
The only major flaw in the experience-gaining process is that you’re pretty much left to your own devices in the game – you will spend most of your time wandering around the lands trying to locate a key item or person to talk to, and since there is no quest log or any way to record key bits of information you’ve received, you’ll spend most of your time wandering around, only to go back to a character to try and remember what you missed out. This not only becomes frustrating in such a script-heavy game, but soon begins to drain any fun out of the gameplay. But if this wasn’t bad enough, the most irritating thing has to be the amount of random encounters you will have as you walk around the world map. Almost every third step you take has you engaging a party of monsters, and even though they initially are good for gaining quick experience, you eventually tire of all the interruptions, as not all battles give you substantial amounts of experience. Not to mention, there are plenty of battles in which you come up against a foe who is considerably stronger than your party, and you will either lose the battle entirely, or end up losing a party member or two. The battle engine itself is very simple, relying on a turn-based system to play out encounters. Simply choose an attack, defend, or magic action, and then let the AI take a hit. It all sounds a bit dull on paper, yet it’s surprisingly fun in action.
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Despite the somewhat constant interruptions as you explore, the game does deliver a retro yet polished experience. The top-down 2D view is reminiscent of old Zelda games, and the graphics look exceptional on the PSP’s widescreen display. The battle sequences have minimum animation, so there’s not too much happening on-screen except a few swishes of your blade or a fireball or two. The animation effects for your magical attacks are also quite good, and retain the minimalist attitude of the game. It would have been nice if the characters had more magic slots or better weapon upgrades, since it seems that this was overlooked during the game’s development. In addition to the game’s impressive visuals, the audio is simply superb. Rather than MIDI-sounding background music, a full fantasy musical score accompanies your adventures, thus helping to complete the Final Fantasy experience.
Final Fantasy is a gentle introduction to a franchise that has won the hearts of millions of gamers. New players will appreciate the simple battle tactics presented, while experienced players will enjoy the chance to play a classic Final Fantasy adventure with a revamped attitude. Despite its few flaws, Final Fantasy is an enjoyable game for the PSP, helping to celebrate one of the most popular and loved games of our time.
PCGameplay, a Belgium-based magazine recently confirmed the existence of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2, the sequel to the 2004 real-time strategy game Dawn of War. According to them, the game will support DirectX 10 graphics and multiple CPU cores. The game will reportedly feature cooperative campaigns for both Orkz and Space Marine factions, the only two classes revealed so far. The developers at Relic have been working on the game since September 2006.
No official date for the game has been set, although it is expected to launch in 2009.
Olivier Baptiste, a 15-Year old boy was shot down by his 18-Year old friend William Suarez after he refused to pass him a game. Reports claim that William Suarez pulled out a .32-caliber Smith and Wesson from his waistband and shot Baptiste in the head before mumbling "This just didn’t happen". The Police have charged the killer with manslaughter, illegal possession of a firearm, assault with a dangerous weapon, and discharging a firearm within 500 feet of a dwelling.
Now, that is one genuinely screwed up individual.
So, here it is, ladies and gentlemen, the very last trailer for Grand Theft Auto 4, Rockstar’s wildly awaited next iteration in the popular GTA series, before it makes its grand release next month. The trailer is called ‘Good Lord, What Are You Doing’ (or ‘Everyone’s a Rat’, which we prefer) and is more than a minute long showing many of the in-game cinematic and a good dose of the graphics engine. Sadly though, there is no in-game gameplay footage which many of us came to expect since this is the last trailer GTA 4 will ever get.
GTA 4 is scheduled to release on April 29th, 2008 for the Xbox 360 and PS3 and hopefully then, we will come to know if GTA 4 was actually worth the attention. Enjoy the trailer for now (HD)!
Those that regretted buying a PS3 might want to take back their words, because according to the latest Sony Computer Entertainment UK release schedule, PS3 gamers are in for a barrage of heavy-weight titles like Kill Zone 2 & LittleBigPlanet in September and Resistance 2 in November. This should clearly provide plentiful competition to top titles from Microsoft.
Valve has revealed today that the new content people have been waiting for should be coming sometime around mid-April. The content is available to only the PC version of Team Fortress 2 and includes a new map called "Goldrush" that adds a new game mode called "Payload" where one team would have to escort a mining cart full of explosives to the enemy base. The update also includes new weapons for the Medic class primarily and then for the rest of the class in the future. A new load-out screen will also appear for unlocking your achievements. Followed by these updates is the release of "Meet The Scout" video.
April couldn’t come any sooner, eh?
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