"Building." "Unable to Comply." "Unit Ready." "Unit Lost." If these are some of the buzzwords that still ring through your ears when you think about real-time strategy games, you might want to spend some resources and check out Command and Conquer: The First Decade. This is a nice bundle of the RTS game from the source itself, EA Westwood. The bundle includes games that released before, during and after the studio's acquisition by EA, and as such, it's a mixed bag. Even so, after the coin toss, the bundle falls heads … [Read more...]
Magnetica
The Game Developers Conference isn't exactly known for having games on display. Rather than the show-and-tell session of E3, the annual GDC is all about business, about developers meeting with vendors and publishers and helping their projects come to fruition. But this year Nintendo had a plethora of Nintendo DS games on display, and the game that grabbed most of my attention was probably one of the most unassuming titles at the show. Magnetica is a game much like Tetris, in which players line up like-colored objects to … [Read more...]
Review: Epson PowerLite Home 20 Projector
As we move into the era of high-definition videogames and even higher-definition movies (HD-DVD and Blu-ray), it's incredibly tempting to run right out and purchase a new projector to take advantage of all the graphical goodness. If you've explored the vastness of the projector world, you already know it's easy to get lost, not to mention get overwhelmed by the prices of the newest models. But affordable projectors do exist for those who are determined to play their games and movies on an 80-inch screen. One such … [Read more...]
DVD Review: Chicken Little
Visiting the Disney MGM Studios used to be an animation fan's dream. In one behind-the-scenes tour you could watch animators sketch scenes and characters from the next great Disney film, then wander into the inking and painting departments to see the sketches come to colorful life. Gradually those pen-and-paper stations gave way to PC terminals, but not long after that, they were blocked-off entirely for fear of competitors stealing trade secrets and/or ideas. When I last toured the Studios, in August 2005, Disney was … [Read more...]
Street Supremacy Review
Years ago, the Tokyo Xtreme Racer franchise was top dog on the Dreamcast. There was nothing so fun as racing around a city at night, flashing your headlights at challengers and ripping through dark highways to become supreme ruler of the streets. It was a good game that spawned a plethora of knock offs. Street Supremacy for PSP is developer Genki's attempt to bring their much-loved series to Sony's handheld - but sadly, the translation and time have been unkind to the core game, and in the end, it's just not fun.The … [Read more...]
Burnout Revenge
Electronic Arts was raked over the coals with the Xbox 360 launch. It wasn't due to the publisher having bad games, necessarily, but for porting super-polished games from the current console generation and/or for producing what some gamers claimed were incomplete next-gen games (Madden NFL 06, for example). Well, if you were one of the people who took offense at the ported versions, you will probably want to steer clear of Burnout Revenge on the Xbox 360, because not a whole heck of a lot has changed. What has changed, … [Read more...]
Fight Night Round 3
The term "boxing videogame" conjured up little more than images of Soda Popinski and Mike Tyson until several years ago. Developers had largely ignored the genre until then, save for EA and its Knockout Kings series, but even that wasn't nearly as memorable as playing as Little Mac in the Punch Out games. It was going to take something new to really re-capture gamers' fascination with the genre. Enter Fight Night. Fight Night was much more of a boxing simulator than previous boxing games, and it proved to be just the … [Read more...]
GT Legends
Europeans love racing games, it's right up their with their love of the WWII RTS. The continent that's given us Rally, Touring Car, Grand Prix, Formula One and Formula Four racing just can't get enough of games involving hot cars, real tracks and nitty gritty details. This love of a deep racing sim shows in GT Legends, a recently released PC title from Simbin, the guys who brought us the equally deep (and excellent) GTR FIA Racing, have taken the GTR engine and put it in the chassis of dozens of classic cars. Well, it's … [Read more...]
BLACK
Before development even started on BLACK, the team at Criterion came to the conclusion that they were going to mimic the most blast-happy Hollywood blockbusters with their new first-person shooter. By all accounts, they've succeeded in that goal. BLACK has big guns and bigger explosions. Loud booms and louder firefights. Lifeless enemies whose bodies fly a dozen feet in the air and bad guys who careen from catwalks with all the grace of a professional stuntman. But a funny thing happened on the way to their blockbuster: … [Read more...]
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat
The Battlefield franchise's first venture onto consoles came last fall with Modern Combat (review), a title in which the gameplay was as impressive as it was innovative. Not wanting to break a winning formula, EA is about to release Battlefield 2: Modern Combat for the Xbox 360, and it's not changing all that much from the core of the current-gen version. But what it is changing makes the game even better. Naturally you'd expect the graphics to take a big leap forward, and that they do. Although the screens that … [Read more...]