Games Cheats and Reviews

First off this review will be very short, shorter than my normal reviews. Why? Well, frankly because this game doesn’t deserve any more “press.”

Haze is one of those shooters that had a lot of potential, but never was really able to capitalize on it. This “gem” is brought to you by Free Radical Design, a company that was formed from a splinter group of the Goldeneye/Perfect Dark team. Also, this team designed the Time Splitters game. The bulk of the aforementioned games were great. Knowing that, you would think that a something they created on a current gen system would be just as outstanding. Unfortunately, that is far from the case.

Haze follows the Sgt. Shane Carpenter, a soldier in “Mantle”, a sort of PMC of the future. You are sent into South America to help stop the rebels known as the “The Promise Hand”, led by a man calling himself Gabriel “Skin Coat” Merino… seriously. Over the course of the game you are able to dose yourself with Mantel’s super elixir called “Nectar.” Basically it is just a drug that heightens your awareness, skill level, and generally makes you a giant douche bag (but more on that later).

Over time, Shane’s Nectar administration system starts to fail. Only then does he begin to see Mantel for what it really is, a giant smash and grab corporation. He’s shown the true repercussions of prolonged exposure to Nectar, that being death.  Naturally, Shane then joins forces with the rebels to try and put a stop to Mantel. Free Radical tries hard to put a big morale lesson in Haze, but honestly, by the end of the game I didn’t care enough anymore to bother paying attention.

Getting down to the game itself, visually, Haze looks atrocious. Seriously… The textures, are just flat out ugly. It’s chock full of glitches and bugs, not to mention that at points I would get stuck in different parts of the map, because the collision detection was so spotty. Controls were run of the mill shooter and let’s be honest, kinda hard to screw up. The weapons of Haze brought nothing new really to the table, and sitting here thinking about the game I couldn’t list a single one to you.

I guess it doesn’t sound all that bad. There is a lot of spoken audio, seeing as how most of the game is told through verbal exposition. Which brings me to my biggest gripe with this game. I will start by saying that I understand what and why they were trying to do with the soldiers of Mantel. When you first meet the other guys in your squad, I was seriously surprised they weren’t wearing pink polo’s with the collar popped. There was more high-fiving and “dude bro” moments in the first section of the game than in the entirety of the beer-pong world championships. It was annoying to the point of being painful. Again, I understand why they did this though. They were making the point that the Nectar alters your sense of right and wrong, as well as making you a team player in your squad. I just don’t think they had to do it to such a nauseating degree.  I was so happy later on in the game that I was given the chance to shoot the Mantel guys. I found myself unloading clip-after-clip into them, just to release stress.

Given the pedigree of it’s creators, and the potential graphical upgrade offered by the PlayStation 3’s cell processor, I was hopeful that this game was going to be something I would initially like and continue to enjoy over time. Much to my disappointment, Haze didn’t deliver on any of it’s promises. I have played much worse games in my life, however this one ranks high on the list because of the sheer disappointment it brought with it.

Sharing: It’s Win/Win

Splinter Cell: Conviction has gone through some big changes since it was originally slated to ship back in 2007, but that delay has been worth it. In its current form, Conviction takes some obvious cues from Ubisoft’s other, big stealth/action game, Assassin’s Creed 2, but it layers on enough distinct, cinematic style to ensure the Splinter Cell series keeps an identity all its own. The game looks great, and the well-paced story reaches a satisfying climax, but you might feel a little bit cheated if you pay full retail price for the game. Even with the multiplayer thrown in, you can expect to go through almost everything in the game once in well under ten hours.

The short playtime shouldn’t be a complete deal breaker though — Conviction is as riveting as any summer blockbuster film. Have you ever watched 24? If not check, out this clip. This is what Conviction is like; the game doesn’t have to explain that you’re an ex-military badass with the skills to take on a room full of armed mercenaries with just your bare hands. You just get it. The game’s lead, Sam Fisher, is Batman with a gun and no qualms about leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake.

JDE writes:

"This May, developer NaturalMotion and publisher 505 Games will have an important question answered for them by consumer’s wallets: If a football game doesn’t have "Madden" on the box and an NFL license inside, is it still worth playing?"

The Beta of Starcraft 2 is running and PC Games hardware took high-res screenshots of the game. The pictures that have been taken at 2560 x 1600 show the maximal details of the game. PCGH also mentions that you can force anti-aliasing in the graphics drivers or with Nhancer although the game doesn’t offer the option natively.

If you log in at PCGH (free registration required) you can download the screenshots, too.

A playable demo for Lunar: Silver Star Harmony was recently released for the PlayStation Portable. You can download it from the PSP’s PlayStation Network, which will take about 210MB of memory. In the demo, you’ll get to see the enhanced graphics, animated cutscenes and play through a few battles in the RPG classic. Lunar: Silver Star Harmony is a refreshing return to the role-playing game, which also includes some additions to the story.

As a bonus for completing your first quest in the demo, you’ll get some bonus equipment for use in the full game. Upon completing the demo’s quest, you can create a save file that will store the "demo clear data." The game doesn’t say what the items are. Game publisher XSEED Games has only hinted that it is "bonus starting equipment."

Kombo: Epic. It’s a word that you hear a lot these days.

It is usually used as a superlative, to praise something deemed big and grandiose, but also very good, despite the fact that the term "epic" doesn’t really have a positive or negative connotation. One thing we can agree on is that it does in fact mean something done on a grand scale, and that certainly applies to certain videogames.

We all love a good, epic game, but it seems to me that we have become so enamored with games done on the epic scale that we may have forgotten that a game doesn’t have to be epic to be good. It has become somewhat irritating to me to see great games go unnoticed because of their lack of an "epic story" or grand scale. Not every game needs to be "epic" and it’s a shame that games that are not so easily fall through the cracks.

Risen, the new RPG from the makers of Gothic 1-3 ist out. PCGH shows some screenshots with maxed out graphics based on downsampling FSAA (the game doesn’t offer AA ingame) and modified ini (view range, details in the distance).

GZ: It looks like Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and Ninja Gaiden 2 graphics are night and day.

We’ve already spotted quite a few differences between the Xbox 360’s Ninja Gaiden 2 and the PlayStation 3’s Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2.

The former features a sub-HD resolution of 1120 by 585, whereas the latter has had the development time (and Team Ninja’s experience developing the first Ninja Gaiden Sigma) to bump that resolution up to the high-definition 1280 by 720.

There’s also another obvious difference that some gamers are disappointed with. The PS3 game doesn’t feature the gore that made the Xbox 360 version so visceral. Instead of blood squirting from disembodied enemies, Sigma 2 spurts out purple sparks.

And now we’ve found another difference.

TheGameReviews writes: "In retrospect, my relationship with Okami was more infatuation than true love. The design wasn’t as tight as that of Zelda’s, the puzzles too simple, the collectibles too useless, and the script too rambly. But it’s easy to get cynical over what a game doesn’t do. What Okami did was to look gorgeous, control well, tell a deceptively complex story, and innovate with its brush mechanics. More to the point, it was more than the sum of its parts. The hand-painted look of the game, the celestial brush controls, and the tale of a goddess reborn all complimented each other in creating the most wondrous virtual world ever committed to a disc."

Koku Gamer writes: "We all like a good game, but what exactly makes a game "good?"

Games are designed to suite all tastes for every kind of gamer. Whether you like rich developed story lines or going down corridors shooting the heads off of the bad guys, there’s something for you. Of course, a one sided game doesn’t sit well with most gamers. A game needs to have aspects of every good thing the developers can possibly fit into it.

So what elements do make a game good? Whether you’ve realized it or not, your favorite game probably has each of the following: Organized plot, developed characters, unique atmosphere and re-playability."