Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked is unequivocally the weirdest slash-'em-up we've ever seen. Created by the mad geniuses behind Killer 7, it follows the adventures of Mugen and Jin, two wandering samurai charged with protecting a young woman named Fuu, whose hobbies include eating and being kidnapped. Throwing historical accuracy to the wind, the game (like the anime series it's based on) is a hyperstylized, hip-hop-saturated romp through 19th-century Japan. And man is it ever bizarre.
We've
Sooner or later, developer Omega Force is going to have to make a new game. In the past six years, they've pumped out no fewer than 13 Dynasty Warriors sequels and spinoffs, all of which have been essentially identical. New battlefields and other improvements keep emerging, but each one still revolves around wading into a battlefield and slashing through hordes of witless enemy soldiers.
Samurai Warriors 2 is no different. Like the first Samurai Warriors, it's set in feudal Japan, with players
Hacking away at your enemies like so much tuna sashimi is great, but any shogun worth his katana can tell you that most battles are won before they begin - with careful planning. Though, an army of bloodthirsty samurai doesnt hurt either.
Enter Samurai Warriors 2: Empires, which mixes the original game's steel-swinging action with board game-like tactical strategy. This forms a game, not shockingly, much like the nearly identical Dynasty Warriors 5:
In the evidence of this, racing bikes - no, riding bikes - is butt-blistering, ball-bruising hard work. You know all those car racing conventions youve ingrained into your consciousness? Forget all of them. That one that says you can brake and turn at almost the same time to skid through a corner sideways for maximum style and speed means jackshit here. And the one which guarantees that you can easily correct a momentary wobble of the steering wheel with the minimum of fuss and not have a major
Regardless of whether you had any affinity for motorbike games, there was no denying SBK-07 was a bit on the hard side. There were options aplenty to mess about with so that there were umpteen degrees of slavish simulation, but there were a couple of notable problems which prevented the game from surging to the front of the two-wheeled racer pack.
Firstly, there wasn’t a whole lot of eye candy on offer - aside from the umbrella
Imagine if, after taking a nosedive into a mountain of coke and getting perforated with bullets, Tony Montana hadnt died at the end of Scarface. Hard to believe? Sure. Strips the film of its central message? Hell yes. But for better or worse, thats the premise of Scarface: The World is Yours.
As the game opens, players replay the final scene from the movie, with one important twist: after trading fire with assassins sent by rival drug lord Alejandro Sosa, Tony escapes his burning mansion.
We got our first real crack at the newly redesigned Scarface: The World is Yours back in March, and while it was still in early form - having been recently torn apart and redesigned from scratch - it was already shaping up to be much more than just another Grand Theft Auto clone. Tony Montana looked and sounded slick, the city of Miami was intricately detailed and the cars handled much more smoothly than GTA's bar-of-soap-on-wet-tile rides.
The game looks even more polished since then, and we
When it was shown at last year's E3 expo, Scarface: The World is Yours got a lukewarm reaction. Its graphics were chunky, the gameplay seemed sketchy and overall it looked like a bad Vice City clone.
"It didn't pop," said Pete Wanat, the game's executive producer, as he explained why the game was essentially torn apart and rebuilt after the showing. "We view this as a long-term franchise. ... We can't mail in the first one."
And so, the entire virtual city of Miami was rebuilt, the driving
Friday 31 March 2006
What better place to show off the all-new version of Scarface than the Los Monteros Hotel in sunny Marbella? Well, Miami, the setting of the ultra-violent Brian De Palma film would have been more appropriate but Vivendi's 5-star hospitality recently provided a suitable backdrop to a game that - like its hero Tony Montana - has dragged itself out of the ghetto and truly made good.
It's all about balls in this GTA style driver/shooter and, as Tony says, "he doesn't break
Thursday 5 October 2006
Tony Montana's meteoric rise from down-and-out Cuban refugee to the lord of Miami's criminal underworld is the stuff of movie legend. Scarface has become synonymous with sleazy '80s pop culture and there are more games, films and songs inspired by it than there are stars in the sky. Kind of.
But how do you make a game based on a downbeat crime drama appeal to the drooling masses without turning it into a gaudy shoot-'em-up with car modding and tit shots?
Well, after
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