Too Human

August 19, 2008 - Too Human is a game with a serious identity crisis. It wants so badly to be everything to everyone – a slick, frantic brawler in the tradition of Devil May Cry; an epic tale of Norse gods, power and corruption; a hardcore dungeon-crawling RPG like Diablo with swarms of enemies and loads of loot; a thoughtful meditation on technology and religion; a cinematic masterpiece – and all of it wrapped around a curious double-planed techno-organic landscape that shares more than a passing resemblance to The Matrix Revolutions.

Too Human tries its hand at all of these elements and succeeds only in proving the old adage that 'more' doesn't necessarily equate to 'better'. There are more outside influences in Too Human's final design than original thoughts; the culmination of more than a decade of on-off development is the clear culprit here.

Silicon Knights' repeatedly delayed, reworked and arguably overhyped release is, in a word, harmless. It won't move you with its writing; it won't impress you with the latest, greatest graphics; it might not even compel you to finish the adventure if you're not immediately taken with the gameplay. It doesn't push the envelope as much as it pretends to on the surface.

What Too Human will do is serve to remind you that, even in a market flooded with dystopian adventures, moralistic epics, mini-game compilations, formalist Japanese turn-based RPGs, World War X shooters and hardcore sports simulations, sometimes the genius is in choosing the right niche, sticking with it to the end and getting it right the first time.

The story is a strange journey – and being the first instalment of a planned trilogy of games, it's also noticeably incomplete. The hero, Baldur, is a member of the Aesir gods, who have sided with humanity in the long-running battle against sentient machines. Superficially, your quest is to wage war and hunt down GRNDL-1, a rogue machine, but this eventually gives way to a more conspiratorial story of gods-against-gods and the implications of overreliance on technology.

At all times, you get the feeling Silicon Knights is holding back. You're tossed into a conflict that your grunt-fodder allies are quick to point out that they don't understand – and neither do we, really. There's a fair amount of exposition between missions that starts to stitch together Baldur's strange memories and weaves them into the rest of the story. The Norse mythological slant is curious more for how incongruous it is against the cybernetic technology than anything; the whole game could've easily excised the Norse component and gone for an original race or sect to the same end.

Baldur isn't the most layered character we've played with in a while, either. He seems motivated by short-spurt bouts of aggression that are perfect for setting the scene for the game's relentless brawling, but are silly enough in the context of the story that they can be easily picked as red herrings or distractions, while the real threat is heavily hinted at to the player. Is that to say the story is a stinker? Not really – it's just painfully hard to follow in one moment and then equally transparent in others. You'll be able to pick the villains, the love interests and the show-ponies from their character design – even before they open their digital mouths.

We knew this was never going to be in the leagues of high-cinema storytelling, but the voice-acting is, at times, genuinely sub-par. The quality of the dialogue ranges from clever asides to daytime tele-movie exposition, espousing lines that you've heard appropriated a hundred times before. Watching Baldur smoulder quietly and reject the obvious advances of a certain female character has all the emotional weight of a Big Brother daily update………………………

Spider Man 3

May 4, 2007 - When Spidey puts on the symbiote -- that's the black suit for those of you who don't speak geek -- Peter Parker goes from a wisecracking hero to a skull-cracking jerk. His testosterone levels spike; he gets meaner and more aggressive. Activision and Treyarch nailed the darker concept with Spider-Man 3 the game because when I picked up the 360 controller, I lost myself to rage. In a flash, the well-to-do dork who sleeps with a Superman comforter was gone, and I became a tweaked-out, curse-word-spewing maniac who pounded on his desk and screamed to the heavens as I was screwed over by cheap bosses and badly-designed interiors. At one point, I drew back my arm to hurl the controller into my beloved TV screen and caught a reflection of myself. This anger. This rage. What had I become?

Just like Pete's decent into darkness, Spider-Man 3 goes south so slowly that it's hard to notice at first. The game opens up with Bruce Campbell acting as our familiar narrator and walking Spidey through his new-found controls. Ol' web-head can now web zip with one button; his Spider-Sense turns the screen black and white while displaying enemies in red, allies in green and objectives in yellow; and Spider-Reflexes allow the wall-crawler to slow time and counter attacks with a single button press. You get the basics down while saving some folks from a fire, and you're let loose in New York.



Lovers' spat over the streets of Manhattan.
At first, it's breathtaking. Activision says the city is 2.5 times bigger than the one in Spider-Man 2, and as the sun bathes the towering buildings in light and you somersault into different sections of the sprawling metropolis without any load times, it's easy to get swept away in the visual upgrade. You throw a web -- it comes out lax, hits something and goes taut in Spidey's hand -- and set off to bring justice to the city, which is no small task in the sandbox environment.

There are 42 missions in Spider-Man 3 that draw from the movie (Sandman, New Goblin, etc.), the comics (Scorpion, Kraven, so on) and the videogame's original content (three gangs are running amok in New York). Drop in random events such as hurt cops and gang fights that pop up as you swing around the city, races, skydiving challenges, 75 gang tokens, 35 secret tokens, 30 skyscraper tokens and 30 subway tokens, and you've got a lot for the web-head to tackle.



Spidey in black suit. He's so dark and mysterious!
Let's get the good out of the way first -- swinging through the city and taking care of random crimes, arguably the best parts of Spider-Man 2, are arguably the best parts in this game. The swinging is well animated and pointing your analog stick left or right will direct Spider-Man as to where to shoot his webbing, while the random crimes are more in-depth this time around. Sure, you have to stop an out-of-control driver every now and again, but sometimes you'll get to follow a speeding police car to a crime scene. Even better is the fact that the pop-up crimes aren't just there to be there this time around -- they play into Spidey's Crime Fighting Index. See, New York is broken up into different gang zones. These zones are visible on the in-game map as well as tracked on Spidey's stat menu. It's up to you to patrol these areas, bust bad guys and watch the zones turn from angry, gang-controlled neon to peaceful, Spidey-influenced green. The better you do, the more upgrades you get for your health and reflexes.

If the same handful of crimes in the last Spider-Man game kept you happy, the expanded roster of events -- Activision said there's three times as many events in Spider-Man 3 -- will keep you playing, but please don't take that as a ringing endorsement. Like any supervillan in Peter's life, this title's got problems.

Grand Theft Auto IV

April 25, 2008 - Criminals are an ugly, cowardly lot more worthy of pity and disdain than admiration. This is what you'll learn playing through the single-player campaign in Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV. The series cheered (and criticized) for glorifying violence has taken an unexpected turn: it's gone legit. Oh sure, you'll still blow up cop cars, run down innocent civilians, bang hookers, assist drug dealers and lowlifes and do many, many other bad deeds, but at a cost to main character Niko Bellic's very soul. GTA IV gives us characters and a world with a level of depth previously unseen in gaming and elevates its story from a mere shoot-em-up to an Oscar-caliber drama. Every facet of Rockstar's new masterpiece is worthy of applause. Without question, Grand Theft Auto IV is the best game since Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

You play as Niko Bellic, an Eastern European attempting to escape his past and the horrors of the Bosnian war. He arrives in Liberty City to experience the American dream, only to discover his cousin, Roman, may have fibbed a bit in his tales of success. Starting from nothing, Niko makes a living as a killer and enforcer, a bad-ass foreigner who appears to have no morals. The longer we stay with Niko, the more we see that there is a broken human being inside, one who would give anything to escape the person he once was.

Don't worry, GTA's famed over-the-top action and tongue-in-cheek humor are intact, but there is a new level of sophistication in the characters and the game world that raises the story above the norm. As Niko becomes mired in the death throes of American organized crime, he begins to become more self-aware. Niko's struggles with his ruthless nature never inhibit the gameplay, but instead enhance the emotional gravity of a brilliant storyline. The more absurd the action becomes, the greater we feel the very real pathos of Niko Bellic.

Much of the credit goes to the artists at Rockstar North who created as believable a city as possible. Liberty City is inspired by New York, but not beholden to it. While there are many parallels, Liberty exists in its own universe and rightfully so. Many open-world games have cities that feel as if they existed only from the moment you first turned on your console, but Liberty City looks lived in. It's an old city and each block has its own vibe and its own history.

Drive around Liberty City and you'll be able to identify each individual block. Though Liberty is filled with brownstones and a myriad of similar brick buildings, you can tell one from the other, just as you can in New York. Go to an affluent neighborhood and the street is likely to be newly paved, the pedestrians better dressed, the cops more plentiful. But head to Dukes or Bohan and you'll find streets nearly stripped of asphalt, homeless people wandering about aimlessly and criminals preying on the weak.

Watch the people and you'll witness some amazing things. At one point, I saw a woman stopped at a light, looking in the rearview mirror right before she was rear-ended by a man ogling a girl on the street. The man got out of his car and went to the woman, checking to see if she was okay. This had nothing to do with Niko or a single action I took. These were the citizens of Liberty City going about their day. And it was just one moment in a day full of incidents.

Hang in one area of the city long enough and you'll see how traffic and pedestrian flow changes as the day progresses. When it rains, people bring out umbrellas or shield themselves with a newspaper and run for an awning. Cops chase petty thieves unaware that walking down the street is Niko Bellic, cold-blooded killer. There's a perfect balance of mumbling doomsayers to remind you that the reason this city never sleeps is because it's full of nut jobs. People go about their day, only altering course when Niko inserts himself into their lives with his crappy driving or excellent marksmanship

Assassin's Creed

November 13, 2007 - In our most humble, convict opinions, there is so much Assassin's Creed gets very right that it sometimes makes other elements that tiptoe the generic line stand out a little bit more. It's not perfect - there are issues and points that will either get under your skin or not - but it never fails to entertain throughout. Here's a point to mull over that is really going to guide the rest of this review: Assassin's Creed isn't GTA. It's not an RPG - even casually. The setting is huge and somewhat open-ended, but the game structure is not. If you were hoping for a game that lets you go anywhere and do anything, then please understand - this is a platformer with action and a bit of stealth. It's not particularly deep and you can follow a straight line from one goal to the next, just traversing rooftops and through villages on horseback. If you can contend with this, then you're in better stead to enjoy what is a game that only does a few things, but does them very, very well. First of all, let's get this out of the way - the big twist is stupid and unnecessary; who knows why Ubisoft made such a hoo-ha about it. Actually, we do know why. It was for two reasons: to generate a groundswell of hype, and secondly, to avoid a backlash from players by revealing it at the end of the game and basically undermining the last 15 hours you just spent playing through it. How so? That's hard to say without spoiling things, but if you've been privy to any of the internet speculation, most of it has been spot on. By revealing this key detail at the end, it would come as a cop-out. If you took Prince of Persia and tossed in elements of Hitman and Shadow of the Colossus, the end result would look something like Assassin's Creed. In a lot of ways, the formula behind Shadow of the Colossus holds up well against Assassin's Creed. From early in the game, after going through early training levels and basic missions, the main game structure presents itself - you are ordered to start systematically bumping off supposedly corrupt, evil, violent and oppressive leaders and social figures throughout Jerusalem, Acre, Damascus and the surrounding Kingdom. You're effectively a pawn for the Assassin's Guild, where you get stripped of your rank and work your way back up the chain. However, those expecting a smooth-flowing, GTA-like experience are in for a shock. Assassin's Creed is divided into chapters of sorts, and between them you're stuck in a confined holding space where a lot of exposition occurs and you can explore the story a little further. If this sound vague, believe me, it is for your own good. This section is all tied to the 'big reveal' - and we kind of wish it had been handled differently. The structure of the game suffers from breaking away from the action after every major assassination. It literally pulls you out and away from the action while characters talk at you for a few minutes and you walk around slowly until it's time to start the next mission. It works as a plot device, but we didn't really like the way this was handled. Sometimes, a cutscene just works better. Free-running and combat are the game's strongest drawcards. Both are done exceptionally well; Altair is a master of his environment and this extends to the way you can use him to scale just about any vertical surface with an edge or jut. Ubisoft has erroneously compared the controls to that of a marionette - that's not quite right. In theory, the face buttons are assigned to body parts, but only in a very general sense. A lot of the time is spent holding down A and the right trigger to free-run - it's not exactly like you're actively controlling his legs; ultimately, you're just pressing buttons that happen to be linked to actions on screen. Clearly, running through a crowd and knocking peasants on their ass is a great way to get spotted, whereas blending in with hooded monks or gently filing past people keeps the ever-watchful eye of the guards mostly off your back. When you start running, jumping, scaling, falling or scrapping, then you start to see the rules of Assassin's Creed's engagement. Criticisms have been levelled at Assassin's Creed in this respect. On one hand, guards and peasants mostly react the same way when attacking you or chasing you, leaving them open to exploitation. If you can break their line of sight with you, you can dive into a bale of hay or a veiled rooftop gazebo to escape; that's about as sophisticated as hiding in a cardboard box in Metal Gear Solid or in a dark corner in Splinter Cell. Anyone in real life with half a brain might do a little investigating. They don't in Assassin's Creed. Nor can they hear murderous acts being committed or care too much when they stumble over the corpse of a guard you tossed over a ledge or knifed from afar. They stick to routines and limited AI rules set up by the programmers, and there isn't a lot of flexibility.

Far Cry 2

August 19, 2008 - It's that time of year again. The holiday season is coming up, and the year's biggest, or at least most-hyped, titles are getting ready for their ship dates. Among those is Ubisoft Montreal's open-world first-person shooter, Far Cry 2, the sequel to Crytek's original. This time around you won't find Trigens or the special scent and strength powers. It's just you, your guns, and a whole lot of enemies across the plains, deserts, and jungles of Africa.

We've put up quite a few previews of the game, but not until recently did we really get to experience the full game world, as before we were either seeing or playing sections specifically constructed for the demo. It's still not finished, but we still got a good sense of what playing the final game might be like. And, as a bonus, we got to see the map editor for the first time, which anyone who played Instincts on Xbox should remember fondly. With Far Cry 2, the map editor's functionality has been expanded and from what we saw, it looks as though the editor should provide players with plenty of opportunity to create a wide range of maps pretty easily on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.

Console or PC players will be able to dive right into it from the in-game menu, and all subsequent map publishing and sharing amongst users and such can be dealt with within the game. Also, all created maps will be for use in the game's four multiplayer modes, so don't expect to create some kind of elaborate map and tack it onto the single-player game world. There's certainly a wide variety of tweaks you can make to your map in the editor, but you'll need to keep in mind how many objects you're adding on consoles. Too much stuff will result in slowdown and the like, but there'll be handy gauges at the screen's top that update as you add and adjust content, letting you know how close to capacity you are. And at any time you can drop into the map and test it out for yourself, just to see how things look and perform.

Upon first entering the editor, you'll be met with a flat, blank square of land. On consoles you'll bring up most of your build options through a radial menu, while the PC editor has a number of drop down menus across the top and a right side bar featuring small thumbnail images for all the objects that can be added. Before you start dropping down vehicles, structures, or spawn points, you'll probably want to adjust the square's topography. The editor lets you fiddle with the size and shape of your cursor, which you can use to raise and lower terrain as you see fit. You can manipulate terrain with a simple raise/lower function, set specific height limitations for plateaus or lakebeds, and then use the game's texturing tool to lay down grassy, rocky, sandy or a variety of other ground decorations.

It might not look all that natural right off the bat, so to give it a more realistic appearance, Ubisoft Montreal has included an erosion tool that molds the land into shapes that look as though they've been affected by elements like wind and rain. So using this tool will add some dimples in flat surfaces, sharpen slopes, and make it appear as though loose soil has been sliding down hills and piling up where the incline meets the ground. Then, once you've set your general landscape heights, you can raise or lower the overall water level to fill up or empty whatever troughs you've created. Jungles, groupings of rocks, short brush, and plenty of other landscape decorations can then be added using the collection tool. This functions just like the landscape manipulator, giving you the option of expanding or contracting the cursor size which can then simply be moved across the land, adding these trees and other features whenever you hit or hold the activate button.

Now that the general look of your land is done, it's time to maybe add in some roads and drop down some objects. Any kind of thoroughfare is constructed with a series of nodes, making it easy to pick up and drag sections of road around if you're not happy with its placement further on in the creation process. When it comes time to select objects, there are tons of options. You've got houses and shacks of varying sizes; all kinds of vehicles, such as hang gliders, trucks, and boats; and plenty of individual objects that can be littered around the landscape or combined to create large-scale buildings. Ubisoft Montreal showed off some impressive examples of this with a construction site consisting of a large parking garage, stacks of pipes strewn about, a fence and road surrounding the whole thing with a few houses in the outlying areas, giving it a realistic, lived-in look. The construction site wasn't a pre-made asset, but rather a building made from existing, smaller asset pieces used as building blocks. Another map featured a harbor loading dock, with huge cranes leaning over ships, cargo containers in stacks and arranged in rows, and plenty of paths and hiding spots in between.

At any time it's also possible to adjust the time of day as well as weather effects. So you can create a jungle map at night covered in thick fog, a hilly desert map at sunset with clear skies, or a flatter savannah map populated with grasses and short bushes that get throttled around by the high winds of a rainstorm. By dropping into the map, you'll get a chance to see how everything looks and burns, as the demo version we tried out gave you a number of Molotov cocktails to set the grass on fire. It was interesting to see how weather and wind affected burn patterns, something dedicated map editors will no doubt take into account when designing maps meant for competitive play

Devil May Cry 4

February 5, 2008 - If you want to see how far videogame hardware has come in the past six years or so, try running Devil May Cry 4 alongside the PS2 original. When it came out, back in 2001, the original Devil May Cry was one of the best looking games on the console. Now, in 2008, Devil May Cry 4 is one of the best looking games on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It's got all the cutting-edge, high definition graphics you'd expect, of course, but just as important is its gratuitous, ridiculous sense of style, full of monocled mad scientists, underground labs, Mephistophelian rivals, bulge-veined creatures, deceptively lesbian snow demons, and assorted femmes fatales.

In this, rather over-the-top, approach Devil May Cry hasn't changed a bit. Another thing that hasn't changed is the underlying design formula. In all its fundamentals, the game is the same as previous Devil May Cry titles: wade through relentless legions of underworld denizens, taking care to dispatch them with SSS-ranking aplomb, and solve puzzles to open up new areas and items. This is no revolutionary reworking, along the lines of Resident Evil 4.

Rather, it's another refinement of Capcom's signature blend of action and exploration – a blend that the company has been evolving across its big-name franchises, Resident Evil, Onimusha, and Devil May Cry. Capcom's DNA is evident throughout the game: in the way the world gradually reveals and discloses its secrets; in the gothic (and sometimes baroque) splendour of its environments; in the grace and poise of its characters; in the jarring segue from moody organ music to high-octane metal that accompanies the game's almost improbable brand of balls-out action.

Indeed, of those three series, Devil May Cry has always offered the most hardcore action, and Devil May Cry 4 is no different: it's a game that's aching for you to smash things up, whether that's the scenery, or one of the inspired selection of evil demons. It's a game that's full of inventive moments, from a snakes and ladders-style dice game, to the various skills that you acquire throughout the game, such as bouncing off special platforms, or entering bullet-time to avoid whirring blades and whizzing lasers. As usual, some of the game's finest moments arrive with the game's bosses, which are universally well designed (Capcom evidently liked them all so much they threw them in again at the end of the game as part of a climactic boss rush – which might not appeal to everyone, but provides some seriously sustained intensity).


character, it won't be spoiling anything for anyone who reads the manual to reveal that you also get to play as Dante at certain points during the game. The two certainly look similar, but Nero doesn't share Dante's laugh-in-the-face-of-danger insouciance, or devil may care attitude. They also each have a very different feel in terms of gameplay: Nero's missions are more exploratory, with a greater emphasis on puzzle-solving; Dante's are mostly all about speed, with several having a time limit of some sort.

You can see it in the rewards they each receive after beating the game's many bosses: Nero receives some new key, or item to unlock new areas; Dante receives some new weapon with which to deal ever more inventive violence. They also handle very differently in combat. Dante's strengths stem from his wide arsenal of weapons (including the utterly insane, transforming, Pandora's Box), giving him a wide range of speedy and direct styles. Nero's strengths are to be found in his demon arm, which he can use to reach enemies from afar, and the new Exceed system.

Fifa 09

September 26, 2008 - Another year, another FIFA game, and another chance to see whether EA has realised its intentions to create the ultimate football simulation. And, of course, it's another chance to revive the aging debate over who rules the virtual football roost. Carrying on the momentum that EA has built up on the current generation since 2006's title, FIFA 09 makes a convincing case for trumping PES in being the definitive take on the beloved sport.

EA's pre-season talk has been full of self-belief in the build-up to FIFA 09 -- the sixteenth iteration of a series that first blossomed back in 1993 -- talking of the 250 improvements made to the already impressive engine that powered last year's game. But have they been enough to push EA's series to the forefront of the genre

Many of the improvements in FIFA 09 will be familiar to those who dabbled in this summer's take on the European Championships, and here they nestle well with a package that's as deep as any football fan could possibly hope for and that constantly glistens with an overwhelming amount of polish. FIFA's huge cast of footballers have been imbued with an added physicality that's apparent upon working your way through your first match, with collisions between two players now resulting in a series of bespoke and realistic animations. Players running into space will call for the ball, while defenders will raise their arms to alert the linesmen of an offside attacker.

It all adds to an engine that could already proudly claim to be the most realistic depiction of football to date, with FIFA 09 taking it to the next level. Matches play out with a slow and measured pace that rewards the patient and wily, and the best way to create goal-scoring chances is to slowly build up attacks, exploiting space, fiercely protecting possession and employing the right mix of brute force and delicate finesse.

With player's attributes now more pronounced it's worth familiarising yourself with your team and capitalising on the stronger members, while FIFA's unique trick system returns and an enhanced vocabulary of moves -- executed with a series of inputs on the right stick -- gives more skilful players another route of attack. It all adds up to one of the most faithful facsimiles of the beautiful game yet seen.


This slavishness to reality may be jarring to those who've plied their trade in other football franchises, and it's fascinating to see how FIFA has now set itself up as the more simulation-minded game in opposition to the instant gratification that PES offers. It could well prove frustrating to anyone making the jump from Konami's series, as, in FIFA 09, goals are genuinely hard to come by. All of which means that slotting one in is all the more satisfying, and you'll want to milk the player-controlled celebrations that return after their debut in EURO 2008.

Playing the ball around is now more assured than in EA Sport's past efforts, with crosses and through-balls proving more malleable than ever before. It's not all good news, however -- returning from the past FIFA are some erratic decisions made by the game when selecting a defender, and often the player's off-the-ball movements will leave you scratching your head in bemusement.

Need for Speed ProStreet

June 13, 2008 - EA's Need for Speed series has long been an ever-evolving franchise, one that changes up its focus, mechanics and style every couple of years. Though the game sells incredibly well, the developer/publisher doesn't like to sit still. This obviously means that the series has had its ups and downs, and unfortunately Need for Speed ProStreet isn't one of the ups.

ProStreet is a game that doesn't really seem to know what it's trying to be. It's been years since we've seen a Need for Speed title that focused solely on track racing, with the franchise branching out into open world settings with a story, cop chases and all sorts of other things to make it stand out. ProStreet, however, goes back to the track-based racing, putting the player into race after race on closed circuits, and then sending them back to a menu after each race is over.

This setup is perfectly fine and, in this case, does work well to some extent, but there's not really a whole lot of extra "stuff" outside of the races that makes it seem like Black Box had a good idea of exactly what it was trying to accomplish. Yes, the fundamentals are there and the setup does work well, but the bulk of the presentation doesn't feel all that robust, especially when compared to what we've seen in recent years.

As well, the control scheme and arcade vs. sim aspects feel a bit confused. ProStreet adds a ton of great customization options to the franchise, which we'll get to in a bit, but the driving physics are anything but realistic. They're an odd in-between of the two and wind up in some place that really just does not work very well at all. The series has generally had strong racing controls, but those were somehow lost in the latest game.

Most of the cars in the game feel like caricatures of their real-life counterparts, but not in a good way. Most every vehicle drives like a boat and feels very reluctant to want to turn at all. Even vehicles in hardcore driving sims like Gran Turismo turn with much greater ease than most any of the vehicles found here, and yet the game isn't even trying to be ultra-realistic.

A few of us around the office drive some of the cars that you'll find in the game, like a 2007 Civic Si (which is identical to the '06 in the game) and a 2006 Pontiac GTO, and none of them handle anything like the real deal. ProStreet's version of the GTO barely turns at anything above 30mph, and doesn't really instill any sense of its 400hp engine. The real Civic Si is a nimble little car, but ProStreet's Si feels very top-heavy and slides around corners like they're covered with ice.

And though we don't drive every car in the game, it's clear that most of them, if not all, do not drive like what we would expect from the real thing. It's sad, too, because this one, huge fault brings down a game that would otherwise be fairly solid.

Though there's not a lot of pizzazz and whatnot to it as we mentioned before, the Race Day progression does offer up a nice assortment of race events for you to partake in. Each Race Day features a handful of events -- be they grip races, drag races, sector challenges or what have you -- and pretty much all of them are good fun.

Drag races start out with a mini-game where you heat up your tires before heading to the line, and then it's all about timing your shifts, using your nitrous at the right time and keeping your car in a straight line, which can be tricky when you get to the really fast cars. The tire heating mini-game can get a little old, especially since each drag race event has three runs, so you'll play the game three times in the span of a couple minutes, but it's fun to try and shave a couple hundredths of a second off your time by getting a perfect start.

Need for Speed Carbon Own the City

November 1, 2006 - EA's seminal racing series has revved its way to the PSP once again with Need for Speed Carbon: Own the City. For the first time, the series hits Sony's portable system with a truly open city to cruise around and race in. Toss in crew members that act as your wingmen during races, some new race types and a bit of spice here and there and you have what sounds like the makings of an all-new experience.

However, Own the City doesn't feel all that new. In fact, it feels like the exact same game of Need for Speed that we've been playing for a few years with a couple new, and mostly minor, features added in.

The series' physics system hasn't changed much in a long time, and it's yet again remained the same in Own the City. Cars feel both agile and loose at the same time with a very arcade-heavy tilt towards the controls. The biggest issue here is that individual cars still don't feel all that different. Of course, they vary in speed, acceleration and handling, but one car that's been modded to have the same stats as another will pretty much feel exactly the same. All this means is that it feels like you're driving stats rather than cars.

The reason we think EA hasn't messed with this design is that it indeed can be fun to fly down highways at insane speeds and quickly wind around slow turns. It's not that the driving mechanics are broken in any way - they're quite responsive, quick and fairly well refined - but the formula hasn't changed in forever, and there really should have been more variance by now.

The track design is, once again, classic Need for Speed architecture. Roads are generally extremely wide and twist and turn slowly, allowing you to floor the pedal throughout most races. There are of course some back alleys and such that'll require that you tap on the brakes here and there, but for the most part it's the same wide-open, and frankly boring, track design we've seen for years.

The game's story is focused around the death of your brother, the leader of a racing crew called the Lucky 7s. After his mysterious death, other crews took over the various districts of the city, so it's up to you to take these areas back in order to find out what happened to your brother.

This setup sounds somewhat different than what we saw in last year's Most Wanted and its wanted list of racers, but in practice it's almost exactly the same. You have to take over each district in a pre-designated order, and complete a number of smaller races in order to convince the leader to race you. So really, it's exactly the same cake as last year, but with differently colored icing.


Own the City's open world works quite well in a strictly technical manner, never hitching to load an area and running smoothly at most every turn. But while it works, that doesn't mean it's fun. There's barely any traffic at all in the game, almost to the point that when you see a car it's a common thought to think, "Oh yeah, there's traffic in this game." As well, there really isn't much to see. The surrounding city isn't all that exciting, and while you can search out hidden crates and such, it just feels tedious to do so. It's much better to simply pause the game and choose your next race from the menu. In this way, the open city doesn't actually hurt the game any, but it feels pointless when you'll always just skip to the menu to progress.

The game's wingmen aspect is pretty decent and winds up being the best new addition to the series. That's not to say that we'd be overly dismayed if the feature didn't return next year, but it's interesting. At any one time, you can have two wingmen that can act as an assassin, brawler or drafter. The assassin will drop spikes just ahead of an opponent, the brawler will simply pummel them out of the race for a bit and the drafter will race ahead of you and allow you to use their draft to increase your speed. Unfortunately, they don't really do anything on their own and will always hang back behind you, but they do work reasonably well as aces up your sleeve when you need

Paradise city

Welcome to Paradise city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. Think you got what it takes to earn your burnout licence?
Burnout paradise is a mix of racing and destroying any other car on the road. Players will be faced with challenges in order to add points to their licence and ultimately earn their burnout licence. Challenges will include destroying a certain number of cars in a time limit, outrunning drivers trying to run you off the road, or just good old racing. With beautiful graphics and stunning crashes you won’t want to leave paradise.
Burnout Paradise brings gamers an enjoyable driving experience with an enjoyable soundtrack featuring such bands as Guns and roses, Killswitch engage, Nerd, and many more.

Freeburn online with friends and compete in races, complete challenges, or just destroy each other for the hell of it. Like destruction? Activate showtime and destroy as many cars as you can for points. Burnout paradise is loaded with superjumps, barriers that need smashing, and the odd driver that you can take out to get their car. The map is rather large and is loaded with over 100 events for you to compete in.
Drive anything from a sports car to a van for all your destructive needs. Burnout paradise offers drivers complete freedom and can explore and play the game at their own pace giving you all the time you need to learn all the shortcuts through paradise city. The graphics are quite nice, but Paradise city seems to lack things you’d expect in Paradise like palm trees, and well, people. Overall a good game, but with a hint of same old, same old. The crashes in Burnout are great fun to watch, what’s better than seeing an opponents get wrapped around a bus. There’s a car for every event and they come in three different classes being speed, aggression, or stunt cars............

Prince Of Persia The Two Thorne

When Ubisoft released Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, it was one of those beautifully extraordinary games that was swallowed whole in a sea of commercialized games both good and bad. Yet the game was able to develop quite a following and why not? It brought back the PC classic and reintroduced it with better visuals, a solid story and great combat. Then came Prince of
Persia: Warrior Within, a darker game but with even better fighting mechanics. Now Ubisoft has spawned a new chapter - one that might not be very different from last year but boy does it offer quite a ride. In Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones we just don’t get one Prince but we get two of them.
Sailing home at last with the Empress Kaileena with him, the Prince returns to Babylon only to be brutally ambushed and left for dead by the remains of his ship. When the Prince wakes up he sees his great city in flames, his people being slaughtered and Kaileena snatched up and taken away. What’s a good Prince to do but rise up and fight back the only way he knows how … with plenty of bloodletting and his acrobatic skills. Yet as he sets out to discover the identity of those who have taken control of his city, the Prince discovers another part of himself - a darker self - that threatens to overtake him and turn him into a far more dangerous threat.

Armed with his usual choice of bladed weapons, the Prince can double-wield two blades and is armed with a number of free-form moves and Speed Kills. The screen blurs when a Speed Kill can be performed and hitting the enemy at the right moment is necessary to pull off a Speed Kill successfully. The free form fighting has been tightened as well but it still allows you to pull off combos and other slick moves anyway you want to so you can be as creative as you want in battle. You can even pick up a sword and throw it at an enemy. The Time Powers are back and they’re helpful in avoiding dangerous traps.

On the graphics front, The Two Thrones looks great on the GameCube. It doesn’t look as amazing as the Xbox version but it still looks so good. The soft lighting from past games makes a return in this game and the slow motion moves look just as amazing. While the cut scenes can look a bit murky on the Cube, the game’s environments and characters look more than decent.

The game’s sound is once again a series highlight with its excellent voice acting that brings each character to life. It’s great to hear the Empress of Time narrate the tale, injecting interesting comments between breaks or when you push the pause button or save the game. The sound effects are also nicely detailed to the point that you’ll hear the wind pass through open shutters or water trickling from a nearby fountain. The game’s score is also a real treat and no different from past games in the series so if you loved it the first time around you’ll love it again.


Without deviating from its familiar free form-fighting and acrobatic style, Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones is still one satisfying and action-packed GameCube game. It’s a bit on the short side, yes, but with a great tale filled with twists and turns and battles aplenty, you won’t help but be drawn into a game that’s well worth the price of admission. If you’re a long-time fan of the series you can’t go wrong with this on..........................................