http://www.chooj.com Thu, 14 Jul 2011 06:34:01 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 http://www.chooj.com/mlb-front-office-manager-review/ http://www.chooj.com/mlb-front-office-manager-review/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:33:15 +0000 admin http://www.chooj.com/?p=180 By Brett Todd Posted Feb 4, 2009 4:41 pm PT An obtuse interface makes MLB Front Office Manager bewildering even to baseball-sim veterans. Sports management simulations have finally hit the big time. After years of indie obscurity, at least in North America, the genre has finally been hauled into the mainstream by EA Sports and 2K Sports. But don’t schedule a parade just yet. EA’s NFL Head Coach series has gone through some growing pains over the past couple of years, and now 2K Sports’ MLB Front Office Manager is off to a shaky start. The biggest problem with this latest attempt at taking management sims to the masses is a gamepad-oriented interface that makes even the most routine tasks about as irritating as trying to throw a curve ball while wearing oven mitts. Clunky controls and a near-total lack of feedback make it hard to feel like you’re in control of anything, let alone a $150-million big-league ballclub stocked with equally extravagant egos. The basic approach on display here, however, is time-tested. The game follows in the footsteps of independently developed baseball management sims like Out of the Park Baseball and Baseball Mogul by putting you in the shoes of a Major League general manager. You start off by naming your virtual head honcho, selecting from a few face and clothing options (are you Joe Suit or Johnny Polo Shirt?), and picking a personal background that determines your skill at specific duties. If you set yourself up as an ex-manager, for instance, teams on the field get a leadership boost. If you take the low road and choose the legal profession, you receive a helping hand when it comes to contract negotiations. As time goes by and you chalk up wins in the Majors, you gain experience points that can be spent on bulking up other skills. There is no option to work your way up to the Show from the minors, so following this brief character creation you simply pick a Major League team and grab the reins. You have pretty much total control over your club from this point on. Budgets, lineups, pitching rotations, allocation of scouting dollars, trades, and so forth are all under your watch, although you can flip over to automatic and let the CPU take care of the more mundane jobs. The team owner sets a player budget that serves as a de facto salary cap, but beyond that you’re free to do whatever you want. If you have a bad run, though, you can find yourself bounced to the curb and awaiting job offers from other clubs. Virtually all of the hardcore stuff serious baseball fans expect is present here, including the Rule 5 draft, player arbitration, and bidding on Japanese prospects. Careers can be played as straight single-player campaigns, as a fantasy variation that employs a rotisserie-style scoring system, or in online leagues with up to 30 players. Just about nobody seems to be playing the game online, however, so finding an open league for your team is tough. It’s still only the start of February, but the lack of players isn’t good news considering that real pitchers and catchers are reporting to MLB training camps in just a couple of weeks. This is also the first baseball game to hit stores in 2009, so you would expect a little more online excitement around it. At any rate, the foundation of MLB Front Office Manager is solid. It looks very good, as well. Big, bold letters and numbers splashed on the screen have a strong visual impact. This is a real plus in a genre where, at least on the PC, most of the competition comes from indie developers and looks more like spreadsheet programs for the office than something you would want to relax with at home. 2K Sports makes great use of its MLB license, loading the game up with a wealth of player photos and an attractive manager’s screen where you can watch the action unfold on the diamond and make calls from the dugout. Implementation is where everything falls apart. A good sports management sim needs to have a database at its heart. This sounds like a dreadfully dull way to present a game, but it is an absolute necessity in this genre since you need to be able to easily sift through stats and sort players by the numbers. Yet here you’re working with screens almost entirely taken up by visual chrome and player photos, save for a relatively small area filled with a couple of columns of players and the barest minimum of stats. Player lists are abbreviated so that you can see only eight names on the screen at once, forcing you to tediously scroll through multiple menus. Information is presented in an almost nonsensical manner. The player negotiation screen, for instance, covers just six core stats for batters and pitchers, like AVG and W-L. So you’re forced to go rummaging around elsewhere in the rosters to dig up thorough information regarding essential data, like at-bats and hits allowed. Vital data, such as overall player ratings and potential ratings, is often tucked away in layered information screens, necessitating a ridiculous amount of searching whenever you take on even the most rudimentary task. It’s tough just gathering the information needed when setting up pitching rotations. And it gets even worse when it’s time to sort through the dozens of players who need the protection of a 40-man roster prior to the Rule 5 draft every winter. The menu screens aren’t linked to one another either, meaning that you can’t zip from one screen to another. When you’re trying to re-sign a player, for instance, and he tells you he wants more years on his contract, you can’t move directly from the e-mail telling you about this demand to his negotiation screen. Instead, you have to scroll down the main menu to Transactions, open its submenu list, scroll down to Payroll, open it up, and then scroll down that list to the player’s name to pull up his contract offer page. It’s the same deal with CPU-offered trades. They are a bit more user-friendly in that you at least have the ability to instantly go to a comparison screen where you can check out the players on the block. But leaving this screen strands you back at the main menu, and you have to access your e-mail again to accept or reject the deal (which, incidentally, cannot be altered). Even the simplest roster-management tasks require five or six steps when they should necessitate just one. You spend more time chasing your tail than making baseball decisions. A lack of feedback makes MLB Front Office Manager even more confusing. Although you have Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane on tap providing tips about contracts, along with memos that keep important dates on the top of the screen so you don’t forget about something like the arbitration, much of what you do takes place in a vacuum. This is a particularly huge problem when it comes to handling players. While you’re kept well informed about looming deadlines, offers to free agents, to pending free agents, and to other teams during trade talks are dealt with through pretty much absolute silence. There is no back and forth with player agents or rival GMs, or any chance to counter an offer from another team. All you get is a flat acceptance or denial with an occasional personal observation, such as that the money being offered is “laughable.” Signings aren’t even properly noted in the e-mail screen that covers all league communications. You would think that losing Manny Ramirez to free agency would be enough of a big deal to the Dodgers to warrant more than an e-mail buried among all the other league news of the day. A successful signing never gets much press, either. If you ink somebody like K-Rod, you don’t even receive so much as a cheesy “I’m looking forward to playing for you this year!” blurb. The only indications that your bid has been accepted are a one-line e-mail, maybe a follow-up note saying that the fans are excited, and notice that the player in question has been added to the Pending Transactions list and must be assigned within 10 days or released. Finally, some of the decisions made by computer GMs are beyond bizarre. Every team in the game seems to be working under the same management philosophy. Each offseason, everybody appears to go after the same big-name free agents no matter what sort of budgetary restrictions they may be operating under. So this leads to ridiculous scenarios where poorer clubs like the Kansas City Royals waste $16 million a year on a washout like Jason Giambi, or the Cincinnati Reds dish off $21 million a year on Mark Teixeira. Sometimes these single big-name signings fill up nearly a third of a team’s overall payroll. Team budgets are also all over the place. The LA Dodgers start off with a budget of $111.6 million, while the cheapskate Toronto Blue Jays begin 2009 with a whopping $139.2 million. Somebody either hasn’t checked the lowly value of the Canadian dollar lately or has a hate on for Dodger blue. Some trades come from the dark side of the moon. While most are nondescript affairs shuffling minor leaguers around, the game hits you with a Bizarro World blockbuster on a regular basis, like when the Red Sox trade away Jonathan Papelbon during spring training for some guy named Nate McLouth. There may be some kind of bug in the game with Papelbon though, since the Sox seem to ditch him for a lower-rated nobody in the first spring training every time you start a career. MLB Front Office Manager needs a lot of work to be ready for the big leagues. The game offers an impressive amount of depth and great support for online leagues, especially for management-sim-deprived consolers. But playing it is such a chore that anyone seriously interested in such simulations will quickly move on to a more serious, if PC-only, effort like Out of the Park Baseball.]]> http://www.chooj.com/mlb-front-office-manager-review/feed/ 0 http://www.chooj.com/afro-samurai-review/ http://www.chooj.com/afro-samurai-review/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:29:05 +0000 admin http://www.chooj.com/?p=177 By Kevin VanOrd Posted Jan 27, 2009 9:18 pm PT This gory, gorgeous action game has plenty of flaws, but it will still satisfy your thirst for blood. Nariko in Heavenly Sword. Cloud Strife in Final Fantasy VII. And now Afro Samurai. These are the characters that you remember for their remarkable hairstyles, though Namco Bandai’s newest hack-and-slash action game offers more than just a curly coif that reaches for the heavens. It is an entertaining and thoroughly gory offering that contrasts sumptuous environments and crisp cel-shaded characters with shocking sights of slow-motion dismemberment. In Afro Samurai, you’ll chop ninjas in half and watch their disembodied torsos drag themselves along by the arms until they collapse in a pool of blood. Sights like these make for some wickedly satisfying combat, though in other areas, the game falls noticeably short of the standards set by genre predecessors such as Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry. Clumsy platforming and pacing inconsistencies keep Afro Samurai from reaching its potential, but the entertaining combat and dedication to its subject matter keep it from being just another forgettable button masher. If you’re familiar with the Afro Samurai anime, you’ll undoubtedly enjoy experiencing the events depicted in the series, as well as several that aren’t. If you’re new to the franchise, the most important thing to know is this: You are a big-haired, cigarette-chomping dude who knows a thing or two about blades. This is a revenge tale, and as Afro, the wearer of the Number Two headband, you’re out to defeat your father’s killer–the current Number One. Even if you’re not familiar with every character (the neurotic, potty-mouthed Ninja Ninja; the demure Okiku), the game’s vibe has a way of pulling you in. Split-screen sequences in and out of combat embrace the game’s anime theme; a fantastic hip-hop soundtrack tinged with Far Eastern harmonies enhances every slice and dice; and energetic voice acting from Samuel L. Jackson and other recognizable talents lends humor and gravitas in turn. Afro neophytes may not be drawn in by the plot, but they’ll find it hard to escape the lush but violent atmosphere. At the forefront of this vibe is Afro Samurai’s combat, which cribs from most games of its type. You can issue weak and strong attacks, kick your enemies around, and string these three basic moves into a variety of combos. You’ll spill a lot of blood using these simple actions, but if you really want to punish your acrobatic foes, it’s better to enter focus mode and watch the guts fly. With a pull of the trigger, you can slow down time, adjust your blade’s trajectory a bit, and lop heads, digits, or entire limbs off of your smack-talking enemies. You have to charge up focus mode by landing combos, but you will never go without the ability for long, and the resulting mix of old-fashioned button mashing and focus-powered slaughter is satisfying and fun. A few other moves help mix things up, such as sprint attacks, parrying, and bullet deflection (tricky to time properly but well worth the trouble). As long as you’re facing a typical crowd of ninjas and a miniboss or two, it’s all a drippy delight. Once you’re outside of combat (an all too frequent occurrence), Afro Samurai trips over its own feet, thanks largely to unpleasant platforming mechanics. The inelegant jumping sections are easy to stomach in small doses, but they’re strung into long and frustrating sequences late in the game–one of which you have to repeat if you die at the hands of the boss that appears afterward. You can wall-run here and there, and leap up and grab certain ledges, but as a rule, you can perform these moves only when the game wants you to, and they’re purely for getting from one spot to the next. You can’t string them into combat moves a la Ninja Gaiden, and rough animations make these acrobatics look as awkward as they feel. This leaves the burden of entertainment purely on the combat, and it’s usually up to the task. At its best, Afro Samurai keeps pushing you forward, throwing a few different types of foes at you and tossing in various objectives, such as throwing foes into an electrical apparatus or flipping a switch here and there. A few set-piece battles are also a total blast, particularly an exhilarating freefall sequence that might leave you breathless. A couple of boss battles are good fun as well, such as one versus an endlessly self-cloning rival, and the easy but moody final boss battle. Some levels, such as a protracted fight versus Kuma, are lighter on combat but succeed thanks to pensive ambience, entertaining scriptwriting, and pure artistic splendor. But as brutally beautiful as the combat is, it can’t support the weight of some inconsistent pacing and the less appealing boss fights. In some levels, you’ll wander around without encountering enemies for far too long; in a few others, nonstop waves of enemies will make you scream for variety that never comes. These issues come to a head in the penultimate level: The combat, normally a head rush, gets a bit tedious, the platforming takes center stage, and a few broken checkpoints might force you to replay sequences that you’ve already plowed through. The boss fights afterward aren’t much of an improvement, spamming some cheap moves rather than providing a true challenge. The camera certainly doesn’t help matters; it isn’t completely broken, but it has a tendency to get hung up behind objects in the smaller combat areas or jitter around if you move it into certain positions. A related oddity is the lack of camera customization. You can adjust the Y-axis settings but not the X axis, which means that you are forced to deal with inverted camera settings when moving it from side to side. If you prefer standard settings, this frustration will simply exacerbate the other camera issues. Nevertheless, Afro Samurai is an appealing game, and its visual style and pulsing soundtrack drives this success. The art style doesn’t rely on simple cel-shading, but rather infuses this familiar technique with soft colors, muted lighting, and crosshatched textures. It’s a unique look, and the gushers of rust-hued blood contrast nicely with the gently lit environments. When you enter focus mode, most of the environmental color washes away, making the gruesome cleaving of a bare-breasted ninja a bloody sight to behold. Jittery animations and other technical flaws can get in the way–particularly in the PlayStation 3 version, which suffers from minor but noticeable frame-rate drops, especially during split-screen incidents–but these rarely detract from the appealing visual design. Likewise, the occasionally lackluster sound effects can’t detract from a superb hip-hop soundtrack (inspired by, as opposed to composed by, rapper RZA) and fantastic, lively voice-overs. Its flaws are noticeable, but Afro Samurai is ultimately a lot of fun. It isn’t the next action classic, but it embraces its subject matter with vigor and delivers equally dynamic combat in spades. You can squeeze a good seven hours of enjoyment out of the experience the first time around, and hidden items and ensuing unlockables may drive you to return, if the fun and ferocious combat isn’t reason enough. In other words, it’s a problematic but ultimately worthwhile reason to don the Number Two headband and see that justice is done–and that Justice is done in.]]> http://www.chooj.com/afro-samurai-review/feed/ 0 http://www.chooj.com/skate-2-review/ http://www.chooj.com/skate-2-review/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:28:23 +0000 admin http://www.chooj.com/?p=175 By Justin Calvert Posted Jan 20, 2009 7:09 pm PT Skate 2 adds a number of new features to the Skate formula, but not all of them are winners. When Skate was released in 2007, it took a fresh new approach with a control scheme that made tricks feel more realistic and satisfying than in any previous game. Skate 2 refines this system somewhat and, impressively, adds a wealth of new features and tricks to its predecessor’s already sizable repertoire. Some needlessly frustrating challenges and annoying AI, as well as a couple of strange design choices (physics-enabled litter, anyone?) prevent this from being the great sequel that it should have been, but Skate 2 is still a lot of fun and bodes well for the future of series. Like the first game, Skate 2 has something resembling a story in Career mode, though that story takes a backseat after the first hour or two. Returning to New San Vanelona after a stint in prison, you discover that the fictional city, which was largely destroyed by some kind of natural disaster while you were inside, is barely recognizable from the first game. The facelift comes courtesy of the Mongocorp company, an organization with a penchant for structures that incorporate quarter pipes, ramps, and rails, and with a seemingly endless supply of anti-skater caps and clips (you learn how to remove these early on) with which to adorn them. Mongocorp’s security guards are quick to deal with any skaters who stray too close to the company’s private property, but the city isn’t anything like the police state that Skate 2’s intro movie would have you believe it is. Where the narrative is concerned, your goal in Skate 2 is to rebuild your career and to reclaim New San Vanelona for skaters in the process. Making a name for yourself as a skater involves entering races and trick competitions, going head-to-head with pros who have devised challenges for you, and doing photo shoots for magazines. Skate 2 is at its best when it affords you the freedom to perform whichever tricks you want to in pursuit of a high score or, as is the case in photo shoots, to adhere to fairly loose guidelines. Unfortunately, there are still a number of challenges in which you’re told exactly which tricks you must perform to succeed, the most common of which are games of S.K.A.T.E. against the numerous pro skaters who appear in the game. Given that none of the tricks in Skate 2 require complex controls to perform, the problem isn’t that performing specific tricks is difficult; it’s just that so many tricks are executed in very similar ways. The analog-stick controls aren’t precise enough for you to nail specific tricks every time, so you end up having to retry these challenges not because you bailed, but because you landed the wrong trick. The retry button also gets some use during photo shoots when, on rare occasions, you might be told that you’ve failed a challenge when clearly you’ve fulfilled all of its criteria. The opposite is also true, and being told that you’ve passed a photo shoot when all you did was fall off of the end of a ramp or skate idly past the photographer can make for some particularly mundane magazine shots. It’s conceivable that you’ll make it through the entire game without encountering this particular bug, but it happened to us on more than one occasion. Challenges are scattered around the city, and you can reach them either by warping to them instantly via a menu screen or by skating around the city with an annotated map to help you. The former is a useful option if you’re in a hurry to unlock pro skaters and licensed merchandise for use online, but the latter is definitely the better way to play because you inevitably find cool spots to skate as you explore, many with their own optional challenges. Being able to get off of your board means that you can reach areas such as the roofs of buildings that would otherwise be inaccessible, and although the on-foot controls feel clumsy, the ability to walk is nevertheless a welcome addition given the prevalence of flights of steps, curbs, and the like. Stepping off of your board isn’t good only for exploring and for negotiating steps; it’s also the only way to take advantage of one of Skate 2’s other new features: the ability to move objects around to create your own skate spots. This feature is used only rarely in challenges, which is just as well because though it’s a great idea in theory, it doesn’t add a lot to the game in practice. Moving large objects around is surprisingly easy; you stand next to the item that you want to move, hold down a shoulder button, and use the analogs to reposition and rotate it. The problem is that dumpsters, ramps, and grind rails that are light enough to be pulled and pushed around by a single skater are also light enough to be moved when skaters accidentally bump into them. After you take the time to perfectly align ramps and other items, it’s irritating that they get moved around so easily. There’s an option to reset them to their intended positions if you remembered to mark them, but an option to simply glue them in place so they don’t move at all would have been welcome. Skate 2 is grounded in realism, but isn’t afraid to ditch it in favor of good gameplay. This is great when it comes to activities such as repositioning large objects or performing insane tricks while leaping from the tops of buildings. Sometimes, though, the game’s realism can get in the way of you having a good time. For example, having pedestrians and traffic cross a line that you have to take to complete a challenge can get frustrating after repeated attempts. Furthermore, when the pedestrians start dropping physics-enabled litter, things can get so bad that you have to resort to picking up a quarter pipe and using it to sweep apples, bottles, and handbags out of the way. Other skaters can also be a problem, especially when you’re taking part in a challenge that requires a number of you to skate simultaneously in a relatively small space. For instance, at the start of a three-on-three contest in the Career mode, there’s a good chance that your two teammates will crash into one another at the start of every run. AI skaters are seemingly unaware of each other’s existence, and they certainly don’t pay any attention to what you’re doing. Collisions are avoidable if you keep an eye out for other skaters, but the camera is occasionally too busy showing you how good you look to show you where you’re headed. Collisions aren’t always enabled when you play online, but they’re also not a huge problem anyway because other players are a lot smarter than the AI guys. Online options in Skate 2 include a number of different competitive modes such as races, trick events, and contests to see who can hurt themselves the most when bailing. More interesting than any of those, though, are the Burnout Paradise-style co-op challenges that require everyone to work together toward a common goal. Some of these challenges, such as accumulating a high score within a time limit by adding all six players’ scores together, are quite easy because skilled players can carry anyone who’s struggling. Other challenges, such as having six players grind a rail simultaneously or accumulating a high score in a situation in which any one of them bailing or skating too slowly resets the counter to zero, can be tough even in talented company. There’s plenty of fun stuff to do while playing online, and the only drawback is that you’re confined to relatively small areas of the city rather than given the freedom to explore the whole map with your friends. Skate 2’s offline multiplayer offering is limited to a Party Play mode that supports up to four players on a single console. The Spot Battle (trick scores), Hall of Meat (nasty wipeout scores), and S.K.A.T.E. (copy each other’s tricks) games here are all turn-based, so four of you can even compete using the same controller. The lack of split-screen support might be disappointing for some, but simultaneous play would undoubtedly detract from rather than enhance the included Party Play games in any case. If you feel like taking a break from skating to flex your creative muscles, Skate 2 has got you covered. Not only can you create custom logos and graphics for your clothing and deck on the game’s official Web site and instantly export them to your game, but there’s also a decent video-editing tool that you can use to customize replays. It’s a shame that said replays are limited to around 30 seconds in length, but that’s plenty long enough to make some great-looking shorts to share online using the included gameplay, tripod, and “follow” camera options. Additional camera options and storage space for replays will purportedly be made available for download at a later date, which probably explains why there are no cool filters to play around with out of the box this time around. Skate 2 is a great-looking game. There are some low-res textures here and there, but the attention to detail throughout New San Vanelona is impressive, and the skaters animate incredibly well–at least until they step off of their boards. The audio is similarly impressive, with believable sound effects that seemingly take into account every conceivable wheel movement and different skating surface. An eclectic soundtrack of more than 50 songs occasionally offers a welcome distraction from the noises of cars honking and pedestrians yelling at you, with contributions from such bands as Black Sabbath, ELO, Judas Priest, Motorhead, Public Enemy, The Clash, and Wu-Tang Clan. Even if you’ve played a lot of Skate, there are definitely enough new features and improvements in Skate 2 to make it worth a look. The presentation is slick, the controls are great, and at times you really do feel like you’re skateboarding. It’s unfortunate that things get dragged down by the occasionally frustrating and buggy challenges; that walking on foot isn’t handled better; and that the game’s physics and artificial intelligence aren’t consistent and sometimes get in the way of the gameplay; because Skate 2 has so much to offer. Oh, and the bone-breaking bails that would kill you in real life are just another way to earn money here, so Skate 2 is not only a fun alternative to taking to the streets, it’s a safe one.]]> http://www.chooj.com/skate-2-review/feed/ 0 http://www.chooj.com/the-lord-of-the-rings-conquest-review/ http://www.chooj.com/the-lord-of-the-rings-conquest-review/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:27:28 +0000 admin http://www.chooj.com/?p=173 By Chris Watters Posted Jan 14, 2009 6:51 pm PT The Lord of the Rings: Conquest is an exciting and action-packed way to experience Middle-earth, provided that you have the patience and fortitude to shoulder a few frustrating burdens. The Lord of the Rings universe is full of memorable battles. No matter whether they are staged in a cramped burial chamber or on a vast, open plain, each clash of arms teeters between exultant triumph and agonizing defeat. In The Lord of the Rings: Conquest, you’ll experience your fair share of both. There are abundant thrills in both the good and evil campaigns, from attacking oliphaunts with catapults on the Pelennor Fields to burning the ringed ramparts of Minas Tirith. However, the frantic combat can often devolve into a button-mashing frenzy as you try to avoid the many varieties of death (some unpleasantly cheap) that await you on the battlefield. These frustrations may prove to be too high a cost of entry for many, but if you’re willing to brave the pitfalls (or are a big Lord of the Rings fan), then Conquest has many hours of satisfying and immersive action for you to enjoy. The best hours you’ll spend in Conquest will be in the campaigns. The War of the Ring campaign puts you on the ground in the most memorable battles from the books, taking a few detours from canon along the way. The well-crafted, immersive environments mirror those of the movies, from the filthy industrial pits of Isengard to the crumbling walls of Osgiliath, and the score draws on themes from the movies to make battles feel more dramatic. As fun as the War of the Ring campaign is, there’s an exciting novelty to playing as the forces of Mordor in the Rise of Sauron campaign. In this alternate storyline, the ring bearer fails in his mission and the once-ebbing tide of evil flows forth across Middle-earth, scouring all in its path. Cutscenes between levels use footage from the movies to craft a believable narrative around your dark exploits, and it’s morbidly thrilling to destroy beloved locations and heroes. The last level in particular is so delightfully sinister that you’ll likely find yourself cackling with malicious glee. During most of the battles, you’ll be fighting as one of the rank-and-file soldier classes. The warrior, the archer, the mage, and the scout all have their own unique strengths, weaknesses, and special attacks. From the mage’s firewall to the warrior’s whirlwind sweep, each class can perform a number of pleasingly powerful special attacks by drawing on energy gained from fighting and surviving. As deadly as each class can be, they are also vulnerable. An archer can easily mow down a warrior from a distance, but if the warrior manages to close the gap, there isn’t much that the archer can do to survive. Close combat is brutal and chaotic, and once you get knocked down, it can be very hard to get up. Because fights favor the soldier who lands the first strike, they often become frantic button mash-offs. This can be tense and exciting, but it also makes defeat bitterer than it ought to be. Working with other players is a great way to shore up your defenses, and The Lord of the Rings: Conquest features a cooperative campaign mode for two players, both locally and online. However, when you’re going it alone, you’ll find that not only is friendly AI unhelpful, but the enemy AI also sees you as public enemy number one. You’ll have to destroy the lion’s share of the enemy forces and be vigilant for attacks that can kill you instantly (such as fire arrows, backstabs, and anything a troll or ent does). You have a limited number of lives, and with so many ways to die, they can go quickly. Restarting the level is mildly tedious, but it can be a blessing in disguise when a mismatch between friendly and enemy spawn rates has you facing an insurmountable tide of foes. It can be frustrating to be a grunt, so it’s fortunate that The Lord of the Rings: Conquest offers many ways to make your battlefield presence more formidable. The simplest of these involve mounted weapons such as catapults and ballistas: powerful yet destructible machines of war that can be a blast while they last. You can also mount horses or wargs and ride through enemy ranks, sword a-swinging. Taking control of an ent or a troll lets you grab, smash, and throw enemies to your heart’s content, and rampaging around on a massive, lumbering oliphaunt is unwieldy fun. Occasionally throughout the campaign you will also get the chance to play as heroes, such as Gandalf, Aragorn, Sauron, and the balrog. These units are powerful versions of the normal classes with their own unique special attacks that let you wreak all sorts of havoc. There is a pleasing variety of heroes featured throughout the campaigns, enough that there is an entire online mode dedicated to hero play. Hero Deathmatch is just one of the 16-player online modes available in Conquest. There is also normal Team Deathmatch, as well as Lord of the Rings versions of Capture the Flag and Territories. Everyone chooses a soldier class to begin with, but the many maps feature the aforementioned machines and mounts to spice things up. When a team reaches a certain percentage of points needed for victory, the top-scoring player will be offered the opportunity to spawn as a hero. It can be tough to break a team’s momentum at that point, but success really depends on the players’ willingness to work together. Playing against human opponents is both more exciting and more frustrating. It’s more satisfying to work with human teammates to kill characters with human minds behind them, but those same human minds are more capable of getting the best of you with aggravating combat techniques. This makes online battles legitimately challenging, so you’ll want to polish your skills in the campaigns first. War is messy, and The Lord of the Rings: Conquest isn’t a clean gaming experience. Combat can be as exasperating as it is exhilarating, and playing solo can be a trying endeavor. Nevertheless, these pitfalls are somewhat compensated for by two epic campaigns that draw you into a rich world in new and exciting ways. Fans of this world will get the most out of The Lord of the Rings: Conquest, but gamers who are looking to battle in an epic setting and willing to weather some frustrating elements will find plenty of excitement on this journey through Middle-earth.]]> http://www.chooj.com/the-lord-of-the-rings-conquest-review/feed/ 0 http://www.chooj.com/acdc-live-rock-band-track-pack-review/ http://www.chooj.com/acdc-live-rock-band-track-pack-review/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:26:30 +0000 admin http://www.chooj.com/?p=171 By Luke Anderson Posted Dec 22, 2008 4:42 pm PT The AC/DC Live: Rock Band Track Pack is a short but sweet experience that leaves you feeling like you didn’t get a Whole Lotta Rosie. Rock groups don’t get much bigger than AC/DC. The Australian hard-rock act has churned out 17 studio albums over 30 years, including one of the highest-selling albums of all time, Back in Black. With that kind of success, it’s a no-brainer that Harmonix signed the Thunder From Down Under for an exclusive game all to themselves, following the inclusion of “Let There Be Rock” in Rock Band 2. However, though the songs on AC/DC Live sound and feel amazing to play, with only 18 songs (the setlist from the band’s famous Live at Donington DVD), no special features, and fewer modes than either Rock Band or Rock Band 2, this game feels very much like a dirty deed done dirt cheap. Despite bearing the name and soundtrack of AC/DC’s feted Donington Park gig, the game provides no visual indications that it has anything to do with either the band or the venue. While you’re playing, the screen is simply graced with generic Rock Band band members playing a generic stage. Since there are no Brian Johnson, Angus Young, or Malcolm Young character models to be seen, the only indicator you’re playing an AC/DC game is the band’s iconic sound. However, you do get some bang for your buck. The game sells for a budget price of £24.99 in the UK, or $29.92 exclusively at Wal-Mart in the US, and the tracklist should keep any AC/DC fan happy. It comes as no surprise that the audio quality is again top-notch, with the game receiving a remastered overhaul of the Live in Donington concert. Rock Band doesn’t get much better than being able to rock out to classics such as “You Shook Me All Night Long,” “Back in Black,” “Thunderstruck,” “Highway to Hell,” and “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You).” Regardless of whether you’re assigned to lead guitar, vocals, drums, or bass, the result should be a wide grin on your face. The highlight for many fans will no doubt be playing some classic guitar riffs as Angus, although if you’re up for some screaming, Brian Johnson’s vocal part is also a pleasurable–albeit raspy–experience. Brilliant beats and self-indulgent drum fills make fan-favourite tracks like “T.N.T.” and “Thunderstruck” must-plays and provide a truly visceral drumming experience. Unfortunately, you can’t play Malcolm Young’s rhythm-guitar parts, which is a disappointment considering how instrumental he is to the band. Instead, as with Rock Band itself, you’ll have to settle for bass if you’re not on lead, vocals, or drums. Because it’s based on a live performance, AC/DC Live also has some of the most ridiculously long ending bonuses seen, most noticeably in “Let There Be Rock.” There’s the chance to rack up some serious points (and some aching muscles) in the dying moments of a song. AC/DC Live doesn’t feature its own dedicated World Tour or online modes, but by redeeming a free one-time code printed on the back of the manual you can export and use all 18 tracks in your Rock Band or Rock Band 2 career and multiplayer modes just as you do current DLC. AC/DC Live’s lower price and the ability to export songs to other Rock Band games makes up in part for the lack of content and shorter experience. However, it still feels like this game has squandered an opportunity to capitalise on the rich history that an iconic band such as AC/DC has, as well as the specific content offered by the AC/DC Live branding, given the amount of material on the attendant DVD. If you’re a fan, you’ll certainly get some thrills out of it, but it’s not the definitive experience that it could have been, and casual fans of AC/DC and Rock Band will find that their money may be better spent elsewhere.]]> http://www.chooj.com/acdc-live-rock-band-track-pack-review/feed/ 0 http://www.chooj.com/rise-of-the-argonauts-review/ http://www.chooj.com/rise-of-the-argonauts-review/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:25:47 +0000 admin http://www.chooj.com/?p=169 By Justin Calvert Posted Dec 18, 2008 6:14 pm PT Jason spends too much time talking and not nearly enough time fighting in this Greek mythology-inspired action-RPG. Loosely based on the same Greek myth that inspired the 1963 movie Jason and the Argonauts, Rise of the Argonauts is an action-oriented role-playing game in which you assume the role of King Jason of Iolcus and go in search of the legendary Golden Fleece. All manner of monsters stand between you and your prize, and doing battle with them is a lot of fun. The same can’t be said for all of the time you have to spend wandering around and talking to other characters, unfortunately, and the wildly inconsistent frame rate makes even the stop-motion special effects in the aforementioned movie look silky smooth by comparison. Rise of the Argonauts gets off to a shaky start. The assassination of Jason’s bride on their wedding day in the intro sequence ensure that the story is instantly compelling, but poor voice acting, awkward camera angles, questionable animation (Jason negotiating stairs is a must-see for all the wrong reasons), and numerous visual quirks waste no time in conspiring against it. Furthermore, there’s not much combat early on, so much of your time is spent trying to navigate Jason’s labyrinthine palace and conversing with guards who, save for their different-colored uniforms, all look identical. Iolcus, like the handful of other locations you’ll visit after acquiring the Argo, affords very few opportunities for exploration, but it still manages to be confusing enough in its design that you need to refer to the crudely drawn map to locate mission objectives in a timely fashion. The high point of Rise of the Argonauts is undoubtedly the combat; Jason is skilled in the use of swords, spears, and maces, and he carries one of each as well as a shield at all times. The controls are uncomplicated and responsive, and it’s good that they’re the same no matter which weapon you’re wielding, because you’re encouraged to switch between them on the fly. None of the enemies are particularly intelligent, but they’re varied enough that you need to employ different weapons and strategies to get the better of them. Your spear can be used to keep overly aggressive enemies at a distance, while your mace is a good choice for destroying the shields of enemies attempting to hide behind them, for example. Putting your own indestructible shield to good use is crucial early on, but as you progress you become much more powerful and can spend more time on the offensive. Interestingly, you need to go into the options menu if you want any kind of heads-up display for your health during combat. By default, you’re supposed to look for visual clues such as blood on the clothing of Jason and his allies to know when they’re in trouble, but the combat is so fast-paced that this isn’t always possible. Adding the HUD makes it much easier to know when Jason’s health is low, though it’s not always important because, in keeping with his mythological status, he’s a tough guy to keep down. When your health drops to zero you don’t die; rather, you enter a “state of grace” in which the screen blurs and you have 10 seconds or so to avoid taking any more damage before you regenerate around half of your health. You’ll die if you sustain a single hit during that time, but there are very few enemies who can keep up as you frantically run and roll around. There are a number of ways in which you become a more formidable fighter as the story progresses. You’ll be joined by a handful of allies who will fight alongside you two at a time, you’ll be able to add more powerful weapons and armor to your arsenal, and you’ll learn new abilities by gaining favor with the gods Ares, Apollo, Athena, and Hermes. Each of the four gods has a skill tree composed of around 25 different “aspects” arranged into tiers so that more powerful ones become available only late in the game. The aspects vary a great deal and include both passive abilities and god powers that must be triggered manually in combat. Passive abilities include things like regenerating health anytime you kill an enemy, doing more damage to shields, and making your allies more powerful. God powers, which are fun but rarely needed outside of the most challenging difficulty mode, include temporary effects such as increased damage, explosions, and the ability to turn enemies into stone. To purchase any given aspect you need to earn enough favor with the appropriate god to unlock it, which can be an interesting challenge in itself. The most obvious way to earn favor with gods is by dedicating to them any deeds you’ve accomplished. You can do this at shrines scattered throughout the world or, less elegantly, via an option in the pause menu. When you dedicate a deed to one of the gods, you earn an amount of favor proportional to the scale of your accomplishment. Settling a dispute among two traders is unlikely to impress in the same way that lopping off the heads of 25 enemies is, for example. The second way to curry favor with a god is by selecting dialogue choices that are clearly labeled as being appreciated by them. This can make the act of choosing dialogue a mechanical one if you care more about pleasing a specific god than you do about your interaction with whomever you’re talking to, but the conversations feel so unnatural anyway that this is as good a way as any to get through them quickly. It’s unfortunate that so much of your time in Rise of the Argonauts is spent in conversation, because much of the dialogue is poorly written and the voice acting is even worse. It’s conceivable that one is the victim of the other, but certainly neither deserves any credit for keeping the story compelling. Even on the rare occasions that the script and the actors work well together, poor sound design results in unnatural pauses and in volume levels that compete with background noise or have you reaching for your TV remote. The lack of believable expressions on characters’ faces doesn’t help matters, nor do the load screens that frequently appear at the most inopportune times–occasionally so quickly after a piece of dialogue that there’s some doubt as to whether or not the character talking was even allowed to finish. To say that Rise of the Argonauts has pacing issues would be an understatement of Olympian proportions; so much of your time is spent running around and talking to people that combat feels like a rare treat rather than a focus of the game. It’s a real shame that getting to the end of this adventure is as much a test of patience as it is a test of skill, because the combat gets increasingly satisfying as your arsenal of moves and equipment grows. It’s true that only boss encounters will pose any real challenge on the default difficulty setting toward the end, but by then that feels appropriate because you’re wielding godlike weapons and powers that can literally call down lightning from the heavens. With a greater emphasis on combat and fewer technical shortcomings, Rise of the Argonauts could have been easy to recommend. As it is, though, this is a great story poorly told.]]> http://www.chooj.com/rise-of-the-argonauts-review/feed/ 0 http://www.chooj.com/estroy-all-humans-path-of-the-furon-review/ http://www.chooj.com/estroy-all-humans-path-of-the-furon-review/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:25:09 +0000 admin http://www.chooj.com/?p=167 By Aaron Thomas Posted Dec 9, 2008 5:43 pm PT If you enjoy tedious objectives, racially insensitive humor, and ugly graphics, the latest Destroy All Humans is right up your alley. Developer Sandbox Games was shut down by THQ nearly a full month before Destroy All Humans: Path of the Furon hit retail shelves, and the PlayStation 3 version of the game was canceled shortly thereafter. After a short time with the Xbox 360 version of the game you’ll probably wish THQ had put it out of its misery, too. The game’s visuals are dated, and its insensitive, stereotypical portrayal of the Chinese (among other ethnicities) is appalling. Add in repetitive objectives and played-out humor and there’s no reason to waste your time with this shoddy excuse for a game. As in previous DAH games, you play as Crypto, a curmudgeonly, smart-alecky alien with a dislike for the human race. The game takes place in the 1970s, and Crypto has his hands full dealing with the Mob in what’s supposed to be Las Vegas. After a few unexpected attackers try to off him, he realizes someone or something other than the Mob wants him out of the way. Crypto sets off across five open-world environments that include faux Vegas, a poor man’s Hollywood, and a pseudo China, among others. While you’re free to run or hover around the game’s large worlds, there’s not a whole lot that’s exciting to do. If you’re in your flying saucer you can destroy buildings, but rather than them crumbling to the ground after a huge explosion, they melt like a stick of butter left in the hot sun. You can zap humans and bad guys with a number of weapons including the not-funny-anymore anal probe. You can take control of peoples’ bodies, make them dance, and use telekinesis to grab and throw them, but you’re best off sticking with your default weapon and powering it up with the DNA you earn for finishing missions. Likewise, the many weapon options available to you while in your flying saucer are generally less useful than the default ray. You might have a bit of fun messing around with a few of the tools of destruction made available to you, but the large number of options is little more than a novelty. It feels that rather than come up with interesting objectives, the developer made a bunch of weapons and occasionally forces you to use them in artificially constrained ways. Rather than allowing you to land your saucer anywhere, the game gives you only a few landing spots, most of which have to be unlocked by playing a minigame, which in turn forces you to use a gun or skill you likely wouldn’t use. This is so contrived that the game even makes a joke about it. Yes, making the people who were foolish enough to buy your game perform unnecessary, cumbersome tasks is really funny. Mission objectives start off simple: shoot some guys, protect someone or something, blow up a building, use telekinesis to carry a person to a different location, and so on. As you progress, the game will lengthen these objectives and then chain them together. This means that halfway through the game–and for the rest of the game–you’ll be suffering through long missions with objectives you’ve long since tired of. The first few Destroy All Humans were amusing and relied heavily on parody and tongue-in-cheek dialogue, but Crypto’s act has grown old. He rarely shuts up, and his incessant yapping and bickering grates the nerves. Thankfully, mission objectives are usually clearly displayed, so there’s no penalty for skipping the game’s painfully frequent and agonizingly long cutscenes. It’s bad enough that the cutscenes are frequent and the dialogue constant; what’s worse is that much of the game’s humor relies on racial stereotypes. The dialogue and accents of many of the characters and citizens in the game’s Chinese levels might have been “acceptable” 30 or 40 years ago, but today they’re downright offensive and reason enough to avoid this game. Path of Furon’s visuals are also offensive, but in a different way. The game proudly proclaims to use the Unreal Engine, but you’d be hard-pressed to see the results in the finished product. Perhaps they licensed the original Unreal Engine and not Unreal 3. There’s not much of the game that looks like it belongs on the Xbox 360. The frame rate is mediocre at best, textures are low-res, huge buildings will pop in right in front of you, and the backgrounds look blurry, as if there were Vaseline on the lens. It gets worse: many of the cutscenes have no lip-synching, camera transitions during cutscenes (which often feel unfinished) are choppy, characters are poorly animated, citizens skate around the city, and explosions are pitiful. Even Crypto looks terrible. A few multiplayer minigames are available, but they add no value to this already miserable game. If you’ve somehow stuck with this tired series since its inception, you’ll probably have some fun with Destroy All Humans: Path of the Furon, but it offers nothing to anyone with a reasonable amount of taste.]]> http://www.chooj.com/estroy-all-humans-path-of-the-furon-review/feed/ 0 http://www.chooj.com/bolt-review/ http://www.chooj.com/bolt-review/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:24:29 +0000 admin http://www.chooj.com/?p=165 By Joe Dodson Posted Dec 5, 2008 7:22 pm PT Bolt is an action platformer that benefits from its super ambitions, even if it doesn’t completely live up to them. Bolt doesn’t know it’s just a movie-licensed game. Sure, it has a few of the telltale weaknesses: the plot is thin and the game gets repetitive toward the end. But just as Bolt the dog confounds your expectations in the film by becoming the hero you thought he wasn’t, so too does the game overcome its licensed nature. Though this action platformer may be a lesser offering than many other games on shelves this holiday season, Bolt is more than a cash-in. Bolt’s premise is perfect. Rather than trying to jam square-peg game mechanics into round-hole movie scenes, Bolt takes place completely outside of the movie’s storyline. Or rather, it takes place within the context of the movie that Bolt and Penny star in–the one that makes him think he’s a superdog. It’s a great idea, so it’s too bad that the action movie he and Penny star in is really, really boring. The gist is that Dr. Calico is forcing Penny’s dad to build a weapon, so Bolt and Penny are trying to save the day, and the dad. There’s no story arc, just chapter after chapter of Dr. Calico narrowly escaping your clutches. And there’s almost no dialogue. Bolt (the superdog, mind you) can’t speak. Sure, he can shoot lasers out of his eyes, but he can’t utter a single syllable. The result is a very long, quiet spin cycle of dialogue that begins with “There he is! Get him!” and ends with “He got away! After him, Bolt!” Fortunately, the “Get him!” parts are pretty good, and so are the “After him!” bits. You play as both Bolt and Penny, though the two aren’t interchangeable. For the most part, you sneak into an evil lair as Penny, hack a computer or two, kill a bad guy, and then get caught. Penny’s sequences mainly involve platforming and puzzle-solving with her nifty wheelbar. This lets her travel along pipes and up crevices, and thanks to her handy Vision mode, she always knows where to go next. She can also hack into computers by playing a Geometry Wars-like minigame that is hectic and kinda fun. More than anything, though, Penny’s sequences serve as palate cleansers between Bolt’s taxing battles. In a fight, Bolt has light and strong attacks (he hovers and hurls his whole body into an enemy), several super attacks, and then a Super mode that can clear a whole room. Regular foes can be felled with regular light and heavy attack chains, and killing them gives you energy, which you can turn around and spend on super attacks for stronger villains. Meanwhile, all of your attacks feed into a combo counter, which in turn charges up your Super mode meter. At first, you’ll have a good time just bouncing back and forth between enemies, shooting one with lasers here, and super barking at a group there. But this whole system comes together toward the middle of the game, as the difficulty really ramps up and you have to fight waves of enemies. You’ll bounce off the easy ones, use supers to slay the tough ones, and then unleash your Super mode to completely annihilate the next wave. The only issue with this is the fact that the difficulty peaks too early. As soon as you’ve won a fight against three whip girls and two mine guys in the middle of the game, it’s hard to take a batch of regular enemies seriously, and yet you’ll still have thousands of them ahead of you. So though the combat is fun, it can get pretty repetitive, and that’s where the game’s decent pacing comes into play. For the most part, right when you feel like you’d rather not fight another ninja girl, the game wisely switches to a Penny sequence. This exchange, with a few special events thrown in, keeps things rolling for about eight hours. Unfortunately, the game is longer than that, and it really runs out of tricks toward the end. If you finish it, you probably won’t want to replay it (it’s long enough the first time), and the only extras to really fool around with are a bunch of the shooter minigame levels. Though there are no trophies in the PS3 version, there are lots of achievements in the Xbox 360 version, and some of them even offer tips. For instance, if you get killed by a mine thrower, the achievement you get will slyly reveal the secret to beating him. The graphics are strong from start to finish. Most stages in the game have beautiful, soft visuals, and others feature epic vistas. The Xbox 360 version seems to look a little bit better than the PS3 version, and it’s definitely more stable. The PS3 version failed to execute a scripted event about 15 minutes in, while the 360 version never had a problem like that. The music was never good or bad, and was only occasionally noticeable. Lastly, the voice acting was fine, even though the dialogue itself was incredibly limited and infrequent. Bolt does several things right, and about as many things wrong. It has great graphics and genuinely entertaining mechanics, and it can keep you entertained for hours. On the other paw, it gets pretty repetitive, it has no storyline, and it isn’t a very good value. So just like Bolt the dog, Bolt the game is somewhere between super and ordinary, but likeable all the same.]]> http://www.chooj.com/bolt-review/feed/ 0 http://www.chooj.com/sonic-unleashed-review/ http://www.chooj.com/sonic-unleashed-review/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:23:49 +0000 admin http://www.chooj.com/?p=163 By Tom Mc Shea Posted Dec 5, 2008 5:49 pm PT Terrible level design, unresponsive controls, and a poor camera are just the beginning of the problems in this awful adventure. Every new Sonic release carries a hope that Sega’s blue hedgehog will be able to regain the form that made him a star in the early ’90s. And most every venture into the third dimension has resulted in various degrees of failure. Sonic Unleashed was supposed to provide the unrelenting speed fans have been clamoring for, and it does finally offer a healthy dose of turbo-charged levels to burn through. Unfortunately, even with Sonic’s trademark speed finally on full display, Unleashed lacks one very important element: fun. The imprecise platforming, absentminded camera, and poor level design make Sonic’s levels an unplayable mess, while his baffling transformation into lumbering werehog comes with a whole new slew of problems. Put simply, there is no reason to play Sonic Unleashed. The story begins with Dr. Eggman shooting the world with a giant ray gun. Predictably, the planet breaks apart, but there is an unexpected side effect as well. Innocuous Sonic gets transformed into a giant, mean-looking creature called a werehog. This abomination emerges only when the sun goes down, and the game allows you to play stages during the day and at night to make full use of your dual personalities. Even though there are an equal number of hedgehog and werehog stages, most of your time in Sonic Unleashed will be spent at night, since the arduous combat levels take far longer to complete than the sprint-to-the-finish-line hedgehog races. The werehog levels are extremely tedious. The levels are evenly divided between platforming and fighting, but both elements offer more frustration than excitement. Even though you can unlock more combos as you progress through the journey, your combat strategy never evolves beyond mindlessly tapping two attack buttons with an occasional jump thrown in for good measure. You’re given a shield for when things get too hectic, but it’s hardly ever necessary. The enemies are stupid, blithely standing around until you take the fight to them, and their lack of variety becomes oppressively obvious after just a few hours. You’ll be given a few checkpoints in each level, but these are awkwardly placed, so you’ll have to repeatedly mash through the same battalion of enemies if you can’t properly navigate the woeful platforming sections. As a werehog you’re equipped with stretchable arms and the ability to grab onto ledges. This should come in handy when venturing around these stages, but a few arbitrary restrictions have been tossed in to make even simple navigation annoying. First of all, you can only grab onto certain surfaces. If you mistime a jump, you often won’t be able to grab a nearby ledge to save yourself, resulting in a quick death. Second, your arms’ stretchiness varies at random, so while it may be possible to grab a ledge from a certain distance at one point, from that same distance later on in the level, you’ll find your reach stunted. The camera also hinders your progress. You are given free control over your view when standing in the middle of a large plot of land. But when placed on a precarious walkway where a perfect line of sight is necessary, your camera control will be severely restricted, allowing only slight shifts to either side of your character. Because the punishment system is so immediate and severe (falling in water results in instant death), these miscues will quickly steal away your precious lives, leaving only frustration in their wake. The Sonic levels don’t fare any better than the lousy werehog parts. Your goal is to run as quickly as possible to the finish line, but the camera is rarely able to give you an optimal view and the controls are far too loose to provide the pinpoint accuracy you’ll need. These technical problems mean you’ll have to memorize stages before you can breeze through them. The game is not responsive enough to allow you to consistently avoid obstacles the first time you encounter them, so you’ll find yourself repeatedly plowing headfirst into spikes and falling down countless bottomless pits before you finally know where each obstacle lays ahead of time. Extra lives–something you’re usually happy to see in a game–actually serve as a warning in Sonic Unleashed. Particularly cheap sections are often adorned by these markers, ensuring you can play them repeatedly to memorize their cruel layout and hope luck is on your side. Even after you commit these stages to memory, though, you’ll still die over and over again because of the unresponsive controls. A few levels take place on the water, making you sprint at top speeds to keep from sinking below the surface. Moving laterally while blazing through waves is sluggish, but you’ll still have to swerve to and fro to complete the missions. In other stages, you’ll have to perform wall jumps to succeed. This ability only works on certain surfaces, but even when you find an ideal place to ricochet from, the finicky timing means you’ll try and fail until you do it perfectly. Certain sections require you to slow down and perform precise jumps across tiny platforms. The controls are built for speed, though, so a slight push on the analog stick will send Sonic sprinting to his death. The game also tosses in quicktime events at random moments. Some of these will catapult you to different parts of the level, but other times you’ll be hit with an instant death if you can’t meet their strict deadlines. Even the between-stage hub is a total drag. Though the professor is supposed to guide you to the next goal, he does little more than point you in a general direction and send you on your way. You’ll have to talk to specific citizens to open some levels, and trying to track down the one person with pertinent information is an out-of-place burden. The level entrances are often hidden in random locations and hunting them down can be maddening. Worse, when you finally find one of these entrances, you’ll often be kept from entering it until you collect a certain number of moon and sun pieces from previous levels. Collecting items in platformers is expected, but the loose controls and obstinate camera make searching for missing pieces grueling. The boss fights follow the theme of the other elements in Sonic Unleashed. These battles are long and tedious, forcing you to play the waiting game for minutes on end until the giant beasts open themselves up for attack. The sheer length of these ordeals makes the fights far more aggravating than they would otherwise be. The attack patterns are easy to learn, so you’ll spend more time standing around waiting for them to let their guard down than actually attacking them. Even worse, their attack patterns don’t drastically change through the fight, so you’ll be repeating the same basic dodge maneuvers until you can finally vanquish these oversized annoyances. The lone bright spot in this otherwise painful mess are some cheery, bright visuals. The graphics are far from cutting-edge, but the frame rate stays high even when you’re sprinting at top speeds, and the levels are pleasantly colorful. The game is at its best when your interaction with it is minimal and you’re able to simply admire the view. The camera adjusts for cinematic impact while you tear through loops and grind rails as Sonic, and though you’re doing little more than pushing right on the analog stick during these sections, it is entertaining to watch Sonic swoop by. It’s sad that Sonic Unleashed is only enjoyable during the moments when you’re hardly in control of it. Pretty pictures aren’t enough to make up for the miserable gameplay. Almost nothing else in this game even reaches the level of mediocrity. The Sonic levels are poorly laid out and have unresponsive controls, the werehog portions have monotonous combat and a wonky camera, and even the hub world is so difficult to navigate, you’ll spend way too much time searching for the next level. There just isn’t any fun to be had in Sonic Unleashed.]]> http://www.chooj.com/sonic-unleashed-review/feed/ 0 http://www.chooj.com/wwe-smackdown-vs-raw-2009-review/ http://www.chooj.com/wwe-smackdown-vs-raw-2009-review/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:22:39 +0000 admin http://www.chooj.com/?p=161 By Chris Watters Posted Dec 3, 2008 7:36 pm PT SmackDown vs. Raw 2009 successfully returns to the fundamentals of realistic WWE action and impressive creation tools. In the WWE, it’s not uncommon for seemingly vanquished superstars to return at random, handing out fresh beatdowns and earning back their former glory. After a disappointing showing last year, THQ’s long-running SmackDown vs. Raw series has returned to the ring, having spent the year slimming down and focusing on its core strengths. The work has paid off: a lot of extraneous elements have been removed, the creation toolset is better than ever, and there are two modes that offer satisfying single-player arcs. Though it is still hampered by a number of lingering issues, WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009 manages to recapture some of the glory of its younger years. The most notable improvements are in the single-player realm. The lackluster 24/7 mode has been ditched in favor of a lengthy Career mode and the scripted Road to Wrestlemania. In the Career mode, you choose a superstar (existing or created) and enter a bracket to make a bid for the title belt. Each bracket has five opponents including the current champion, and you’ll have to earn stars by winning matches in order to get a shot at the title. You win up to five stars for each match by earning points in three areas: match results, technical, and excitement. These categories encourage you to get into the WWE superstar mindset by rewarding you for both pummeling and mocking your opponent. At the end of each match your attributes will increase and your health will replenish based on how the match went–no micromanagement here. You’ll also earn amusing awards for things like striking your opponent 35 times or breaking a barbed-wire-wrapped plank over his or her back. It only takes a handful of successful matches to earn you a title shot, which is great because it keeps your career moving along at a good clip. This action-packed Career mode is the perfect complement to the Create A Superstar mode, and winning belt after belt as you bulk up your created character is satisfying and fun. The other single-player mode, Road to Wrestlemania, features six unique story arcs that let you play as WWE superstars like The Undertaker or John Cena and defeat numerous foes (and a few nemeses) on your quest for Wrestlemania glory. Matches are interspersed with story scenes packed with typical WWE action and voiced by actual WWE superstars, so fans of outrageous melodrama will be well pleased. In keeping with traditional SmackDown vs. Raw strengths, the superstar models, entrances, and arenas are all excellent. While the character animations are good (despite occasional clipping problems), the wrestlers still lack fluidity when maneuvering around the ring. This feels like a result of staying too true to the source material: though WWE wrestlers do often move slowly, it’s not very exciting to actually plod around the ring in a video game. The audio only further detracts from the excitement factor. Four-hundred-pound men hit the mat with all the impact of a child shutting a car door, and the strongest punches sound like a raw chicken breast being dropped on the floor. It dampens the supposedly hard-hitting action, and while the once-dismal announcers from years past have been improved quite a bit, the sound design is in serious need of a shot in the arm. Despite how it may sound, the action is indeed hard-hitting. It’s easy to perform powerful moves using the analog stick and a few buttons, and the breadth of things you can do in and out of the ring is impressive. From removing the turnbuckle cover to slamming your opponent through a burning table, there’s no shortage of satisfying ways to deal damage. Specific match types have their own nasty additions, from rubbing your opponent’s face against the elimination chamber to the powerful hot tag, which allows a tag team partner to build up momentum so that, when tagged in, he or she will get the quicktime chance to unleash two unblockable attacks followed by a finisher. Enabling such a wide variety of moves is one of SmackDown vs. Raw 2009’s chief strengths. Like previous games in the series, it too relies on relative position to increase your repertoire, and your wrestler is still prone to miscues as a result. However, missing a move because you aren’t quite in the correct position is less frustrating than missing one because your opponent is in an uninterruptible animation. This usually crops up in matches with three or more players, when one player is performing a move on another. In these realistic-to-a-fault situations you get a good feeling for just how exciting it is to stand passively aside while other wrestlers battle it out. In addition to the Career and Road to Wrestlemania modes, the competent AI and unique wrestler abilities make playing single-player much more appealing in SmackDown vs. Raw 2009. No longer content to stand around drooling, computer opponents will actively attack you, tag their partners (you included), and use environmental elements reasonably well. Though the Road to Wrestlemania and early stages of the Career mode will seem easy to experienced players, it won’t feel like you’re playing against brainless apes. Last year’s fighting style system has been removed, and in its place are unique wrestler abilities that existing superstars have and created superstars can earn. The effects range from attribute boosts (able to remove belt in ladder match faster) to enhanced abilities (can regenerate a small amount of health). While these abilities aren’t particularly powerful, they can come in handy during tight matches. While you might not have tight matches against the computer, you are sure to find tough competition online. You can use SmackDown, Raw, ECW or created superstars as you face off in ranked or unranked play in any of the match types that support one to four players (six-man matches and royal rumbles only available locally). Against tougher players, any miscues due to bad position, odd animation, or the semi-frequent lag are likely to cost you dearly, and once your opponent has you on the ropes you’ll be hard-pressed to reverse your way out of it. The best new online feature in WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009 is the WWE Highlight Reel. Anyone can capture clips from their matches, edit them together using the robust toolset, and then upload their clip or screenshots for all to view and rate. Those willing to invest some time will be able to create some pretty excellent stuff, as evidenced by the existing image of Freddy fighting Jason in a flaming ring and video of Obama giving McCain the Rock Bottom. Of course, these hilarious videos wouldn’t be possible without the still-impressive Create A Superstar tool. Once again, with a little time and patience, you can create almost anyone you like, from famous celebrities to hideous abominations. You can then customize your character’s move set to craft their fighting style, choreograph their ring entrance, and even create a finisher to decide how he or she (or it) will finish opponents off. The Create A Finisher tool allows you choose from a huge list of move parts and chain up to 10 of them together to create a finisher as quick and brutal or as long and painful as you want. You’ll get a constantly updating preview of the move while you design it so you can easily tweak it to your liking. It’s really fun just to experiment with all the different move combinations, and this feature really rounds off a formidable suite of customization tools. WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009 benefits greatly by restraining its scope. You can still edit rosters in Career mode, but other than that the menu-heavy GM mode has been fully dropped. The result is a game completely focused on action, and on letting you customize and record that action. While some elements still need improvement, SmackDown vs. Raw 2009 is ultimately successful because it embraces the dramatic fights and outrageous showmanship that are the heart and soul of the WWE.]]> http://www.chooj.com/wwe-smackdown-vs-raw-2009-review/feed/ 0