Poker was first widely played in New Orleans in the early 1800s and quickly spread throughout the Western frontier. Back in those days, poker was mostly popular on riverboats and in saloons. Nowadays poker is everywhere. There are pocket-sized poker video games; online real-time poker tournaments, and who would have thought we would now be able to turn on our TVs and watch other people play poker? Of course, there are also full-featured poker videogames for PC and home consoles, the latest of which is Crave … [Read more...]
FIFA 06
Creating titles to launch on a new console must be a tricky thing to do, given the track record of a certain developer of sports titles. EA, which created a new game engine rather than rehash a prior one for Madden NFL 06 on the Xbox 360 (review), continues the trend with FIFA 06. Sadly, this next-gen soccer game also follows the trend that Madden NFL 06 started: incorporating fewer features to focus on the all-new engine and enhanced graphics. Unfortunately only a few modes of play are included in FIFA 06, but … [Read more...]
007: From Russia With Love
I've insisted for years that as capable as Pierce Brosnan was, Sean Connery was the true James Bond. You just couldn't escape Connery's debonair, his grace, his ability to be believable both as a world-saving super spy and a dream-dashing womanizer. Connery was Bond, plain and simple. So when the latest 007 game was announced, and Sean Connery was providing both his voice and his Bond-era likeness to the game, let's just say I was a tad more excited than I was about the previous 007 games. From Russia With Love takes … [Read more...]
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Say what you will about movie-based videogames, but Electronic Arts scored big when it snagged the licenses to the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter games. Even if the games weren't successful critically, the simple tie-ins to those movie franchises were sure to drum up sales. The Lord of the Rings games have had a consistent theme, not to mention a steady demographic, which has led the development team to make some notable improvements from game to game. The Harry Potter games, meanwhile, have also largely targeted … [Read more...]
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
It seems like an eternity since Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was shown at E3, and it almost seemed like the game would never ship. The game promised to mix the popular (and incredibly creepy) fiction of H.P. Lovecraft with action and adventure gameplay elements. Now that the game is on shelves, it's obvious the game was an ambitious effort, which may have caused the delays, but in the end, it all worked out pretty well. In this game, you take on the role of Jack Walters, a guy who's not what most people … [Read more...]
Peter Jackson's King Kong
With the current-gen consoles (PS2, Xbox, GameCube), many game publishers make a base version of their game and "port" it so it works on the other consoles. When the Xbox 360 launched, only two companies tried their hand at releasing next-gen versions of their games at the same time as their current-gen counterparts. The first of those companies, Activision, released Tony Hawk's American Wasteland (review) and Gun (review), both of which were only marginally better than their current-gen counterparts. The second … [Read more...]
Project Gotham Racing 3
It seems like a console now needs to ship with all its genre bases covered: shooter, racer, platformer, fighter, etc. Microsoft's Xbox 360 was no exception, with all but the role-playing genre covered from the get-go. Although many gamers would've liked to see the "shooter" category grounded by Halo 3, much like Halo 1 filled the original Xbox's shooter hole, Microsoft instead repeated history only in the racing category with Project Gotham Racing 3. With the PGR series now a known commodity among Xbox owners, … [Read more...]
Editor's Blog: Wish List for Project Gotham Racing 4
Dear Diary, I haven't written my Project Gotham Racing 3 review yet, which makes me naughty, I know, but it's past Christmas, and I hear Santa quits taking notes after December 23, so I think I'm in the clear. Part of it's just a lack of time, since I'm still trying to un-bury myself from the 18 games of the Xbox 360 launch, but another part is simply because I'm not sure what to write. I've got some ideas, sure, but PGR3 is such a different game from PGR2 (remember my retrospective?) that I'm at a bit of a loss as to … [Read more...]
Pinball Hall of Fame
Back in the "day," Gottlieb manufactured some of the best and most memorable pinball machines ever made. There was a time when almost every corner drug store or grocery store had at least one pinball machine. And you'd better believe I found every one in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, the golden age of the pinball machine has come and gone. But it is most certainly not forgotten. And thanks to the developers at Farsite and the publishing team at Crave, we can now carry around 13 of Gottlieb's classic tables in our … [Read more...]
Rise of Legends
At E3 of 2005, Big Huge Games shocked and amazed many fans when they announced that the upcoming incarnation of Rise of Nations, their now-classic RTS series, would not be historically based. Rather, Big Huge Games was making a big huge change, and taking their game into the realm of "steampunk" fantasy, a world that was part mechanical, part magical and most definitely unique. In the steam powered pseudo-Victorian world of Rise of Legends (the game's new moniker), players could use magic and technology to pursue their … [Read more...]