I will start this off by being honest.  I have never finished a Splinter Cell game before this.  I tried on multiple occasions to get through the first Splinter Cell title, the Pandora Tomorrow title, and even Double Agent.  Most times I would end up stuck in some situation where I was out of ammo, surrounded by tangos and not have a way out of the game short of restarting.  I often found that the level of stealth required to get through the game was almost insurmountable, reminding me of the old PC game Thief verses something more modern with technology on my side.

Needless to say, I was skeptical about yet another Splinter Cell title being added to the franchise.  Overall the Tom Clancy name was being diluted by Ubisoft and the name was being put on tons of IPs.  Was this going to just be another in a line of rehashed titles for Ubisoft?  Obviously I stayed my hand, and waited until well after release to see how the public as a whole reacted.  The trailers had looked interesting, with much more action than previous titles, but I wasn’t going to let myself be swayed into buying Splinter Cell Conviction right out of the gate.

Then of course, I had a free night to play online with a friend, and got a copy of the game off ebay (used).  This revision of Splinter Cell gave me a whole new appreciation for the series.  Gone were the long levels of making sure you weren’t seen, and limited resources.  It was actually FUN.  This game did for the stealth genre what Mass Effect did for RPGs.  SCC gives a whole new take on the one man stealth army, with hand to hand eliminations which load up a meter so you can mark targets and take them down in execution succession, better gadgets and a unique black and white system to show when you are hidden.  I loved it.  We spent a good 6 hours that night playing through the co-op campaigns on normal.  A couple weeks later we went through them all again on realistic and finished it out in about half that time.  The game was good, and I was inclined to play it.

Over the next month or so I finished out the storyline.  The details and fleshing out of the background story were satisfying enough for me, though only borderline plausible.  Let’s not kid ourselves though, this is a superhero action game, who’s really looking for a scientifically correct story?   Throughout the game, you are mostly at the same capability level, with the unlocking of certain skills or gadgets occurring over time.  For the most part, you are just Sam Fisher: Bad-ass extraordinaire.

One aspect I really enjoyed about the game was using the surrounding walls or buildings as a backdrop for cut scenes or objectives.  One time, I was chasing a target through a crowd and he ducked into a tent.  As I passed it a bit of texts over-layed on a truck near me saying “He’s still in the tent!”.  Excellent use of the environment to keep yourself involved in the story and engaged.

There are great challenges within the game that give you point credits so you can upgrade your arsenal or gear, which adds a little bit of RPG mechanic to the otherwise stealth shooter series.  I tried to get the bulk of the challenges (PECs) but lost interest before finishing out any full set.  The amount of time required to complete all sets is fairly intensive and I had other fish to fry with my copy of Crackdown 2 sitting there taunting me (read: orbs).

For me, this was the first Splinter Cell game I actually enjoyed playing.  Even hard core fans of the series have had greats things to say about it.  Though it is a deviation from the previous trend of the series, I feel it is for the best.  Taking in Rainbow Six: Vegas elements into the Sam Fisher universe really helped round out the game and gives a much fuller experience than the previous iterations.  There are many hours of game play available in this game and I’m almost sad to move on to another.  I likely put about 20 hours into SCC, which is pretty good for a modern shooter game.  The co-op elements shine brightly in the Deniable Ops part of the game, while the single-player makes you yearn to solve the mystery around your missing daughter and the conflicting emotions of revenge.  If you are a fan of Splinter Cell in general, this is a shoe-in for you.  If you like semi-stealth shooters and tactics, dive in.  Most shooter fans should enjoy this as well.  However, if you only like car racing games…well…you might want to pass.

- Ben Mazhary-Clark

In the past, I never would have picked up an RPG (Role Playing Game for those not in the know, and if so, why are you reading this?).  The mere mention of them gave me impressions of turn based action sequences, painful management of inventory, and killing spiders for 20 hours to level up.  Recently, publishers and game designers have switched it up a bit, making RPGs less of a painful grind and bringing back the fun.  Mass Effect was the game that got me interested in RPGs again.  The inventory management was pretty easy, the action felt more like a shooter with squad based strategy elements, and the storyline kept you captivated.  From there I went a little more hardcore, and blew untold hours on crafting a paradise in the wasteland of Fallout 3.  Then, from out of nowhere came a game I had heard about in passing several times but never gave it any thought.  A new IP called Borderlands.  Suddenly, days after it came out I was working out a plan to acquire it.

Borderlands for me had all the elements I was looking for in an RPG.  The art direction was cell shaded, which I enjoyed in Crackdown and Robotech Battlecry.  This artistic style gave it a unique look that was easily recognizable whenever you saw a screen shot up.  Battles were action based and didn’t require a lot of setup beforehand.  Inventory management was fairly minimal.  All of these elements were only made better for me given the fact that online co-op was also available, though limited to a 4 player raid.  More on all of these points below.

The premise of the game is that you have landed on the world of Pandora, to search for alien treasures hidden somewhere on the planet’s surface (no, this isn’t Avatar).  The planet itself looks like you’ve landed somewhere in New Mexico, with nothing but scrub and junkyard towns scattered about the dusty plains.  The junkyard towns are usually where you get your quests and have the supply depots in them, where sharky businessmen make their living off the fortune seeking quest followers.  Cell shading lends to thicker outlines around objects, while textures insides of the cells are still reasonable.  If you have played Crackdown you are familiar with the style.  At first it feels almost cartoony, however once the action starts you will feel it is anything but.  Textures themselves are of a industry standard detail, nothing over the top.  Occasionally when you warp into a new part of the world, the textures can take a while to pop in, though it isn’t usually that distracting as you are already rushing to replenish your stores at the closest vending machine.

Action in Borderlands is often intense and keeps your interest.  The intensity increases when you co-op up to three other friends, as both the levels and the quantities of the enemies you are fighting explode to manic proportions.  Even exploring the world and grinding I still found exciting enough to keep playing it on and on.  As you progress through the game, the enemies level up with you.  Each enemy you destroy will give you experience points, that ultimately help you become more powerful.  They also often drop items, such as ammo, weapons, health vials, etc.  Lot more on weapons later.  The interesting item in regards to the level of enemies is when you go back to an earlier area you can literally mow everyone down with little resistance.  The caveat of going back to lower levels, though it does make you feel god-like, is you get almost no experience for anything you take down.

When leveling up, you find yourself with access to new skills and abilities.  There are 4 classes you can play as:  tank, sniper, soldier and assassin.  Each one has it’s own set of three major branches of a skill tree that unlock unique abilities for that class.  As you gain levels, you are given points to deposit into skills in the tree, leaving your character customization options fairly open.  I chose to take the assassin route, and by the end of the main quest line had quite a stealthy bad-ass whom could take on her fair share of enemy raiders.

Which brings us to weapons.  Some have described Borderlands as a gun nut’s orgy.  There are an almost unlimited amount of gun combination available in the game.  You have your basic classes such as SMG, machine gun, sniper, rocket, etc.  However, for each one of those classes you have level of weapon and a series of modifiers available for each one.  These modifiers can be something simple like a 2x reload rate, or more extreme like 4x fire damage for a certain amount of seconds after the target is hit.  Though inventory management isn’t that difficult in this game, you can spend a bit of time after a battle looting what the dead left behind, always searching for the perfect gun.  Ammo slots can be upgraded as well, and once you are half way though the quest line running out of ammo really wasn’t a big deal.  A nice feature is you can collect everything off the battlefield, then take it into a local town or vending machine and cash it all out.

The quests given to you in towns and people you meet out in the wasteland are varied.  It can be something simple like collecting and item and bringing it back, or the more extreme of finding pieces of an ancient artifact to help the storyline along.  All quests can be done solo or with your friends.  Once completed, everyone in the party gets the experience from the quest.  Vehicles are available within the first hour of the game, which further facilitates exploring and movement on the very large map.  Their armaments and speed mix it up a bit in what would be a boring quest or a lot of walking.

Borderlands shines the most when played co-op.  Gearbox did include 2 player split screen, though it is hard to see the menus in each half of the screen when you are trying to do inventory management and the like.  The ultimate best way to play this game is online with three other people.  Nothing beats the experience of trying to flank a horde of baddies with your party, communicating to each other over voice chat, and completing a quest together.  For best results, everyone in the party should try and be a different class, but even when there are duplicates the game gracefully takes it in stride and sends just the right amount of challenge your way.

The developers at Gearbox really knew how to breathe extended life into this game.  Not only can you do a second playthrough with your same character, but the amount of DLC they have release has been substantial.  They have released several major DLC packs for Borderlands to date, and they are still planning more.  The latest iteration, General Knox, adds a whole new realm to the universe, with fresh weapons, vehicles and enemies.  The last game in the recent past I have seen that provided such a steady flow of DLC for a game has been Burnout Paradise.  It is great to see that some developers are finally extending a game with added content, verses just popping out another sequel once a year (I’m looking at YOU EA).

Overall this game has been a great experience.  It took about 30-35 hours for me to do the first play through.  I still have plans to play it a lot more as soon as I can finally make it through Mass Effect 2.  The constant approachability of Borderlands and the amazing fun of playing it online has been keeping it off my Goozex queue, even though I have already finished it once.   I’ll see you in the Borderlands.

- Ben Mazhary-Clark

There have been a lot of Star Wars games.  A LOT.  In my experience, only a few have made the cut at all in terms of quality.  I think the last good one I played was X-wing vs. Tie Fighter.  Maybe Jedi Knight.  Rogue Squadron?  Please.  So along comes a game where you get to fully explore the dark side of the force.  I was intrigued.  Never before had we been given an opportunity to slay down anything in our path, with no regard for who it was that you were mowing down.  After a few looks at screenshots and descriptions, I ordered Star Wars: The Force Unleashed off of the Best Buy site on basically a half price deal they were doing the day after Christmas here.  After a very painful process to actually get the game in my house from Best Buy (took over a month and somehow I ended up with two copies of the game) I was able to sink my teeth into the game.

This game fills in some new back story with Vader.  It occurs after the events of the 3rd movie (Episode III), after Vader has been created.  Vader has taken on a new apprentice, behind the Emperor’s back, in hopes to overthrow the Emperor behind the scenes.  The game leads you through a storyline as his apprentice, with the time line coming rather close to the 4th movie (Episode IV), as there is a Death Star already being built and functional.

First impressions were good.  You start the opening level as Darth Vader so you have no issues slaying all the Wookies in front of you, though I did feel a little bad about it at first.  Once that level is down however, you are left to fend for yourself as Vader’s apprentice.   The first HALF of the game was truly painful as this character.  You rarely had enough power or experience to really do the damage you needed to.  Boss battles were often very hard.  Given this, you end up spending half the game attacking and hiding and dodging to keep alive until you level up enough.  Whenever you level you are given points that allow you to add to stats or abilities, similar to a mini-RPG.  The decisions are not very difficult.  More force power that recharges faster?  Yes please.

Once the second half of the game kicks in, you are in the swing of things.  Powers are readily available and you can easily meet the objectives of each level without a redo.  There is certainly joy in wreaking complete havoc on your environment.  Force push here, lightning there, jump in here and sith slay with your saber.  Rinse and repeat.  Most large enemies are easily taken down with running in circles and force lightning them.  Kind of a cheat, but it also feels great to be your own personal electric chair.

When you tire of hacking through levels (as this game really is just a hack and slash), there is a sum of training and challenges you can do.  I wouldn’t expect them to take more than an hour all told, and are usually best done after you are fully leveled up near the end of the game.  For the most part they aren’t very difficult, as long as you engage the most troublesome enemies in the room first, then deal with the rest afterward.

Overall the game is very satisfying.  Once you get a fair amount of powers under your belt, the game is enjoyable, though before that it can feel like a grind.  Like most Star Wars games from Lucasarts, it feels like they put a lot of thought into it, but didn’t take the time at the end to put in the extra polish a truly excellent game usually has.  I experienced many glitches, where I’d fall halfway into the floor, the enemy I was fighting would disappear, and once the save game even became corrupt, causing the game not to boot anymore and moving it off from the hard drive to a memory card made it suddenly work again.  Amazingly, these still didn’t take enough away from the experience to make it miserable.  I liked the game, and had a great time with it.  However once you are done, there isn’t much replay value, and off to Goozex it goes with my two copies.  I’d recommend picking this up if you enjoy the Star Wars universe.  If you are looking for a basic shooter or hack and slash game, your money might be well spent somewhere else.  A solid rental for sure, buy if you are a fan.

- Ben Mazhary-Clark

Another game based off a movie, yeah great.  When are those ever any good?  You’d be hard pressed to find one.  But this is different.  It’s an old movie, a classic movie.  this can’t just be a shameless plug for the latest blockbuster.  Sure, you CAN go buy the movie at your local retailer… but this is far from the typical movie game made to be a piece in the media blitz puzzle.  Though the game obviously has roots in the movie, it doesn’t try to integrate itself to it.  Instead it creates it’s own universe.  The the cool part is, then it tosses you the keys and says “Go ahead, have some fun… be home before dawn”.

When one looks up this game on the EA site they see it classified under the “Action/Adventure” genre.  Ok, there’s action in it, and I would say there’s a bit of adventure… though i don’t see a fedora or a bull whip anywhere.  But if you stop and think about it, doesn’t EVERY game qualify as such?  I mean really, what else is there?  The Boredom/Monotonous genre went out of vogue in the late 90′s.  So, in the quest to better describe this game i hereby offer a new genre.  Hence forth, this type of game shall be referred to as a Sandbox game.  A sandbox game is one where a world is given to you with several vague objectives and you can do whatever the heck you want.  If you want to follow the objective, more power to ya.  If you want to drive around as fast as you can running over as many people as you can… go for it.  Examples of this sort of game are game such as Crackdown,  Grand Theft Auto, and yes… The Godfather 2.

So now that we have that ironed out, what about the game?  You start out in Cuba, the day that Castro takes power.  When the dust settles from the revolution the family is forced to change their plans… which is where you come in.  The whole point of the game is to take over rival family’s business, then take out the rival family completely.  The game provides some guidance along the way, but how you do it is decided entirely by you.  You can bomb business, perform hostile take overs, or just go rob banks all day.  Whatever floats your boat.

You also get some partners in crime.  That’s right, you get your own family.  How that works with the movie logic?  Haven’t figured that out yet.  You’re a Corleone, he’s a Corleone, wouldn’t you like to be a Corleone too?  Regardless, you’ll get to recruit and promote 7 “made men” that you will then use to attack and defend territories in 3 different cities.  These men will have varying skills.  There are safecrackers, engineers, medics, demolitionist, arsonsists, and bruisers.  You’ll need to make sure you have the right men for the right job.  You can also upgrade your character as well as your family members… increasing accuracy, amount of health, and so on.  These men will prove vital in helping you secure every possible business and defending again rival families that are coming after you.  Treat them well.

I found my 10 or 13 hours of game play to be interesting and slightly addictive.  I found the need to completely stomp out all competition to be strangely compelling, which disturbs me a little.  The combat was fairly smooth, if not a touch on the arcade side.  Driving physics were HORRIBLE, but most sandbox games suffer the same affliction.  Graphics were quite good making for some inspiring fire balls, and surprisingly realistic animation.  Be VERY aware, this game is rated M for a reason.  There is nothing pleasant about shooting your way in to a rival family’s strip club, beating the owner in to submission, and then accidentally shoving your shotgun in his mouth and making a mess on the wall behind him.   If you’re sitting in your dorm room causing mayhem, that’s one thing.  Don’t buy this game for your kids, play it around  kids, or discuss it with kids.  Unless, of course, you want them to grow up to be a Don.

- David Hayes

Well, Hollywood strikes again.  Every time anyone has a good idea Hollywood scoops it up, ruins it, squeezes every penny it can from it, makes us choke on it, then cuts it’s losses and runs away with a devilish little giggle.  That’s exactly what they’ve done again with WANTED.  For those of you not paying close attention, Hollywood has already moved past the A List comic books (Superman, Batman, Spiderman), burned through the B List (Hulk, X-Men, Fantastic 4), and made us suffer through the lower echelons of the comic book world (DareDevil, Electra, Iron Man).  But now, they’ve gone from mainstream to some of the less known, but highly respected comic books such as Spawn, Watchmen, and WANTED.  First came the movie starring the always lovely Angelina Jolie… and some other guy.  Now comes the video game.

WANTED: Weapons of Fate is another foray in to the world of a “Fraternity of Assassins”.  Can you imagine their pledge week?  Anyway, the back story on all of that is made fairly clear in the movie, so i won’t rehash it.  The game picks up 5 hours after the end of the movie.  The main protagonist, Wesley, has his home intruded upon by members of the French Fraternity and thus starts both an evolution of his skills as well as a journey of discovery in to who or what he is.    Along the line comes several upgrades to your abilities and weaponry that really make for the most interesting part of the game.  There are plenty of predictable plot twists and turns that delve deeper in to his past before ending with ever present boss fight.

Before you ask… yes, you get to bend bullets and slow time and all those fun ideas.  It’s not very smooth or quick… but it’s doable and becomes almost your primary tactic as the game progresses.  The practice of doing so takes more work than you might imagine.  For instance, yes you can bend bullets… but before you can do so you must stand up out of your cover spot while being shot at, then tell the game you want to bend a bullet by finding your target then pressing the special button, THEN you have to find the correct trajectory for the bullet.  WHY?!?!  You’re a super assassin that can bend bullets, but you can’t have the instincts to know the best trajectory?

The other major tactical factor in the game is your use of cover.  It’s rare that you find a shooter where staying under cover is so important.  The cover system was good, though not perfect.  It did a better job then most, particularly when moving between cover, but every so often the game did something less than logical that would cost you your life.  Very frustrating.

Level design was adequate, if not repetitive.  Lots of cover spots, lots of bad guys.  Not bad at all.  Most of the game is spent in either Chicago or Paris, so there’s a little diversity there.  One thing that should be noted is that i finished the game, at the hardest difficulty level, in 4 hours and change.  It’s NOT a long game.

Overall this game is a quick fun jaunt through the world of WANTED.  I liked it enough to play it through twice in 2 days.  The graphics aren’t great during cut scenes, but game play is acceptable.  Game play moves quickly, though it  too can get a bit repetitive if you don’t get creative.  And for all you Xbox360 Gamerpoint addicts, if you play on the hardest difficulty you’ll get 3 achievements for 80 gamerpoints per completed level.  All told, not bad for a weekends’ worth of escapism, but definitely not on anyone’s “must have” list.

This may just be a good rental for you, or perhaps trade for it and throw it back into the pile.

- David Hayes

Heart thumping, getting so close to the end of the race, if only you could get those three black cars off your tail that keep smashing you into the wall, then you can make it safe to the finish, unscathed. However it is unlikely that this environment will be forgiving enough for you to make it to the finish. This is Burnout Paradise, the fifth in a series of explosive racing games that pushes your reaction times to the limits but rewards you with spectacular crashes when you fail to make the grade.

Criterion Games gave the Burnout series a fresh new feel this time around. With an almost menu-less system for starting races and taking on challenges, the new open world dynamic brings a lot of new concepts and features to a series that is certainly middle aged. Previous iterations of the Burnout series were deep in menus to get into the action. With Burnout Revenge even having multiple levels of maps and menus to get through just to start a race off. No more! Burnout Paradise (aka BOP) takes a hint from the Midnight Club and Grand Theft Auto series and gets rid of the menus. All you are left with is a large island to explore. You are left to your own, with a basic car. It is up to you to actually find all the races on the map, which there is indeed an achievement for.  Roll up on a race, hit both gas and brake, and you are good to go, the race starts, and you are off.

The world is instantly interesting.  First off you have to repair your car, and then it’s off to exploring.  I easily spent hours getting the lay of the land, trying out a few races, and finding those elusive gate smashes that are scattered throughout the city.  Even when exploring, you can set top road rule times on all the roads, to the envy of your online friends (who can see them when they are crusing around).  After you win a few races, you have the chance to take out special cars that add them to your collection.  Tons of fun.  The race types vary; from straight out end point races, to being the marked man, my favorite road rage, and so on.

Not only can you play these all offline, but with a quick flip of the D-pad pop-up menu, you can join an online party with other fellow racers.  The online options include both racing in a couple different varieties, as well as a large handful of group challenges.  These give the game extra breadth and depth after the single player game becomes too familiar.

Graphically and auditorially the game is amazing.  True to form for a Burnout game, crashing looks awesome, with shards of your vehicle spinning off in all directions.  Sounds boom and roar, with the life of the city all around.  It is usually fairly easy to hear when a car is coming up behind you in surround.  Ambient sounds also make you feel like you are in a city full of activity.

The game as it stood out of the box on release was impressive on its own.  I personally put over 50 hours into the base game, with more than half of that online in Freeburns and Races.  However over the course of the next year and a half, Criterion has gone to great lengths to contually add to this game.  Iniitally, these updates were free.  This first set of updates added in new online race types, and even a whole motorcycle subset of the game, which is a first for the Burnout series.    Then later they added the option to buy exotic new cars, an offline pass-the-controller-party mode, and even a whole new section of map in the form of another island.  Criterion has not only made this an excellent game, but also a platform.  Using downloadable content packs and micro-transactions, they have extended the life of a game that likely would have lost interest after 6-8 months.  However more than a year later, it goes on strong.  I hope in the future, game developers and publishers take the hint from this success.  Forget putting out another iteration of the same game every year, but how about adding the same functionality into the existing game as DLC?  Here’s hoping for the future.

Come join the party online with your own copy!  Alternately you can trade for it or rent it, but I’d recommend keeping it for the long haul.

- Ben Mazhary-Clark

Ladies and gentleman, after years and years of continually advancing technology and game development you’d think we were getting to the end of our potential as humans.  Then, every once in a blue moon, along comes something that either creates or redefines a genre.  Well, here it is.  Don’t believe me?  Ok, let’s talk about the zombie survival horror games.  What can we expect?

1. Zombies… generally speaking they’re slow, gross, less than intelligent, and insatiably hungry for braaaiiinns (yet they never seem to attack each other for this delicacy)
2. Horror… every new room or level gets creepier.   The game developers go out of their way to provide ever increasing surprises which invariably leads to the ultimate boss fight, which of course is the mother of all horrors and has more teeth than a school of great white sharks.
3. Survival… run run just as fast as you can.  Usually in this genre you are provided all sorts of fun new types of weaponry.  It’s you against a never ending onslaught of nasty ghouls highlighted with gory kills.

These 3 simple ingredients have been the recipe for many games from about as far back as gamers can remember.  What iteration of Resident Evil are we on now, 27642?  The zombie game has stayed the same, minus a few tweaks, for decades.  Then along comes Left4Dead, which i immediately dismissed as yet another clone.  Who cares, been there done that… zombie ate the shirt.  Then, pretty much on a dare, i figured I’d waste a few hours finding out how much i was bored with it and move on.

At first glance you know immediately the Left4Dead is a zombie game.  There’s a cinematic opening that causes instant pucker factor, and if you’re not a fan of zombies in generally will make you second guess whether or not you really want to play this game.  Assuming you decide to continue you are faced with a choice of four characters you can play as.  You hit the start button and are immediately hit with another twist you probably didn’t expect.  You’re playing a movie.  That’s right… this game isn’t split up in to levels of a campaign, it’s four different movies that you play though.  Each movie has scenes, which are basically checkpoints. Character is selected, movie is loaded, game starts.  This is where the similarities both begin and end.

Not surprisingly, there are zombies in Left4Dead.  And of course a zombie wouldn’t be a zombie if it weren’t gross and really wanted to eat your brains.  The difference is that these zombies are neither stupid nor slow.  Ok, so they aren’t necessarily MENSA candidates, but they are observant.  Generally they hang around moaning and throwing up, but once they notice you it’s ON.  The more light and or noise you create the more they take notice of you.  And then, just to throw a wrinkle in to it, they seem to know when you’re most vulnerable and will attach en mass and try to wipe you from the face of the earth (more on that later).   The enemy AI is so well tuned that the normal trigger points of a game are gone.  You know what I’m talking about.  When you reach point X enemy Y and Z will come around the corner looking for a fight.  That’s all gone.  If you get half way through a scene and die you’ll be returned to the beginning of the scene.  As you go through it a second time it’s totally different than the first play through.  Different number of enemies, different types, different strategy.  It’s one of the most complex enemy AI systems i recall playing against.  If the game thinks it can get you, it will attack.  Which leads to another difference.  These zombies attack at full speed.  Full speed RUN.

After playing for a bit you start to pick up on the next important difference.  Most zombie games get progressively more difficult, leading to a series of boss fights.  That’s not the way this game works.  There are zombies (the grunts of the L4D world), and then there are five types of “specials”.  Five different types of particularly difficult variants that attack at the most opportune moments to create the biggest impact, both in the story line and your heart rate.  So while there’s no true boss fight in any of the four movies, you’re continually fighting mini (and not so mini) bosses through out the entire movie.  And instead of leading to the ultimate boss fight at the end, you get to go through what’s affectionately referred to as “The Last Stand”.  Wave after wave after wave of zombies of every flavor while you try to defend a small patch of land and a rescue vehicle makes it’s way toward you.   I can tell you, it’s more intense than most boss battles that I’ve dealt with.

Finally, the biggest difference of the all.  Survival.  Most of these types of games pit you and maybe one AI sidekick against a swarm of zombies.  What’s a guy to do but whip out his gravity gun and start slinging blades into the crowd?  Well, this game is totally different.  Firstly, there are no special weapons.  Shotgun, SMG, Hunting (Sniper) Rifle, Assault Rifle… that’s it.  You will always have your trusty pistol(s) with their never ending ammo supply, but the big weapons are limited in their choice as well as ammo supply.  But the true difference, and the one that redefines this genre as well as possibly creating it’s own, is that you are not alone.  It’s you and three others wading through the corpses, trying to find safety.  More importantly, it’s not necessarily three NPC’s.  The truly compelling part of the game is when you have three real life, human, xbox360 connected friends to play with.  Now suddenly it’s not a phony character on the screen being stupid. It’s your brother across the country, or your friend from high school, being stupid.  Now you WANT to see them survive.  Now when they are in trouble you feel compelled to help them,  and not solely because you know you may need help later.  This is the part of the game that truly grabs you and brings you back for more.  You can play it alone (with friendly AI), but then it lacks something.  The true appeal of this game lies in the idea of going up against impossible odds with someone you are at least vaguely familiar with and surviving.

So, how does this game rate?  Left4Dead is a highly compelling and interesting game mostly due to the online cooperative play.  Make no mistake, this game was designed from square one to be played over XBoxLive with three friends.  There is a multiplayer (adversarial) option that is fairly cool and works very well when you have more than three friends online.  But no matter how you do it, this game is meant to be shared.   The graphics are great, though a bit disturbing at times, and the controls are tight.  The action is incredibly intense and high paced.  On the negative side of the ledger, there’s only 4 maps.  Each map can be gotten through in about an hour and a half on the normal difficulty level.   All told that is six hours of gaming, but when you add in the multiplayer, and major differnces in the difficulty levels, you suddenly don’t mind playing the same maps repeatadly.  Don’t get me wrong, i REALLY hope they bring out more maps soon, but the lack of maps hasn’t stopped me from playing the game over and over again.

If this sounds good to you:  Buy it now or Trade for it on Goozex

–David Hayes

Well I signed up for this back in April, and then of course promptly forgot about it.  What did I forget about?  The all new Quake Live Beta program.  Given that it had been so long since I signed up, I thought at first that the mail I got from iD Software on January 21st of this year was just spam.  However, after reading it I realized that after too many months, they were finally selecting people for open public beta testing.

Quake Live, for those who aren’t familiar, is essentialy what appears to be a modified Quake 3 embedded into a web browser.  I’m sure the NDA I didn’t fully read mentions that I shouldn’t go into too much detail at this point, but I will give a couple points.

It seemed to work in both browsers I tried it in.  Setup was maybe 15 minutes and then I was playing.  Graphics seemed to be pretty good, a far cry from the flash based browser games I’m sure we are all used to.  The training missing flowed well, as did the online matches.  I also discovered that I’m not better at this version of Quake than I was at Quake 3.  Guess the twitchy factor for FPS’s starts to wane after you get to a certain age.

Overall, it’s looking good, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a fast paced, zero storyline FPS.  I’m curious to see how they work free online browser based gaming into a business model.  Ads in games?  It worked for Burnout Paradise, I’d imagine it will work here as well.

Coming to a browser near you around July 31st.

- Ben Mazhary-Clark