Exploring Stuff That Makes Life Great
I’ve always been a little wary of movies based on video games. Maybe it’s the fact that most are directed by Uwe Boll, which usually means Rotten Tomatoes gets to make good use of their 00% every once in a while. Continue reading “Max Payne Not a Payne-ful as You May Think”
Is it a winner? I crack myself up sometimes. Only sometimes, not everytime. If you’re a hardcore PC gamer looking for high-end gaming products that will improve your game, check out Nova Gaming! Continue reading “Nova Gaming Winner 3 – Is it a Winner?”
Remember all of the skills you learned from those marathons of CSI New York? Well its finally time to put them to use! You get to use the intuitive observation skills of Gil Grissom and the deductive reasoning skills of Sherlock Holmes as you solve cases as the rookie in the New York Homicide division in 1976. You and your partner Marcy Blake are assigned cases from Captain Abbot, the head of the department. And as if the bodies aren’t enough for this, add in an abducted model (who happens to be Marcy’s sister) and you have Empire Interactive’s Unsolved Crimes.
With this being my first hand held game since Pokémon Yellow for the Gameboy Color, it was an easy introduction game for the DS. While investigating crime scenes, Marcy asks you questions involving the case and you get to choose the correct answer from multiple choice options. Sounds simple right? Well, it is. You have a total of three tries before you get kicked out of the department, with the occasional bonus question to gain an extra “star”. Some of Marcy’s questions involve drawing the trajectory of a bullet, or filling in missing portions of a map but most consist of either writing in the answer or choosing from 5 multiple choice answers. This makes for the game to be simpler that I would have preferred but I will admit that there are those questions that had me perplexed for a while, but for the most part the questions were pretty easy as long as you think it through logically. It’s all elementary my dear Watson.
Dare I add to the cheesiness? Yes I do. The graphics are a crime in itself. With the graphic’s color range as far as I can throw an elephant, I wouldn’t suggest nominating this game for any awards in artistic design. The colors are limited in shades and textures are minimal at best. The 3D aspect of searching through the crime scenes are rather flat. Whether this was a conscious choice on the designers part I’m not sure, but I don’t believe it fits with the game very well.
The continuing story line of a kidnapped model gives you a break from the usual routine. With the tracking down of suspects, searching their apartment for incriminating evidence, or memorizing license plates from suspicious vehicles, the game becomes a little more intriguing. After a while, solving cases one after another becomes a routine and rather predicable, but when side investigations from this continuing story arc are put in intermittently into the case lineup, it can keep us interested enough to see the game through to the end.
Although the somewhat repetitious game play and poor graphics are a downside to the game, upside of a good thinking game with a story to break up the monotony helps bring this game up a couple of notches in my book. It may not be the huge adrenaline rush that games like Gear of War 2 is, but if you want something different than “woah! Did you just see its head explode?” kind of game then give this game a try! Not that I’m condemning those kind of games. I may not look it, but trust me, I enjoy the games where I get to watch an alien creature’s head pop through a sniper scope! But every once in a while I do want to embrace the idea that while playing a video game you can use your brain for more than planning around AI aliens trying to kill you, and Unsolved Crimes would be one of those games where I can get my synapses started up.
Force Unleashed, for all the reviews it got, ended up being a success, with a whopping 1 million unit sales in a mere 5 days. If anything, it goes to show that people still buy Star Wars. While Metacritic gave it a score of around 70 on different platforms, LucasArts seems to be unfazed by the criticism.
So does that warrant a movie version?! After watching (and shaking my head profoundly) at Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie, I can’t help but think how Force Unleashed can possibly be a great movie. Except maybe if the entire movie was about slicing and throwing people with the Force. But since its Star Wars, I doubt if Lucas will approve that.
Force Unleashed already got a comic book adaptation and a bestselling novel, oh and an artbook as lavish as a full-fledged movie. So it would it be surprising if LucasFilms announced out of the blue that they’ve decided to make a movie on Force Unleashed?
Haiden Blackden, project leader and Sith Lord of Force Unleashed says that a movie version would be an “testament to the priorities and sophisticated ideas of his team”. “It’s an incredible time,” he said, “to be telling powerful stories in this fairly young medium.” Well, I don’t know, Blackden, but storywise, I’d watch a Knights of the Old Republic movie first. Hell, I’d watch a Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast movie first.
id’s long tradition of keeping games mod-friendly and mod-supportive appears to have broken with their revolutionary new game: Rage. Tim Willits from id says that it is impossible to mod Rage even on the PC, but the matter is still under consideration.
While id is as always, supportive of mods, Rage is simply too complex a product to mess around with. The biggest hindrance will be the much-talked-about MegaTexture system. For those not in the know, id’s new idea is to create something of a “super-texture” that the game streams seamlessly, rather than rendering hundreds of different textures on different objects.
The system itself is said to consume heaploads of processing power at id. A large number of computers are working hard to process them in a similar not unlike a CG render farm. And if id is taking that long, it will probably take years on an average computer, I imagine. I don’t even want to know the size of that thing.
Still, Willits doesn’t rule out modding entirely. He does say that it may just be possible for users to create mini-mods that will add to the gameplay, in small chunks of stuff. So full mods and conversions may be out of the question, but we’ll still be able to make smaller mods. Sounds fine by me, I guess. Then again, I’m not a modder.
Holy shit, did anything even remotely think of this? The Inquirer reports a breaking that Google may be buying Valve any second. And why this seemingly random move? Google most probably wants to acquire Steam, Valve’s trusty and super-successful content distribution service. So is Google taking it’s first step in the video game industry by bridging the Internet and video games?
There is no doubt that Steam is the greatest, most effective and most awesome content distribution ever. It looks like Google is interested in distributing content around. Owning Steam would definitely be profitable for Google, but it would only enforce peoples’ opinions that Google is turning into a Microsoft-ish monopoly with their webby hands over everything related to the Internet.
I personally think that the acquisition will still give Valve some space, a bit like the Activision-Blizzard merger, I’m thinking. But Google will definitely want Steam for itself. I just hope they don’t change the default theme to their boring white-blue nonsense, that just sucks.