Reviews & Articles

Major Minor's Majestic March is an odd little game. I use the word little intentionally because it's a bit of a one-trick pony: you play as a drum major who marches through town inspiring the townsfolk to join up and follow you lead. I guess you could say you're The Music Man only a lot more honest.

I feel like a dweeb (is dweeb still a word in common use?) when I tell someone just how cool it is to be a mushroom in Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars. I don't drink, yet everyone I know seems to have a breathalyzer on them and starts measuring my blood alcohol level when I mention the various factions: the Shiitake, the Morel, the Boletus... See, you're making that face!

Alpha Protocol is an espionage-based action/role-playing game that looks to flexibility of storyline as its main hook. The real goal of Alpha Protocol is to create a world/scenario that will result in very different outcomes based on how the player behaves in the storyline; not JUST in the ending, but all through the experience.

To me, Stormrise seems to be a game that was designed entirely around its interface, and some of the results are quite interesting when you consider what typefies the RTS genre - even those that have made it to console games. The concept is basically, "design a control scheme that allows a player to manage an RTS style battlefield from the frontlines of the battle, and lets them to do it using a console's standard controller." The game that evolved from this baseline looks and controls uniquely enough that Creative Assembly and Sega also plan on moving it to the PC after the initial console releases, so the meat of the game seems to be deeper than JUST the control system!

There are Lord of the Rings fans – like those of us who re-read the trilogy, The Silmarillion and The Hobbit about once a year; and then there are Lord of the Rings fans – like my son, who at 11 has read all 5 books twice, a few of the unfinished tales, memorized the films, owns more paraphernalia than can be stored in two homes and must own ev-er-y single video game that hits the market. If you are of the latter category, Lord of the Rings: Conquest is going to make you rather happy.

The E3 presentation of Bayonetta may have been one of the most surreal experiences I've had in and about video games. It is, assuredly, the only time ANY of my notebooks has ever included the phrase "hair dragon ate ogre," and really, that was just a highlight - not the pinnacle of the odd. Through it all, though, Bayonetta looked really COOL, which is apparently what Platinum Games is going for. At the very beginning of the presentation, they stated that "Bayonetta will be the best 'style-action' game on the market. There are others, and we will be better than them. You will want to play Bayonetta." Wow - that's brassy! In terms of guarantees, it really seemed more "Joe Namath" than any of the shallow guarantees we get these days - so how did they follow up this proclamation? Well, let's see...

I had a chance to see the pre-alpha of the newest game in the Total War series. Having played many a game of Shogun, and tinkered a goodly bit with all of the subsequent titles, I was interested to see what was coming with this iteration. The game is set in the 18th century, when empire-building was all the rage, and the lifesblood of commerce and military was naval trade/warfare. As such, a wholly new naval component is being added with Empires, in addition to some big changes in the land engine. Let's start, however, with the brand new "if by sea" news!

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was the fact that when I got to Bethesda on Thursday, for my last appointment of E3, I got to play around a half-hour of Fallout 3. There were a few restrictions on what we could or could not write about, but I jumped right into it to the point of forgetting to write anything down.

One of the best looking games I saw at E3 wasn't because of a photorealistic style, but rather what might be called the next evolution in cel shading. Ubisoft called it an "illustrative" style, and it was a distinguishing style for the newest Prince of Persia video game.

The four of us that made up the GamersInfo.net crew, as it were, at E3 all went to see Rock Band 2 on Thursday morning. The Harmonix guys were all recovering from having seen The Who the night before, you know, the event that we weren't invited to and we had to wait for them to re-record a bit for G4 before we could go in since we're just print. But hey. We finally got in.

The very last game I saw at E3 - though not the last one I'm writing up, in case you're worried about that - was Rise of the Argonauts which is being published by Codemasters. As the final music blared, one of Codemasters' guys walked me through the background, discussion modes, and combat of Rise of the Argonauts.

Sega had their newest Sonic adventure displaying at E3, and as an old-school Sonic fan, I had to grab a look. What I discovered was a nice-looking title with some surprise mechanics from the old games, as well as an interesting new game type. Sonic: Unleashed is divided into “day” and “night” games, so I'll provide a look and some thoughts about each of these segments.

Konami had a trio of Dance Dance Revolution games on display at E3 this year, with a slightly different model representing the various console platforms. Here's what each has to offer!

I went to the Ubisoft demo room to look at Far Cry 2 and I had one big concern about the game. When I'd first heard about the game in some gaming magazine it was mentioned that you would be battling malaria. "Malaria?" I thought, "Dealing with disease isn't fun." What I found, however, was that Far Cry 2 is fun, and the malaria bit is actually something that adds to the feel of the game.

One of the games taking a lower profile at E3 was the new Tom Clancy branded air combat game, HAWX. The fact that it's not coming out until next year might be part of that, but the build that I got a chance to play at Ubisoft's floor booth was a lot more fun than I'd expected it to be (especially with that unfortunate name).

One of the things that amused me at E3 was watching people who were unfamiliar with the Brothers in Arms series pick up the controller for Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway and try to play it like most other first person shooters. Usually they were fairly quickly dispatched by the relentless German fire and they would wander away from the game, annoyed. That would be because they don't realize how realistic the third incarnation of the Brothers in Arms series can be.

Golden Axe was one of those classic quarter munching video games. With animals to ride, gnomes who dropped bottles, and enemies who turned to stone when killed, I spent many an hour and dollar doing my best to beat the game. Now Sega is restarting the property by introducing Golden Axe: Beast Rider.

So. Your name is Will. You fly a cargo plane. You crash said cargo plane in the Bermuda Triangle and now you're stuck in a mysterious parallel dimension called The Void. Intrigued yet? What if I told you the same guys who brought you Crimson Skies for the Xbox are helping to bring you Dark Void from Capcom to the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3?

In the first person shooter genre, there are many fine franchises with games worth playing. As such, it is important to ask why you should play any particular title. What is it about that particular game that you're not going to find anywhere else? Gamecock's “Legendary” is well aware of this question, and answers it in two ways;

The son of a CEO, Aidan and his pet lemur monkey Hobo, find themselves marooned on a desert island. It's up to him to decide whether or not he wants to explore or try to escape from the island.

I don't own a PSP. There's a combination of factors that usually build into whether or not a handheld would be useful for me and one of those is "will I get enough game time on it?" There are games that have looked interesting to me but after seeing the sheer amount of gameplay available in the action RPG Valhallan Knights 2 it definitely skewed me stronger towards considering a PSP.

The first thing that Boris, of Akela, told us about DIsciples 3: Renaissance, was that it was most certainly an entry into a franchise. Akela is aware that the first two Disciples games had a following, and they want to make sure that the expectations of those fans are met while they're developing new wrinkles for their game. Having never played the initial entries in the series, I don't know anything about their look and feel, but I can share that Renaissance looks really good, considering its stage of development.

In the 19th century, Dracula has returned, and it's up to the Order of Ecclesia to stop him. Unfortunately for the main character in Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, Shanoa, her jealous collegue Albus has made the hunt for and fight against Dracula more perilous by interrupting an important ritual and causing her to have amnesia.

Populus, originally a game for the PC, is coming back this fall for the Nintendo DS. This time, instead of just following one god, you'll have the option to choose which of five gods you'll represent for each mission.

It's easy to admire the scope of Spore from a "reality" perspective. The concept of tracking a small organism in the primordial ooze, following its evolution into a complex creature, and watching subsequent development of its society - straight through to that of a spacefaring race - is immense. It's an impressive undertaking, and in person it comes off well. What's more noteworthy to me, however, is the breadth of gaming that's covered by Spore. It includes a bit of resource gathering/management, a bit of real-time combat, a bit of RPG leveling, some unit-group management, and through it all, a content manager and editor that ties in the personalization/collectible genre. That's a lot of gaming to be included in a single title! Thanks to some always-handy dev cheats, I had a chance to see Spore in all 5 stages of game play, which are (in order): spore, creature, tribe, civilization, and spacefarer. I'll give a short rundown on each segment, and then some overall game impressions as well as a peek at features that don't fit squarely into a given phase.

To a certain degree, all sports are influenced by swings in momentum. Some, more than others, are also affected by atmosphere, and EA believes that these factors should be examined in NCAA Football '09. This game includes new mechanics that give prominence to momentum, atmosphere, and experience - emphasizing intangibles that have gone largely unnoticed to this point. These changes manifest on both sides of the ball, and while the concept is largely the same, the specific causes, effects, and recovery processes differ to a significant degree.

Korg DS-10 Synthesizer is, to be completely accurate, not a video game. It is, instead, an accurate recreation of the Korg MS-10 synthesizer of yesteryear. Yes, what was a huge synthesizer "back in the day" can now be completely ported over to a small handheld video game console.

Did you buy the original version of The Witcher? Atari loves you and wants to reward you by giving you a copy of the new "Enhanced Edition" for free! Did you not buy The Witcher? Well, here's a good excuse to do so, because with the new enhanced edition you'll find that the game has been considerably...uh...enhanced.

Like many of my generation I have fond memories of hanging out with my friends as a kid, playing Nintendo with all that came along with it. Laying down on the floor, blowing the dust out of cartridges, checking out the random games and occasional magazine a friend might have that you didn't. Retro Game Challenge recreates that experience in an unusual but very cool way.

Sometimes it's just a matter of scale. Combination action/strategy World War 2 naval games exist - I do believe if you look here you'll see another one - but PT Boats: Knights of the Sea is a smaller scale, primarily European theater game of that sort.