Hazard_Lobbies wrote Midnight Club La Game Review

Midnight Club Los Angeles has a lot going for it: excellent graphics; fast, intense racing that takes place day or night; and numerous online modes that support up to 16 racers. Unfortunately, it has a few rather significant problems that hold it back, including a small roster of vehicles and gameplay that, while fun, doesn't break any new ground. But most of all, it is Midnight Club's excessive difficulty that makes it a very good racing game rather than a great one.


It's a nice car now, but it won't be by the end of the race.
There's a bit of a story, but it's the bare minimum to get you in a car to race around the streets of LA. And it is quite a version of LA. The game has a day/night cycle so you're not stuck racing at one time of day the whole time. You won't just race in sunshine, either. Some days are cloudy, and every once in awhile, the clouds unleash torrents of rain. Day or night, rain or shine, the city looks fantastic. The frame rate is steady, the action is fast, and the game's re-creation of LA is absolutely gorgeous. This slightly scaled-down City of Angels covers everything, including the beaches of Santa Monica, the Hollywood hills, and downtown. What's really neat about the city here is not only how many recognizable landmarks there are, such as the 3rd Street Promenade and LA Convention Center, but also the branded buildings, such as 7-11, Pizza Hut, Holiday Inn, and even billboards for iPods. There's certainly such a thing as too much advertising, but it's not overdone here (not every gas station is a 7-11, for example), and having these real-world businesses in the game world helps immerse you in the experience.

As with most street racing games, you drive around the city looking for people to race. When you find someone, you flash your lights, and in most cases, race to the starting line. There are time trials, checkpoint races around the city, freeway races, and races from point A to point B--pretty standard stuff for the genre. You'll also have missions where you must render payback by damaging target vehicles and deliver cars across town unscathed in an extremely short amount of time. There is a police presence, which can and will chase you down if it sees you're up to no good. Chases aren't as intense as in the Need for Speed games, but it's immensely entertaining to pull over and then watch yourself on the police car's dash-cam as you peel out when the cop approaches your vehicle.

When you finish a race, you're awarded money and respect based on your position. Respect unlocks new races, as well as new licensed cars (plus motorcycles), visual customization options, and performance upgrades. The slow way in which new cars are unlocked is most likely because of how few cars and bikes are (about 44) included. But regardless of the reason, it takes a lot of winning to gain new items, which can be frustrating when you've got money to spend and a car in desperate need of improvement.

Frustration is something you'll become accustomed to as you play Midnight Club LA. This is mostly due to the game's uneven and excessive difficulty. Other than the occasional race that lets you choose ahead of time, there are no difficulty settings. There are color-coded races that purport to be easy, medium, or hard, but quite often, the "easy" races are just as challenging as the hard ones. This "one size fits all" difficulty wouldn't have been a problem if the game were balanced, but it's not. CPU racers seem impervious to the perils of oncoming traffic. They rarely make significant contact with other cars, weaving back and forth across lanes like George Costanza playing Frogger. You, on the other hand, won't be as lucky. Even minor scrapes with cars, walls, and fences can send your car spinning and leave you facing the wrong way when you come to a stop. Parked cars are particularly hazardous because they don't have their lights on and are extremely difficult to see. Because of the amazing skill level of the CPU, even one minor error on your part can--and typically will--cost you the race. This means that you'll end up doing a lot of grinding (finding races that aren't insanely tough and repeatedly doing them over) to raise your respect level. It's tedious and doesn't make for a great time.

There are other issues that prevent Midnight Club from achieving its potential. The Google Earth-style map looks really cool as it seamlessly zooms from street level to the sky, but it's not great at showing you where to go. This is a problem because it's a map. The angle at which you view the city streets isn't very user-friendly when zoomed in, many streets aren't marked, you can't rotate it, and while you can set a waypoint marker, it won't show you the best route to take. This is a huge problem when you're racing from one spot to another without checkpoints--you must constantly pause the game and consult the map to make sure you're taking the right streets. This problem is even worse in the ridiculously punishing car-delivery minigames. Not only do you need to keep the pedal to the medal the whole time, but you have to avoid damaging the car all while pausing the game and checking the map every few blocks. Even when there are checkpoints, there is no guarantee you won't get lost. Some of these large pillars of smoke are poorly placed, and the smoke actually obscures what's behind it, making it possible to zoom right by a turn. When this happens, you might as well quit out of the race to start over because you don't get the same rubber-band assistance as the AI and probably won't recover.


The map is really cool-looking; unfortunately, it's not as useful as you might hope.
If you can look past Midnight Club's many frustrating aspects (unlockable special abilities that do things like slow down time and clear cars out of your path help alleviate some, but not all, of the problems), there's a very solid racer to be found. When the difficulty is just right (it happens occasionally), and you take advantage of the simple-yet-effective drafting mechanic, races are exciting and finishes are tight. There's also a lot of enjoyment in the game's multiplayer component, which supports up to 16 racers via system link, as well as online. You can create your own races, challenge folks who happen to be driving around to standard races, or play one of the game's unique modes, such as Capture the Flag, Team Capture the Flag, Keepaway (get a flag then keep it away from everyone), Stockpile (whoever returns the most flags to his base wins), and more. Because it's a level playing field and you don't have to deal with the AI, multiplayer is where Midnight Club is at its best. Going online also gives you the opportunity to show off your ride to the community where others can rate your car's looks and even purchase it.

Midnight Club Los Angeles is exciting, beautiful, and great when played online. It's a shame that its difficulty is so uneven, because this issue and other problems take your attention away from what is an otherwise very good racing game.

theexplict wrote

Minecraft 360

Release Date: May 9, 2012
Developers: 4J Studios, Mojang
Publishers: Mojang
Platforms: Xbox 360
Genre: Sandbox, Survival, Adventure
Players: Single Player, Multiplayer
Rating (ESRB): E (Everyone)


Overall Review
[spoil]Spend one hour with Minecraft, and you will be addicted, I know many people out there are like "Minecraft is for nerds" or "Minecaft is a rip of of a lego game" Well Wrong! minecraft is unique and and is amazing witht he stuff you can do and the time it waste when your playing it, it's unique graphics make it all the better. This to me is a must buy game, and i am sure alot of people will agree.

TomClancy wrote Formats: Xbox 360 (tested), PlayStation 3, PC
Developer: Ubisoft
Publisher: Ubisoft
Released: 25 May 2012

The Ghost Recon series has long been known for prioritising tactics over gunplay, though the precise definition of tactics has been gradually easing up in the 11 years since the first game. Ghost Recon (2001) was a work of nerve-shredding tension that saw you ushering your squad of well-armed killers individually through underbrush, forest and desert, knowing all the while that a single bullet would be their destruction. A premise so mercilessly hardcore and so focused on patience and stealth was never going to survive into the mass market of the modern gaming age, though it's still a surprise to find that the latest instalment of the series has dropped even squad command from the single-player game. What's even more surprising is how well such a bottom-up rethink works.
The new game gives you control of one of four members of a tough-voiced wetworks squad, taciturn chaps who creep about on the edges of global flashpoints snapping necks and sniping goons with sinister businesslike lan. The Ghosts are assisted by a raft of five-minutes-from-now military technology, including optical camouflage that makes you mostly invisible to enemies while sneaking, augmented-reality sunglasses that project target markers and objectives onto the environment, X-ray vision that lets you see through walls and a nifty Parrot drone that zooms around the battlefield, dropping through windows and doors before swinging down little wheels to trundle along happily at ankle height. For one mission you also find yourself backing up the Warhound, a vast walking weapons platform, clearly based on Boston Dynamics' bloodcurdling BigDog robot, that spews forth mortars and guided missiles at a twitch of the trigger.
With all this tech on the Ghosts' side, you almost feel sorry for the hapless mercs and militiamen ranged against them, and for most of the game you'd be right. There's a meaty campaign, set across a scenic variety of world destinations -- a refugee camp in Zambia, an oil refinery in the **** Delta, a drilling platform in the Barents Sea, the streets of downtown Peshawar and Moscow -- but if you're familiar with the sneak-and-shoot mechanics in games such as Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six Vegas or the latest Deus Ex, you'll only feel in serious danger when things go south and people start shooting back. Ubisoft's creditable decision not to turn your character into a bullet sponge pays dividends with the sense of peril in these segments: take more than a few bullets and your character is down and howling for a medic, while after three revivals your Ghost gives up the ghost. Further neat mechanics such as suppressing fire -- your camera shakes and wobbles while under heavy fire behind cover, making it more difficult to pop out and line up shots -- add to the drama, to the extent that you'll find yourself really keen to avoid open confrontation if at all possible.
The stealth in Future Soldier takes inspiration from several mechanics in the last Splinter Cell game, in particular the mark-and-execute function. Tagging targets with the right shoulder button assigns them individually to members of your squad, and a marker lights up to show when your men are in position to take their shot. Instigating combat then triggers a brief sequence of slow-motion that allows you to eliminate all four at once, a trick that becomes progressively more useful as the game progresses. You'll find yourself spinning up the team's miniature drone to sail above the battlefield and tag rooftop snipers or unwary outliers, then collapsing them with silenced bursts of fire while their teammates potter obliviously about in the distance. Combined with the spookily efficient movement of your AI squad, this can at times make things too easy: you mark the targets, you press the button, they go down, you move on. Playing in online co-op with friends, however, the experience becomes altogether more tense, as you work your way to an optimum firing position under the gaze of patrolling guards. It'd be even more fun if Ubisoft had seen fit to include an offline splitscreen function for the campaign, an aspect present in previous Ghost Recon games that would have made this one really shine.
Getting both sneaking and combat right like this is quite an achievement, and the single player game, while you're in mission, feels for the most part solid and exciting. It's strongly reminiscent of several other games: the cover-based run-and-shoot action has the chunky solidity of Gears of War, the tactics nod to the SOCOM series, the stealth reminds of Deus Ex and Crysis 2, and there are more than a few homages to the Call of Duty series, the market Ubisoft must be desperately hoping to woo with this one, in everything from plot to level design.
As with many modern shooters, your role as part of a squad does let you in for a fair amount of bossing about from your squadmates -- for much of one level you are basically subservient to a large robotic dog -- and although the maps have much more width than the infamous scripted corridors of Call of Duty, with most having a network of alternate routes, the game occasionally pulls that series' nefarious trick of blacking you out and forcing you to return to the combat zone if you stray too far from the path. Still, for much of the campaign such tiny niggles fade into the background. The AI is solid, never throwing itself in your way or tripping enemy radars; the mechanics are decent; it all just feels right. If you enjoyed the famous All Ghillied Up sneaking level from the first Modern Warfare game, you will be in seventh heaven here for entire missions. Future Soldier may not have the nerve-shredding tension of the first game in the series, but what it does it does excellently.
There is a problem though -- the story. The story made me feel I was going senile, or that Tom Clancy was, or whichever half- demented work experience at Ubisoft Paris writes these things under his license. The developers of Future Soldier are clearly keen that you appreciate the routine nature of extreme combat situations for your squad, so the cutscenes between missions are for the most part resolutely downbeat. The Ghosts swap side-of-the-mouth banter in the aircraft-carrier canteen, or complain about not having time for a beer, while around them the world spins. Arriving back from a mission in the Barents Sea, they're told there's been a coup in Moscow; "Will we at least have time to eat something?" asks one of them uninterestedly. The disjuncture between this and the high-stakes missions is deliberately extreme: by the end you half-expect to see the Ghosts sidling out to the betting shop or creeping round Poundland between levels, just to drive the point home.
Future Soldier was developed by Ubisoft Paris for most of its chequered gestation period, and it's hard not to see the plot of the whole thing as a sort of sarcastic Gallic spin on the overwrought blockbusting of Call of Duty, with those games' breathless reversals of fortune and their endless shouty fearmongering about Russian nationalists, Russian separatists, Russian nationalist-separatists, Russian nationalist-separatist-tragical-comical-historical-pastoral ... Russians, anyway. But the developers' determination not to spoonfeed you the plot means that for much of the time the player risks not having a clue what's going on. It took me nearly half the game to work out that the 'Kojack' everyone was muttering about was the player character, a man called Kozak. Around that point, there's a brief attempt to give you the kind of personal investment in the action that the Call of Duty series attempted to such a ludicrous degree: the bad guys start saying things like 'I know all about you, Kojack," and telling your character that they know where he lives. Kojack doesn't seem worried, though, and with good reason, as these plot points don't raise their heads again for the remainder of the game. It feels as though someone left half the design document in a taxi, or that the game is setting itself up for the real story to strike in some mammoth DLC (perhaps not unlikely).
Things aren't helped by the dodgy cinematics, which bear a disturbing resemblance, in animation and detail, to the ones in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory seven years ago. Lipsync is off, the faces are strangely textureless as though drawn on balloons, and everyone's body seems to do that weird St Vitus's Dance associated with Nineties videogame exposition, in which pronouncing a sentence requires them to roll their torso earnestly back and forth while twitching their arms like a drunk in a strong wind. Towards the end of the game, voice tracks start to be recorded with no background ambient sound, textures go missing and so on: you'd forgive it in a fan mod, but here it just looks like carelessness, or worse, contempt. The developers clearly know that the missions are where the action is, and here they can't be bothered. That they're right doesn't make it any better. We might also draw a veil over the briefing screens, which look, charitably, as though they were assembled by a non-English-speaker transcribing a lecture he doesn't understand into PowerPoint. Bleeding chunks of text from the spoken briefing flash up on the screen, giving a surreal effect: BAD GUYS / LIVES OF OUR MEN / CONVENIENT HUB / DESTABALIZED (sic). There are very few of these moments in the actual missions; I did briefly wonder why a primary school in Nigeria is bedecked with murals proclaiming 'Primary School in Nigeria', but in general the immersion is well-worked-out.
Once the twelve-mission campaign ends, though, Ubisoft will be hoping that you turn your attention to the multiplayer, the one arena in which Ghost Recon really needs to compete with Infinity Ward's $7.2bn military behemoth. The online versus mode allows you to pick one of three classes, Rifleman (assault), Scout (stealth) and Engineer (support), each of which has its own advantages. Scouts have adaptive camouflage and sniper rifles, meaning that you will vanish if you stay still for more than a couple of seconds. Riflemen have speed and heavy assault weapons. Engineers can deploy drones. The various game modes prioritise teamwork, which can initially be quite a shock to those used to Call of Duty's individualist manshooting. In Conflict mode, teams must collaborate on a series of shifting objectives, working to capture resupply points or eliminate fleeing enemy agents. In Saboteur, you are tasked with retrieving a briefcase bomb and smuggling it into the empty base. Siege mode asks you to attack or defend a particular point on the map, and -- in a nod to the unforgiving nature of previous Ghost Recon multiplayer -- denies you a respawn if you're killed. There are no vehicles or destructible terrain, as with the Battlefield series: this is pure military tactics, command and control.
It's all good fun, though the need for teamwork is paramount. Bonuses are gained by supporting your teammates, and objectives fall faster if you're surrounded by members of your squad. But this kind of coherence seemed in rather short supply in pre-release matches. If you want to get the best from this game you have to play it right, which means putting together a team, turning on your microphone and playing it like a team game. Ubisoft are clearly aiming to instil more intelligence and strategy than their competitors require, but it leaves gamers without an extensive list of regular teammates in something of a bind, on multiplayer servers where getting people to turn on their microphones can itself be a difficulty. I'm not convinced the game gives you enough squad-communication tools to work collaboratively with someone who may not share the same language as you, but time will tell.
Played right, as a game between two communicative and experienced squads, this could be one of the most satisfying multiplayer experiences out there. The Gunsmith tool, heavily promoted by Ubisoft ahead of release, is in fact just a rather more complex spin on the weapon customisation tools in games like Rainbow Six Vegas, but it will allow dedicated multiplayer vultures to develop a boomstick tailored to their own particular playstyle. I'm not convinced that the Kinect integration is worth much -- yes, you can move the pretty guns around with your hands, but there is, for example, no integration of voice commands for your squad in-game -- but if you happen to have it, it's a fun gimmick.
Although there's no splitscreen in the campaign, there's a couch co-op mode called Guerrilla that asks players to defend a sequence of objectives from advancing waves of enemies. The spots you actually have to hold can be daft -- the dead centre of an office, surrounded on all sides by entrances and cover? -- but once the action hots up, fed by weapons drops between waves, it becomes a satisfying collaborative experience. There's a stealth round every few turns, too, allowing for an experience of the game's excellent sneaky gameplay in local co-op, though it remains a shame that it wasn't extended to the main story.
Is Future Soldier worth it? Yes, easily. There's a great deal of content here for the money, and a set of high-level weapon unlocks, combined with challenges to complete on every mission, should keep you coming back to the single-player or co-op games as to the online versus modes. Dismal story aside, this is a solid, professional, deeply enjoyable product. Like the Ghosts themselves, it's so good at what it does that you run the real risk of not noticing how superbly it's doing it.

Hazard_Lobbies wrote Release Date: Oct 7 2008
Developers: 2k Sports
Genre: Sports
Rating: 7-10

As any knowledgeable caveman will tell you, it's tough to reinvent the wheel. Some might say impossible. The developers behind the yearly stable of sports games that we all love struggle with a similar problem every season. How do you change a videogame enough to make it worth sixty bucks while still staying in the confines of the given sport? It's a lesson that 2K Sports learned the hard way last year with NBA 2K8, a game that underperformed in the eyes of most critics.

Luckily NBA 2K9 is here to return the series to its once comfortable perch atop the basketball world. While no one will argue that it's a massive overhaul from what we've seen from the series in the past, the additions that have been made advance the gameplay enough to conquer the competition.

The biggest changes, surprisingly enough, actually do come on the court. It's a welcome switch for a genre that so often rests on its laurels. NBA 2K8 was home to plenty of issues including gameplay that felt a step too slow and a newly adapted defensive mechanic that nearly broke the game. Lockdown defense is back again, but it's been changed for the better. Shaq can no longer guard Steve Nash by simply slamming down on the left trigger.



The new system still relies on the left trigger for activation, while it uses the right stick to determine how you orient yourself with relation to the person with the ball. That leads me to my main complaint with the mechanic, that being that it's only usable when the man you're guarding actually has the ball. Why can't I hold the left stick and, based on my opponent's position, deny him the ball on the right or left side? Still, the lockdown stick is much better than it was and it allows you to pick out the tendencies of an AI player and exploit them easier than before.

Moreover, AI as a whole has been tuned up during the off-season. Dual player control is a much larger part of the gameplay as you can now tell your guys to screen for you and either pop out for a jumper or cut to the hole and the specialized animations that follow look great. Not only that, but your players also make solid cuts off the ball if they notice a defender is overplaying them on one side. Running plays is also streamlined so it's a bit easier to hit the open man.

The shot stick, a staple of the series, has been modified a bit to allow players to change their shot in mid-air. It works very similarly to what you remember in year's past, but it's now more responsive if you get stuck in mid-air with no place to go and need to go for the fancy up-and-under move.

Keeping the conversation on the offensive side of the ball, you'll immediately notice that the speed of this year's game has been ratcheted up. It's not to the level of an arcade basketball title, but there's certainly a stronger propensity to get out on the open floor and run the break. That's not to say that there aren't annoyances when players won't keep their momentum going down the court when catching a ball, but seeing two players explode down the sidelines and calling for an outlet pass on a rebound is authenticity at its finest.

The animations, like in all NBA 2K games, are great to watch. They're realistic, they almost never falter and the little nuanced actions that you see when players interact are great. If the refs make a call, a player will get upset. Get knocked down and they'll help each other up. Run out of bounds and run into the mascot and there's an animation that plays there too. Same goes for the coach. It's these little touches that help push 2K9 beyond what we've seen elsewhere.



One issue that has also been corrected for NBA 2K9 is that of missing shots that pro players should be making. This happened all too often on drives to the basket or shots from within ten feet. This season is the first time where 2K Sports seems to have gotten the skills of the players right. Kobe and Lebron are going to score their points, there's little that you can do to stop that from happening. This game realizes that and, while it doesn't take defense out of the equation entirely, there's much more leeway on hitting some of those tough jumpers. Build up some momentum and you'll really see some buckets start to drop.

The Association, dubbed this year as The Association 2.0, is back with as much depth as you'd expect. The immediate change to the mode has to do with the user interface which now incorporates NBA.com into the presentation. Sadly, that's one of the biggest follies in NBA 2K9. The system does provide some cool updates as to what's going on around the league (updates to actual career milestones) but it's incredibly hard to navigate. It's made worse by the 2K Nav feature, something that I've never been a fan of. All in all the off-the-court presentation is easily the weakest part of 2K9.