GamesRadar - Xbox Previews

American McGee's Bad Day L.A. hands-on (Bad Day LA)

8/08/2006

Fact: one in 1,368 readers will be struck and killed by a falling meteor while reading this. Okay, so that's not entirely true, but similarly absurd situations and scenarios jam the subversive, satirical action-title Bad Day LA way past chock-full. Rock star game designer American McGee pokes fun at our national pastimes of racism and classism during our Bush-Era culture war of fear - but does so using everything from a guy in a hamburger suit to toxic waste-spawned zombies. Our hands-on look ...

Bad Day L.A. (Bad Day LA)

24/02/2006

The checkered history of Los Angeles suggests that on occasion it can help, ahem … redefine the concept of the human love/hate relationship. Even so, the city's seen nothing like this. In the third-person action game Bad Day L.A. you'll face missions involving plane crashes, zombie hordes, meteor showers, riots, a tsunami, an earthquake, and more. Crips vs. Bloods this is not. At the center is misanthrope and reluctant hero Anthony Williams. He's a former Hollywood agent so disenchanted ...

Bad Day LA (Bad Day LA)

15/02/2006

We're used to gradual evolutions in gaming, be they in technical, graphical, even artistic fields. And you might have expected the same as gaming explores other new horizons, such as politics, current affairs, satire. But with Bad Day LA, American McGee has taken a tradition that had long since become dormant (in mainstream games at least), and has pushed it from a standing start to a racing finish. Taking on fistfuls of current taboos - terrorist attacks, immigration, obesity, tsunamis - it ...

Batman Begins (Batman Begins)

3/05/2005

Based on Frank Miller's superb Batman Year One comics, if its Xbox mirror image is anything to go by, Batman Begins promises to be darker than a black hole and edgier than a dodecahedron. No more tights. No more comedy sidekicks. No more remote controlled Batmobiles with optional bulletproof shields either. Batman Begins - the movie - will be a Batman with its roots in the real world. He'll hunt criminals, he'll scare them shitless, but he'll feel pain, anger and lose control too.Of course, as ...

Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII (Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII)

7/03/2006

Why don't Top Guns get any love? Crimson Skies and Secret Weapons Over Normandy were a blast, and we demand more. Ubisoft's WWII era flight opera Blazing Angels is primed to deliver the kind of experience that has been sadly lacking on the consoles for the last ...

Brothers in Arms (Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30)

7/01/2005

If Full Spectrum Warrior was your idea of an exciting squad-based shooter, Brothers In Arms is going to make you just as trigger-squeezing happy.The two games are similar - both set in the thick of war, both with you playing as an American squad commander and each high on strategy and non-existent on Medal of Honor-style running and gunning. The big difference between the two games, though, is that Ubisoft's Brothers In Arms is a real-time game where you have direct control over your character. ...

Brothers In Arms (Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30)

24/08/2004

The Utah Beach Museum at Sainte-Marie-du-Mont is the answer. It's the answer to all those questions fired at developers about the morality of making wargames. The questions may be expressed in different ways but they always amount to the same thing: How do you feel about turning a painful, traumatic conflict into entertainment?Randy Pitchford, president of Gearbox Software, uses the Spielberg defence: "We're fulfilling a fantasy, but also retelling a story as authentically as possible. I think ...