Call Of Duty 4 | Modern
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Xbox 3 Or Xbox 720 Speculation | PS4 Playstation 4 No Time Soon?
Xbox 3 or Xbox 720 Speculation | PS4 Playstation 4 No Time Soon?
clicktotweet.com Quick Update video about some Xbox720 Rumors, and PS4, no time soon? Ogwalrus Channel WTF!! http:///www.youtube.com/ogwalrus ...
Monday, August 29, 2011
What Will Be The New Features Of Xbox 720 And PS4
What Will Be The New Features Of Xbox 720 and PS4
Peter asks "What Will Be The New Features Of Xbox 720 and PS4". Brandon makes his best guess, but doesn't have any insider information. If you ...
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Xbox 720 Rumour Round-up
Xbox 720 rumour round-up
Will the Xbox 720 release date be at E3 2012? What Xbox 720 features will we see? Here's our next-gen console wish-list E3 2011 has been and gone ...
Saturday, August 27, 2011
MW3, Fifa 12, Xbox 720, PS4 | This Week In 100 Ep ...
MW3, Fifa 12, Xbox 720, PS4 | This Week in 100 ep ...
The biggest news stories of the week in 100 seconds, plus best comments. Took a while to make and so please give it a thumbs up and a comment ...
Friday, August 26, 2011
NEWS: Wii U Speeds Up Xbox 720, Mega Man Fans 100000 Strong & ...
NEWS: Wii U speeds up Xbox 720, Mega Man fans 100000 Strong & ...
Nintendo spooks Microsoft and they rush the 720 for an E3 2012 reveal - www.eurogamer.net Insomniac Games may support Wii U - www.stumbleupon.com ...
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Xbox 720 At E3 2012?
Xbox 720 at E3 2012?
Gameplay Channel: www.youtube.com ------------------------ MY FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com MY TWITTER: twitter.com Ronald Jenkees: www.ronaldjenkees ...
CGR Retro News - Xbox 720 And Xbox History!
CGR Retro News - Xbox 720 and Xbox History!
Angela and Edit Station 1 bring you the latest news and rumors surrounding Microsoft's next console -- the system that online message boards and ...
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Xbox 360 Arcade Price Cut To $199 On September 7 - Rumours
Xbox 360 Arcade price cut to $199 on September 7 - Rumours
Monday, August 22, 2011
Xbox 720 Trailer (Kinect)
Xbox 720 Trailer (Kinect)
The trailer for the Xbox 720 "Xbox Kinect" I might be getting one this July. The price is somewhere around 299$ or so I've heard. I was flipping ...
Review: Pirates of Black Cove
The naval combat is solid and accessible, if perhaps too arcade-y in nature for the hardcore naval fan. While you start out with little more than a horrifyingly slow floating wreck with a handful of broadside cannons, sinking ships and doing quests for the three different Pirate factions that vie for control nets you the necessary money (pieces of eight) to buy and upgrade ships. Through exploration around the map, you'll also find "blueprints" that work as a ship and upgrade unlock currency.
Soon enough, you will have found enough blueprints and liberated enough pieces of eight to afford yourself a decent ship. Contary to the more open gameplay found in the bug-ridden yet quite enjoyable Pirates of the Caribbean from 2003, all progression in Pirates of Black Cove is done through quests. There is no trading of any kind, because this is not a merchant simulator; it's the pirate's life for you.
Progression is a semi-linear affair, with completed quests occasionally leading to a batch of new quests that you can complete in any order. Once you have completed enough quests for one faction, the resulting gained reputation allows you to start doing missions for the next faction, and so on. It's not so much a game where you have to choose sides, as much as you simply go through all available missions to gain the highest reputation for all factions and unlock the final storyline mission.
Between the missions at sea that involve sinking ships, capturing them with a human catapult special ability -- which catapults an unfortunate pirate -- or escort duties, these missions stay fun throughout the lengthy campaign. Combat is fast, though once you upgrade to one of the heavier Buccaneer faction vessels it's pretty hard to ever get sunk. Occasional maritime distractions will see you battling a Kraken or navigating a rotating maze that protects Sirens in special separate seafaring sections.
In line with its accessible nature, you won't be seeing much ship customization beyond upgrades and special weapons. What you buy is what you get, without having to worry too much about ship statistics or crew maintenance, and there's no chained cannonball shots to wipe out masts or any option to build a fleet beyond the ship you control directly.
The land-based combat is a different story altogether. Each pirate hero can have up to three squads of a wide variety of units under his or her command, and new pirate heroes will join you as you complete all missions for a faction. Every pirate faction has its own island base where you can construct barracks to recruit land units and accept or hand in quests. Although the units are varied enough to give you a range of melee, ranged, and special attacks in theory, the land combat doesn't work quite as well in practice.
Part of the problem lies with the controls and mission structure. Practically every land mission simply requires you to walk from your landing point to a mission objective, killing enemies along the way, and walking back. Your units will usually attack whatever is next to them if they are standing still, but there is no attack-move option. You need to manually right click on enemies to attack them, but if they are melee units and start to swashbuckle with your units, it can be quite hard to click to attack them.
If you misclick and move units to the ground next to an enemy, they will sometimes just stand there and take damage until you finally click on the right spot. The controls need a lot of precision on your part, which isn't always possible when you have a mess of units brawling about. A default attack-move option would solve all these issues, but without it the land missions range from frustrating to eliciting the feel that you are simply going through the motions to get back to sea.
It doesn't help that the land mission areas are either too large or your units walk too slowly, which results in a long wait while all your units walk back to the landing area -- something they need to do in almost every mission. Thankfully there is a "return to ship" button that automatically directs all units to return to the landing spot, but it's still a jarring experience from the fun you are otherwise likely to have with Pirates of Black Cove.
As you progress, an inventory system will fill itself with items you can activate for things like invulnerability or taunting nearby ships, yet it's hidden away in a menu that discourages you from remembering to use it. Having these items in a toolbar, World of Warcraft style, would've been highly beneficial.
This is most certainly a game for patient PC gamers who just like to kick back and mess around with pirates. A unique "wind charm" item lets you instantly teleport to a faction base to save time, although it only works only if you are at sea. Whenever you use one, you had better remember to pick it up again inside the faction base in question or you'll be manually sailing all the way back. It's a bit mindboggling why there is not simply a teleport button instead of this system, as the wind charms can sometimes be hard to spot inside the base until you've learned its possible spawn locations.
Occasional game-crashing bugs also mean you have to be patient, although Nitro Games has been pretty quick with releasing patches already and future support seems like a safe bet. Which is great, because Pirates of Black Cove does a lot right whereas it falls short in other areas.
The dialogue is fully voiced and funny enough, the story keeps progressing at a decent pace to keep playing, and you can collect all manner of collectables -- including 1000 "joke bottles" with jokes that range from hearthy chuckles to cringeworthy puns. These jokes are echoed on the faction bases by NPCs and as someone who is not averse to terrible puns, these jokes actually made me smile more than I can remember doing in any other recent game.
Most importantly, the entire game has a certain charm to it. Pirate tropes abound everywhere you look, and it's obvious that Nitro Games is a huge fan of everything pirate; something further evidenced by the mention of swashbuckler classics like The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood on the game's Facebook page.
Even though the land mission structure in Pirates of Black Cove tends to be a bit bland, these missions do help to keep the gameplay varied. Essentially the game suffers from the same problem Star Wars: Empire at War had: space battles were fun, while ground missions were a bit of a mess. Other than this structural aspect, every other issue with the game -- from the land-based controls to certain interface oddities and a game-crashing bug here and there -- concerns things that could easily be fixed through updates.
Pirates of Black Cove has some rough edges, to be sure, yet it is still the most enjoyable and simply fun pirate game I've played in years. The foundations the game is built upon are strong enough to support a sequel that improves on the existing formula and does away with its flaws, whether they are issues grounded in design or controls, and I'd probably buy any future iteration set in the Oriental in a heartbeat.
If you are a big enough pirate fan and willing to overlook Pirates of Black Cove's faults in favor of its charm, there is enough fun to be had to make its budget price a barrrrgain. Should such pirate puns lead to haemorrhaging in your brain's language centers, however, then this might not be the game for you.
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Review: Air Conflicts: Secret Wars
The game starts out rather dodgy, throwing "cutscenes" in your face that are just a single image which the camera pans over a couple of times -- focusing on different aspects of the image to fit the voice-over narration, if you're lucky. The first campaign or so sees you partaking in some truly awful missions that involve flying to a checkpoint or shooting down a few fighters or bombers, and strangely enough these missions can sometimes only take a few minutes to complete.
If you stick with it and keep on playing, however, it actually becomes quite an enjoyable little game. Missions become slightly more varied, the story picks up, and you start to unlock more and more planes that each have their own statistics and weapon loadouts.
The planes are sadly not very distinctive in the way they feel. Bombers are slow and handle even slower, with the option to use a turret and shoot backwards or sideways using the d-pad. Unfortunately, since the turret's power is pretty useless, you are unlikely to ever down more than 20 planes this way throughout the game.
Fighters handle much better and are a lot faster, and later in the game you'll unlock the Me-262 jet fighter and Hortha-Gothen Flying Wing to mess around in. All the planes in the same class handle almost identically though, and you'll be hard pressed to notice the handling difference between a Mosquito and a Stuka. What's worse, all the planes lack a sense of speed. Only after flying all of them do you notice the difference, and even then it's hard to notice whether you are flying at 33% throttle or a maximum speed.
Where the difference between planes does come in is in the weapon loadout, if you can call it that. Each plane has a set amount of rockets and bombs it can fire, which reload automatically at different speeds depending on the plane. It's an arcade game, so there's no resupplying or refueling or anything like that. Aircraft can be shot down with rockets if you're lucky, if you happen to get the time to line them up to an enemy that flies in a straight line, or if you shoot them right before smashing into a plane. The latter is the easiest option, as there is no collision model for planes in place.
Planes do have some graphical damage modeling but it doesn't impact how the plane flies, making a Spitfire with half its wing shot off look pretty comical. To make up for that, you'll have little Nazi soldiers running for their lives on the ground and screaming in an explosion of blood when you bomb them to smithereens, and a mission in which you need to shoot down over a hundred Nazi paratroopers who go "Aaaah" when their parachutes collapse.
It's a shame that the missions are pretty drab. You'll go through the standard WWII scenarios under the guise of helping out resistance fighters throughout Eurasia, but at no point will you be surprised with the mission design. Compared to Ace Combat 6, IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey and H.A.W.X., Air Conflicts: Secret Wars disappoints in this regard. It's a good thing the missions are at least pretty varied, as far as shooting down aircraft and bombing ground targets during WWII can provide variety.
The controls work well enough, with only the left stick used for controlling your plane and the X and Y buttons for decelerating and accelerating. You're notified that decelerating will help you turn faster, but that's only an effective tactic for a handful of very slow or very fast planes. For the most part, it won't matter at all how fast you are going in a turn.
If you try to fly in a loop, you will suddenly face downwards upside down without the option to roll around and escape a crash -- at least when using the arcade control scheme. Because the simulation control scheme is just no fun to use at all in this game, you are simply stuck with making normal turns and sometimes braking because you're used to doing so in a flight sim whether it actually does anything or not.
Landing is a matter of flying through four loops after which you are instantly on the ground, and usually you can take off directly afterwards with the cargo or person of interest on board. You'll earn "Stars" for completing objectives and destroying enemies, which unlock new planes, but there's little feedback on how you can earn more of them. Likewise, you sometimes level up and get a skill point to spend on handling, endurance, critical hits ("You shot a pilot through the head!") and wingmen effectiveness. But there's no hint on how to earn these points or if they are just allotted for certain missions.
So far Air Conflicts: Secret Wars might sound like a truly terrible game and at times it can be. But for the most part, it can offer some stupid budget fun despite its faults. Enemy planes will dodge out of the way if you shoot at them, turning dogfights into an affair that will always keep you busy without taking minutes to down a single plane in a dogfight. Depending on the difficulty, there is a very generous lock-on reticule that makes shooting down enemy planes pretty easy. Only on the highest difficulty will the target reticule lock-on less often, and even then it's never hard to complete a mission.
It's a very arcade experience that may feel dumbed down to the hardcore flight sim enthusiast, but this game doesn't try to satisfy that audience. If you can look past the game's faults, the gameplay has plenty of fun to offer. Surprisingly enough, the story is not terrible either.
Penned by the writers at International Hobo, the story is in fact pretty depressing. Throughout the seven campaigns that make up DeeDee Derbec's story, she is always on the lookout to find out what happened to the father she never knew. All she knows is that he never returned from World War I. In each campaign, you will play a fighter who was on her father's squadron and fight a single mission alongside Guillaume Derbec.
These missions are hard to fail, and merely serve to provide a backstory for her father's experience and character during the war. While a voice-over from one of DeeDee's father's old squadron mates tells her what had happened, you act out these events flying a biplane and make some simple bombing runs. Again, these missions offer nothing groundbreaking but a nice change of pace.
As the story progresses, you will lose friends along the way and DeeDee turns from a simple happy-go-lucky alcoholic smuggler into one of the most depressing characters you are likely to find in any video game. Even right up to the finale, everything about DeeDee's adventures is a tale of atrocities, mass murder, the bombing of field hospitals, the loss of friends, and her descend into a war-torn woman who is slowly stripped of a soul.
Sadly, while the story and script might surprise you at times given the budget nature and the genre of the game, the voice acting ruins almost all of it. Only four actors do the voices of around 12 characters, and when DeeDee is talking with her awful French accent to a Russian resistance fighter who has the exact same voice, it can become hilarious at times.
Despite the title mentioning Secret Wars, there is not really any secret war to speak of. The story about helping out the resistance in various regions is a nice break from the standard RAF superhero pilot story, but don't expect anything as grand as Secret Weapons Over Normandy.
Air Conflicts: Secret Wars is a weird game. Everything from the graphics to the music and sound is passable, and it doesn't hold up to the best this genre has to offer on the consoles. But strangely enough, it can be a damn enjoyable little game to play.
Even though it's stitched together from pieces of varying quality and even though the writing cannot save the boring cutscenes or the mission designs that never rise above mediocrity, it's still a lot more fun than most other budget simulator games on the consoles. Hell, it's more fun than the awfully disappointing H.A.W.X. 2.
Make no mistake, this is game that no one but the most avid of console flight sim fans should ever play. If you can look past its budget production values and design, there's about 7-8 hours of missions and multiplayer that practically nobody but the Achievement whores seem to be playing online -- though there is system-link multiplayer that will also give you Achievements if you are into that.
Air Conflicts: Secret Wars might be a budget title in price, looks, and polish. But it's a simple and surprisingly enjoyable game that hardcore fans of the genre will enjoy if they can go in with low expectations. It doesn't do anything new or anything special but if you see it discounted (it already dropped to half price in Europe within two weeks of release), or if you can rent it, you might have more fun with it than you might expect.
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