By Cyrris , 11th August 8:20 pm
As I have stated before, I have been a big Civ fan, but the release of Civilization IV was marred by bugs which really stopped the game from being all it could be. Fast forward 18 months, and this game has now seen extensive patching and two expansion packs. If you had asked me a week ago what my opinion of Civilization 4 and it’s Warlords expansion pack was, I would not have been able to say a bad thing about it. The original game is fantastic, and the expansion only built on it in positive ways. Warlords effectively raised the bar in the Civ4 experience, but didn’t really change enough for me to be bothered making a review.
Beyond the Sword, however, has not just raised the bar. It has put the bar on a rocket and launched the damn thing in to orbit.
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By Cyrris , 23rd July 6:06 pm
Earlier this month my ISP started giving away keys for the open beta of Massive Entertainment’s latest RTS - World in Conflict. Since seeing the screenshots and other media over the past few months I was pretty impressed by what I saw, and decided not to miss out. I don’t usually go for betas (waiting instead for demos to come out) but when a game looks particularly interesting, I’ll cave. The last (and only previous) open beta I also played was Supreme Commander, but that didn’t work out too well because of performance issues. Thankfully, I fared a lot better this time around.
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By Vermouth , 15th July 9:16 pm
Now that E3 is no longer with us it’s time to take a look at the winners and losers from the game industry’s big event. This was a newly crafted E3 which had a very different flavor than in previous years. No longer was this a gigantic sensory orgy in the way of years past, but rather a big huge level industry event with a laundry list of games on display. This had an upside and a downside. The upside was it was much more focused on promoting games than in years past. In the press conferences there were only a handful of games that were not ostensibly 2007 games. Of course, the show had a handful of big winners who improved themselves considerably and some that were not as impressive.
The big winners were:
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By Vermouth , 13th July 12:54 am
Getting up yesterday morning the first item on my agenda was to catch the Nintendo E3 press event that was in the morning. This show was really as unimpressive as you can possibly imagine. For one thing it really served as a platform for Nintendo to talk up their sales success to the press and they really didn’t show much in the way of games. The biggest announcements from this show were release dates for Mario Galaxy & Smash Brothers along with the completely unsurprising unveiling of Mario Kart for the Wii which will have online multiplayer.
Miyamoto showed up to show off a big game at the end of it as usual - but instead of an awesome game we got Wii Fitness. I don’t believe it’s possible to be more disappointed. Instead of getting a new character franchise which the Wii could desperately use, they took the time to show me how I can do step-aerobics on my game console. Oddly enough the only games really present on the DS were Brain Age 2 and Zelda. For a system that is leading the whole world in sales month after month, it’s really surprising they didn’t show us but a few games. We saw none of the rumored titles like New Super Mario 2, no 2D Metroid, no Smash brothers DS. Nothing new which was a major disappointment.
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By Vermouth , 11th July 4:56 pm
Watching the Microsoft press conference at E3 this year I think it’s quickly evident what their aim was. It was not to build some long term hopes for the future by announcing a bunch of games that won’t be ready for a long time. What it was, was to reinforce this basic fact the Fall 2007 Xbox 360 lineup is one of the best, most complete game lineups in my lifetime.
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