Galactic Civilizations II : Dread Lords
04-Nov-07Galactic Civilizations II : Dread Lords is a game about a wide array of races including the dreaded Drengin to the Terran Alliance trying to find their niche in the universe. This game is like many other's in its genre in that there are multiple ways to win and victory doesn't necessarily revolve around total domination, although in my experience its much more fun dominating than playing politics with a pesky race full of non-humans.
This game boasts world building along with free form ship design and what reads from the back of the box like some crazy ass space fighting with some planetary invasions as well. So how does this all actually add up? Truth is the free form ship design is nothing but pre-designed structures that can be attached to your ship and they mean NOTHING, you select what size hull you want your ship to have and that determines how many weapons or other structures you can put on it, the actual free form structures do nothing but waste precious space you could be using for weapons or cargo pods. So essentially its useless, and on top of that the structures rarely will go where you want them, you just end up clicking around your ship in a circle until the computer selects a suitable place to stick a piece. So I hope you didn't want matching warp drives or any other symmetrical design because its nearly impossible to do.
As far as the planetary invasions, those are cool right? WRONG. Planetary invasions include you selecting what type of an invasion whether its some kind of espionage or other devious sounding thing but all it really turns out to be is a cartoonish looking screen where odd's of both sides are randomly rolled until you click go in which the odd's lock into place and battle if you can call it that actually begins. The battle consists of some block looking characters who shoot red lasers and make an early Nintendo boinking sound and then disappear. No it doesn't cover the world or anything remotely, its always the same little tiny stretch of land and no you don't have control over even one single soldier....you just click the odds and watch numbers disappear to the sound of a zap gun thingy.
Ok its a space game right so its about space battle correct? Nope, you'd be wrong again and so was I when I bought this game. The space battles are much the same as the planetary invasions. Sometimes it takes you to a real time battle screen where you simply click go again and wait sometimes up to 10 minutes for the ships to spin around like tops or something out of Asteroid and zap each other and then you either declare victory or defeat. Most of the time though the ships simply move up to another ship and you hear the same crappy sound effects you hear on planetary invasions and it shows a little explosion and the ship that lost is just gone. There is no control and no fun in this activity. The ONLY thing enjoyable about this game is that its relatively easy and they have lots of weapons and upgrades you can apparently get although no matter how much I upgraded my ships always made the same sounds and showed the same effects when firing, I guess its just all in the numbers as far as how much damage is produced. To say the least this game is disappointing all the way around, they even managed to get the planetary building wrong. On planets you tell it what you want to construct then you simply wait weeks at a time for it to finish and then nothing, you can't produce anything out of most and it just gives you little things like, commerce boosts. Trust me if your thinking Civilization you'd be wrong, its like a bad twilight duplicate of that system gone terribly wrong. So lets see on the thumb scale how this game actually does:
| Ratings | Galactic Civilizations II : Dread Lords |
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This game had all the opportunity to be good, it just didn't happen. It's hard to put your finger on exactly what might have made this game better since seemingly everything went wrong. Hopefully they will either stop making these games or simply listen to someone who's actually played it and make a better one.
Bottom Line:
Don't Buy It.
What's New?
03-Nov-07Since I've been gone a lot of games have come and gone while I simply sat in Baghdad, Iraq oblivious to the outside world. Now that I'm back I'd like to take this time to start catching up on some games I've missed so expect some reviews coming very soon and I'd also like to give you a little idea of some games that helped keep me sane while overseas.
1. Reel Deel Casino - Playing holdem and various other casino games gave me hours of enjoyment.
2. Painkiller - What can I say except this game is one crazy killing game.
3. Mahjongg - I think I got somewhere around 500 games played on this one in my time over there, very addictive.
4. The Sims 2 - Its fun to play life games when your somewhere where you absolutely have no life.
5. Video Editing - Although this isn't really a game it was so much fun taking pictures and putting them to music in slideshows that I could bring back and show my family.
Gaming Tournament
24-Jan-07
In a couple of weeks I will be hosting the first of what I hope is a monthly gaming tournament with cash prizes. As more competitors get into the tournament's the prize money will also go up. As of yet I've had so many ideas about which game to play at this inaugural tournament that I've put it up to vote on the forums.
Visit the forums and pick which game you want to play and start gearing up for the tournament and may the best man win.
Final Fantasy Series
20-Jan-07How does a game continue to be able to churn out sequel after sequel and still be successful? They have to be damn good. The one thing that the Final Fantasy series offers players is an escape into a unique world where the weak become strong and the powerful become weak. Its a story as old as human imagination itself, the strive for those who aren't powerful, popular, or sure of themselves to finally become that which they so desire to be. In all of the Final Fantasy series games the main character almost always starts out as either an outcast or some type of vagrant.
Lets look all the way back to my personal favorite, Final Fantasy VII. The game consists of a main character named Cloud Strife who leaves a town a teen to try and join an elite group in the military known as "SOLDIER". Cloud endeavors upon this adventure because he wants to be popular as the great hero "Sephiroth" himself. As the story goes this small town become becomes the savior of an entire planet.
Jump to Final Fantasy VIII. An average student at an academny who falls in love with a girl becomes the savior of the world. Same story different game right? So far I'm seeing a trend with these games, every Final Fantasy game seems like the same story set on a different planet with better graphics and people with different names. Lets see if this trend continues.
Final Fantays IX took a bit of a twist by making the main character not only a putz, but also a lowly thief playing in a traveling theatre group. The characters in this story travel around showing plays and on the side steal to make extra money. A princess who suspects herself to have been targeted hides away on the theatre group's ship and essentially falls into the lap of our hapless hobos and at this point the story levels out and becomes the same as EVERY other Final Fantasy story.
Final Fantaxy X/X-2 - This is a story of a vagrant once again who comes up in the ranks and saves a beautiful powerful princess type character. Ok so far so good right? Slam on the breaks fellas this story has a sequel called Final Fantasy X-2. Apparently SquareEnix decided that instead of recreating the same story over again and having to redo all of the graphics and people they would simply keep the graphics and character and do a follow-up story. So now the main character from Final Fantasy X is dead and the beautiful princess whom you saved is now in control searching the globe for any sign of your existence. Ok so for the first time you get to play someone powerful, THE PRINCESS type character right? Nope, in this sequel the character has pretty much given up her stardom and singing career to find orbs or something that looks like orbs that show clips from the past. She is now Britney Spears after her career crash and burn. Once again your a distraught hapless nobody trying to figure it all out. Good trick Square Enix but we figured it out.
Final Fantasy XI was online and I didn't play it, but from what I could tell from the storyline its the same story. Since I didn't play though, lets move on.
Final Fantasy XII - So what do you think is going to happen? Yep you play a character named Vaan who lives in a magical world called Ivalice. Ivalive is composed of two major factions fighting against each other in a never ending struggle, much like the Cold War. Vaan's brother joined the local army essentially to fight the evil Arcadian Empire. Vaan on the other hand is an orphan who's parents died in the ongoing war and is left abandoned when his brother is also slain during a battle. So we have our misfit homeless guy working and stealing to make money once again. At this point you are probably wondering why we play these games if they are all alike.
The truth is, I'm not sure why we play a franchise who's games are all carbon copies of each other. Before Final Fantasy XII I would have argued because they are the most prolific story telling games of all-time, but now I sit here half-way through this game and unable to play it. I haven't picked up the PS2 controller for almost a month now to play a game I feverishly bought and played for 20 hours. Has Final Fantasy ran its course? Maybe, but usually when it comes to games I somehow manage to get ahead of the curve and burn out faster than most, so I'm sure that some are just as tired of this as I am but most people will continue to play through at least another game or two before they look at themselves and wonder why they play. Good luck Final Fantasy, but I think I may be done.
I'd like to hear your opinions, post on the forums if you have anything to say on the topic.
Speaking of new Final Fantasy, I'd just like to show you a screenshot of the upcoming Final Fantasy XIII game on the PS3.
Final Fantasy XIII - PS3
NeverWinter Nights 2
06-Jan-07Since the days of Blizzard's venture into the world of RPG's we've all been waiting on something to take the place of Diablo and Diablo 2. I remember sitting there playing for hours just to see what items I got and how many spells my character could learn. After awhile though, you begin to get the same things over and over until you realize that you've gotten everything there is to get and that my friends is when a gamer starts looking for a new game. We all wanted Diablo 3, but it never materialized so we aimlessly went from RPG to RPG looking for something that could match that type of storyline and gameplay. After countless grueling hours of playing games that I didn't like, I ventured upon a game called Neverwinter Nights, which at the time wasn't getting a lot hype and I only found it in serious computer/gaming stores. Which is to say Wal-Mart hadn't decided to carry it yet. NWN's was amazing and had a storyline that stretched out for hours and hours, at one point I think I had put over 100 hours into the game and I wasn't at the end. Needless to say I played the game alot which many people did as NWN's grew like wildfire and became a giant in the industry. As I got older so did the game until I had played the game out of existence and was looking for something else. It only took them three years to give me that next thing, but finally Neverwinter Nights 2 was sent as a blessing to all of us gamers who were looking for that next gaming "high".
So how does NWN 2 stand up compared to its predecessor. As in most movies the sequel is rarely as good as the original and unfortunately this is the case with NWN 2. The graphics are leaps and bounds above the original but that may be the only area where NWN 2 steps in front of the classic. The story is flat at times and you find yourself just pushing through a quest because you've already sank hours into the game and want to get some type of resolution. The voice acting is pitiful and at times sounds like it was recorded with my $11 microphone and headset, the quality is just poor. Tediousness is the name of this game, in the original the game made you do hundreds of quests but they all seemed to be pushing you in the direction you needed to go, but in NWN 2 the quests seem to be there to fill time and space so you can't advance the actualy story very fast. At one point in the game you are trying to get into this closed down district so you have to talk to the local police (watchmen), instead of allowing you or disallowing you to enter, they say the only way to enter is to join their organization. Hmm, you find a stranger on the street and tell him the only way to get into a secured section under military control is to join the military. Well that seems reasonable right??? WHAT???? The next 10 hours you will spend doing quest after quest for these people including taking down a gang, finding dirty watchmen to arrest/kill, going completely away from the town to find an emissary sent by another country (and upon arriving to find the emissary you meet another group of people who send you on hours worth of more quests), then you must fight a fire and do various other meaningless and tedious things until eventually they just say, "ok you can go in now".
Graphically NWN 2 looks amazing
The WORST part of NWN 2 is the bugs and crashes. This game crashes more than Paris Hilton's reputation. Every few minutes the game will just lock up and crash. Sometimes the game won't even read your CD, and it will say "Cannot Detect CD In Drive". Which means you don't have the game in the cd drive, even if you really do. So you go out and buy this game and install it and then once you start to play it says "YOU DON'T HAVE THE DISC"... the same one it just said you had so you could install the game. They've come out with some patches that fix a lot of these bugs but if you happen to not have the internet you won't be able to download it and its quite a massive patch (around 100+ MB's), so it takes a couple minutes to download and install.
Withour further wrangling lets see how this game stacks up:
| Ratings | Neverwinter Nights 2 |
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Unfortunately this game just doesn't meet the cut. If you've already bought it then finish it and thengive it to someone who's to poor to buy video games, otherwise simply don't buy it. The only fun time you'll have in this game is when you get your own castle and have to recruit and build up your forces, which is extremely fun. The only problem is no matter how good or bad you do with your castle building it has absolutely NO effect on what happens in the game, so its just another pointless thing in a game filled with pointlessness and bugs.
Bottom Line:
Don't Buy It.
FireArms 2/Source
02-Jan-07If anybody played any Half Life 1 modifications at all then you've ran across my personal favorite, Firearms. The old game for half life 1 was an amazing experience of fast paced action. It felt like a deathmatch with goals, but as all games do, it died out. Now that Half Life 2 is out the team or teams are busy bringing us the next generation of this mod. You might be asking yourself, "There are two versions?" The short answer is yes. The world of modifications is a volatile world of powerplayers who each have a vision and want that vision to be realized. The FA community splintered at some point and two versions began production. As the story goes, the original FA team decided to work on another multiplayer game called World At War and decided to close up shop on Firearms. This of course didn't settle well with some of the community and despite the team's wishes a group split off and began development of a source version of Firearms. That group is located at Firearms2mod.com. The original team fought the game's conception to no avail, eventually though some within the team began to want to bring their own version of this game to source. So some of the official team members set out to make their own version. You can find it at Firearmssource.com. I've been browsing both sites and to be honest I'm not of an opinion as to which I think will become the best, if any game is to come out at all.
What I did notice however was that the FA:Source team had a in-game video to show you how progess is coming along. This far exceeded anything I had hoped for and really puts pressure on the FA2 team to do something similar. The video was simple and without editing but the graphics, the speed, and the weapons we've all come to love were in there. The gameplay already seems to be coming along and I was amazed at how much the Firearms:Source team has caught up to the FA2 team who had quite a head start on production. My opinion is its probably a coding issue as coders seem to come and go quite rapidly in the modification world.
| Ratings | Firearms:Source | FireArms 2 |
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Firearms:Source comes out a winner in this review. FA2 has some amazing looking models and map shots, but no gameplay videos or details to speak of and as a player and a fan I simply can't get excited without some type of gameplay to look forward to. When new games come out the big selling point is always how the game will play and how the game will look, with Firearms:Source we seem to have a mix of both that draws us in and makes us want to go flying around a corner spraying at some other player. With FA2 we simply have some great looking models but no idea of how these models are being implemented, so the marketing strategy looks one sided in this contest.
It will be interesting to see exactly what comes of these two promising games.
 Firearms:Source (Caen Map) |
 Firearms:Source (Durandal Map) |
 Firearms 2 (Uzi Model) |
 Firearms 2 (Player Model) |
Quote of the Week: "When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.'
-Theodore Roosevelt