November 2007

Race 07

November 16, 2007

PC / Reviews / by Justin Last Make a comment! / Tweet it!

RACE 07 is built for the hardcore race simulation fan. For those of you that have a racing wheel and want your racer to assign you a weight penalty for winning then RACE 07 is the game for you. Racing sims are punishingly hard, and RACE 07 is no different. This is great for fans of the genre, but it makes RACE 07 a game aimed squarely at a small audience with little to no chance of expanding that audience.

Racing sims are about two things: force feedback and realistic damage, and RACE 07 deals with both concepts wonderfully. You can feel when tires aren’t gripping the track, and you can hear (or not hear) when you’ve overaccelerated, lost all traction, and pinned the steering wheel to the left with no effect.

Damage is realistically modeled, but plenty of games do that. What RACE 07 does differently is that damage affects gameplay. The car both looks and feels different after being slammed into a wall. The fine folks over at SimBin are so proud of their damage modeling that the manual actually encourages you to hit the wall just for fun to see how it can affect gameplay.

Further adding to RACE 07‘s realism is the default viewpoint. Your default view is from inside the car, and it makes sense. Were you actually racing as a part of the WWTC your only view would be from the driver’s seat. Handy as it may be the follow viewpoint isn’t terribly realistic. To go along with this realistic viewpoint you can alter your seat height and position, and the game will automatically push your view in at the apex of a turn. It’s the little touches like this that make RACE 07 a game for the racing afficonado. The sim fan will also be ecstatic to learn that the genre’s newest and best peripherals (like Track-IR and the Logitech G25) are supported by default.

RACE 07 provides a robust experience: six classes, 32 real-world circuits, and the little details mentioned earlier like automatically adjusting the view at the apex of a turn. Unfortunately, RACE 07 isn’t all positives. Multiplayer requires you to register your game with Valve’s Steam service. If you don’t want to use Steam then you can’t play the game online. There’s also a lack of analytical software bundled with the game. Admittedly, this has little to do with the racing itself, but SimBin’s last game, GTR2, provided this tool, and its absence is obvious here.

If you’re a racing simulation fan then RACE 07 is east to recommend. The experience provided here is less a game and more a true-to-life approximation of the WWTC for those of us lucky enough to own a PC and racing peripherals but not quite lucky enough to trade our lives of cubicle work for the life of a race car driver.

Two Worlds

November 16, 2007

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Robert Rasco Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Aziraal, the god of war and leader of the Orcs, lays entombed, and the Relic is the key to opening his tomb. Only a member of your family is capable of performing the ritual. Your only other surviving relative, your sister, has refused to comply with the wishes of Reist, her captor, because the resurrection of Aziraal will lead to the holy crusade of the Orcs. Now, it is up to you to collect The Relic and save your sister. However, your destiny is ultimately your choice. In the end, only one of the Two Worlds will remain.

Reality Pump and Southpeak Games have just unleashed Two Worlds, an RPG with over 100 hours of single-player questing, two Xbox Live compatible game types, and support for up to eight players on Xbox Live. Quest with friends in online co-op, have team battles, or team monster hunts. Each game type allows you to create a unique character, enabling you to try different variants of character types and skills. Online matches are arena-based levels with boundaries in which you can play PvP (death match) or RPG modes. The solo player campaign offers a much bigger arena to roam with more quests and capabilities. Essentially, all of the online levels are pieced together like a puzzle, from the royal capital of Cathalon to the Northern townships of Tharbakin and Tarmalin, the Grom infested city of Gor Gommar, and the barren desert of Drak’ar.

The campaign’s quest involves finding and saving your sister, along with the opportunity to save or destroy the world. Along your way, you have a freedom of choice unseen in any other RPG. The non-linear story line creates a world around you which comes to life and reacts to every choice you make. Attack or rob a civilian, and expect consequences for your actions. Strike up a conversation with town’s people to obtain information to further your quest, or to receive new quests which you may choose to accept or reject, but beware of the decisions you heed for they will affect the outcome of the game. Completing quests gains you experience pointsA

Switchball

November 16, 2007

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Justin Last Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Solving good puzzles is rewarding. Solving puzzles in a beautifully rendered world with a realistic physics system is even more rewarding, and that’s exactly what you do in Switchball. There is no story, there are no characters; Switchball is all puzzles, all the time.

Switchball‘s premise is simple: take a marble and change its composition to solve environmental puzzles. As you alter your marble’s composition you also alter what it can do. The default marble is an exception; all it can do is roll. The metal ball is heavy. It can’t pass over cloth (the cloth will tear and your marble will fall through), but it can push metal boxes. The power marble acts a lot like the standard marble in terms of weight and pushing capability. There are various power-up stations scattered about the levels that make the power marble able to jump, boost, or become magnetically charged.

Each Switchball level starts out the same way. Your marble is delivered onto the start of the level and you need to get from point A to point B. Switchball‘s puzzles are less about finding where to go and more about finding how to alter to environment to make it possible to get from start to finish. In one puzzle, you must be a metal ball to roll safely past a fan and then change into a power ball with the boost ability to adequately maneuver a half-pipe and then get into the helicopter to end the level.

Switchball features five worlds each with six levels. In a move that more puzzle games should emulate, Switchball also features both competitive and cooperative multiplayer. Competitive multiplayer allows multiple players to race through a single level. These races are done in real time; it is completely possible (and strangely satisfying) to push your opponent off the side of the level. Cooperative multiplayer is a great addition to Switchball; it features different levels than the single-player game, and all of the cooperative levels are designed with two marbles and voice chat in mind. The only thing missing from Switchball‘s multiplayer is the ability to play with multiple players on a single console.

Switchball is easy to learn but difficult to master. Levels are beautifully rendered, and puzzles are satisfying to complete. Later level puzzles require high amounts of dexterity, speed, and timing, making each victory hard-earned. Single-player time trial victories are even more difficult. The first few silver medals aren’t hard to come by, but you’ll need to know a level backwards and forwards to earn the silver and gold on later levels.

If you’re the type that likes solving puzzles then Switchball is easy to recommend. It’s pretty, it’s fun, and the achievements tied to silver and gold medal collection give this title something that most puzzlers lack – replay value.

FIFA 08

November 16, 2007

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Mike Carabajal Make a comment! / Tweet it!

No game captures the look and feel of soccer like the FIFA series. With its licenses coming directly from Soccer’s governing body, EA is able to bring your favorite club team, its kits, players and even stadiums to your television in gorgeous high definition. FIFA‘s graphics have always been a step behind in capturing the intricate dance that is soccer, with the games choosing instead to appeal to a more arcade feeling of run and gun. FIFA 08 catches the series up to speed.

Unlike most popular American sports, soccer is a game of placement, skill, and strategy. FIFA 08 has finally captured soccer’s passion and precision. The game play no longer consists of a chaotic onslaught of incredible runs, but is now a chess game of placing balls through and wearing down a defense. Dribbling has also been touched up with a skill button that will allow your player to do some impressive tricks with combinations from the right analog stick. The game improvements are not all on the offensive side of the ball. The player now has a greater control of players off the ball, with a simple flick of the right analog stick yielding a player-switch.

While the game play is now much more fluid, FIFA still suffers in its aerial game. For some reason you lose temporary control over players while the ball is in the air. It is hard, if not impossible, to fight for position on corners or long crosses. This has to be the most frustrating aspect as when you do score a header off a corner, it seems as the game just gave it to you as opposed to fighting for it like you do while dribbling and passing along the ground.

The difficulty is notches above last year’s edition as well. The Pro mode will find you very frustrated, but like most sports games, after a multitude of losses you get to figure what works with your team. You can tweak your roster and customize your player’s runs too. This will help you level the playing field. Semi Pro though will still have you play some close competitive games.

New to FIFA is the “Be A Pro” mode. This mode is a fun aspect of the game where you control a single player. The camera focuses on that player and you are graded as to how well you play your position. Icons show you where to be, where you should defend and, of course, you can call for passes or be the assist man.

While the “Be A Pro” mode is a blast, the real meat of the game is it’s deep manager mode, returning from last year. As a manager, you control the fate of a team through season after season as you try to improve and guide your team and gain reputation for the team and yourself. This isn’t unlike the franchise mode from the Madden Football games. Finding the next great thing from Brazil when they are eighteen years old and bringing them to your squad is very satisfying.

Also back are the Challenge Mode and the Tournament Mode. The challenge mode is where you compete against various scenarios to earn some points to buy new kits, balls, cleats, and skills in the pro shop, while the Tournament Mode has you compete in the various tourneys throughout the world, or create your own custom tournament and play it.

Taking FIFA online, you will find that you can compete in an Interactive League where you play as your team in its real life schedule, or you and some friends can create an online league for yourselves and play it. FIFA is always better against a human opponent, so taking FIFA online is a blast. Xbox Live keeps track of your stats (good or not) for the world to see, or for you to brag to your friends about.

FIFA 08 is deep, immersive, and breathtakingly realistic and beautiful–the pinnacle of EA Sport’s attempts to bring soccer to the gamer. With its rich and varied play modes and its hundreds of teams and thousands of players added to the mix, FIFA 08 is the closest thing to perfect soccer.

Wii Photo Channel To Lose MP3 Support

November 14, 2007

News / by Chris Rasco Make a comment! / Tweet it!

One of our members, Pin, just pointed out a little note on the official Wii homepage that makes mention of upcoming changes to the Wii’s Photo Channel. Changes include adding support for MP4 AAC files at the expense of dropping MP3 support. These changes will be present in the 1.1 version of the Photo Channel and will be included with all new consoles sold starting in early December.

If you use your Wii for MP3s, then you may want to hold off on the upgrade as it can’t be undone. I personally didn’t know this functionality even existed so I won’t be crying, but some of you might.

Source: Wii.Nintendo.com

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