When science goes wrong, things blow up. It’s all part of the cycle of life – at least for ‘Splosion Man. Accidentally spawned from the experimental tinkering of his fellow lab coat-adorned scientists, the titular protagonist of this inventive 2.5D platformer takes psychotic glee in his newfound ability to explode himself at will. His fiery enthusiasm is infectious.
Fans of the original .hack series and anime have another reason to dust off their virtual desktops with .hack//G.U. Vol. 1//Rebirth scheduled to release early next week. With a story intertwiend with .hack//Roots - a new anime series that debuts on Cartoon Network in November - the game takes place in the not-so-distant future, where a fantasy online role-playing game called The World has become a cultural phenomenon.
You control Haseo, a brash Adept Rogue who needs to find a way to save his
Lengthy cutscenes, repetitive dungeons, and a general sense that Namco Bandai was drip feeding us one complete game split into three volumes, undermined our enjoyment of .hack//G.U. vol. 1: Rebirth. Over six months have passed since that game released, and fans who've been patiently waiting for .hack//G.U. vol. 2: Reminisce may be disappointed with this tardy and underwhelming follow up that offers too much of the same.
Reminisce continues to follow the story of Haseo and his investigation of
If you're not yet familiar with the .hack story here it is: you play as a "real" person playing a (fake) MMORPG called The World. You log on to talk to your friends and deal with a virus, AIDA, that is infecting game characters and causing players to go into comas in the "real" world. As best we can figure, it must be the addictive nature of MMOs that stops everyone from quitting this potentially fatal "game." Logging off The World allows you to check emails from your virtual friends, visit
007's latest video game journey brings you on a trip through the agent's memories of some of his biggest missions. Sadly, he seems to remember them being more boring than they really were...
As a collection of quick-fire minigames, you certainly get plenty for your cash. With over a hundred to choose from (ranging from darts, juggling, sushi spearing, air hockey, skydiving, Snake, curling and, er, 94 others), the variety means there will always be some hits, misses and some devilishly infuriating games that you just can’t play without getting into a right old huff.
Do you remember the first time you played Sim City or Civilization? The joys of constructing buildings, improving your city (or civilization) and helping it prosper are sometimes hard to remember. Instead, we recall the frustrating gameplay, convoluted menus and poorly designed battle systems that have plagued the second-rate imitations that have flooded the market in recent years. Luckily, 1701 A.D. manages to breathe life back into this crowded-but-listless genre. You won't see any far out
Efforts to bring the PC's brand of Civilization style strategy games to the Nintendo DS haven't always yielded positive results. Age of Empires was decent, but they made it turn-based. Sim City had features cut. So did The Settlers, and it was a buggy mess on top of that. For once, wouldn't it be nice if one of those wonderfully engrossing empire sims survived the transition from the PC to DS without losing anything in translation? If you
Before now something had kept us unaware of the macho-romanticism of the long-distance truck driver. Now, suddenly, the appeal of the open road strikes us: We’ve got a big blue truck and a delivery that needs to be in Las Vegas, like, yesterday. There’s a whiff of management, but really this is a driving simulator. Not a driving game, in that Grand Theft Auto style, no: a simulator. You pick up your load, you head out on the
GTA: San Andreas may have led to a lot of moral outrage and criticism of the game industry, but its worst effect might actually be 187: Ride or Die. Apparently, someone thought that the secret to success was to throw young black men into cars, give them guns, and let them run wild. Instant videogame hit, right? No.
You're Buck, an up-and-coming gangsta running for a Southern California OG named Dupree. When Dupree says jump, you jump - and when he says "grab a semi-automatic weapon, jump into
