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Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3

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Could anyone possibly dislike a game that has Frankenfurter travel back in time and kill Einstein, then return to his time to find his Russia gloriously populated by hot, busty women in tight plastic outfits, only to be thwarted by an ex-MTV soft porn star, a host of psionic school girls and the Hoff? No, I thought not.

This is Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, the third sequel to the prequel of the Command and Conquer franchise… Errr, yes, it’s rather confusing if you don’t know the history of the games, but the basic premise is the Nazi’s never rose to power in Germany, allowing Russia to dominate Europe, much to the dismay of the Allies. In the future, the Russians become the Brotherhood of Nod, and the Allies the GDF which is what Command and Conquer deals with. The Red Alert series deals with the Russians and the Allies. Simple, right? Well, to make things a bit more complicated, Red Alert 3 introduces a new faction, the Japanese, who have mech robots and the aforementioned psionic schoolgirls.

But it doesn’t really matter if you don’t know the history of the franchise, as the premise of this edition is explained in glorious full action cutscenes throughout the game. Featuring real actors including J. K Simmons, Jenny McCarthy, Gerge Takei, David Hasslehoff and Tim Curry, these are worth the price of entry alone. Sure, it’s B-Grade, but it’s the best kind of B-Grade, being funny and entertaining, and they really set the vibe of the game incredibly well.

The game never takes itself too seriously, and gameplay wise is pretty much a traditional Real Time Strategy – it’s faster paced and relies a more on the rock/paper/scissor dynamic than being a matter of building your forces and “zerg” rushing your opponent. The xbox controller does it’s best to match a mouse and keyboard, although I did find myself wishing for them on more than a few occasions, but the online play is smoother than PC could ever be.

If you’ve liked the previous Red Alert games, then this is pretty much the same, just with more to see and do. If you’ve never played these games, you’re missing out on some of the best B-Grade action this side of the 90s.

3.5 Stars

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Battlefield 2: Modern Combat

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The world of PC shooters was set alight by the introduction of Battlefield 1942. A massive amount of people could play an engaging shooting game that was fast, furious, and full of action. It shirked the realism aspect of other WWII games out at the time, and allowed you to fly a plane, drive a tank, then get out and shoot like a soldier. When you died, you only had to wait a few seconds before spawning into another soldier.

When Battlefield 2 arrived, its setting was placed in a more modern context, and new soldier roles allowed you to play a much more tactical game, but still kept the arcade fun of the original. Now that experience comes to Xbox, however the Xbox version of Battlefield 2: Modern Combat shouldn’t be compared to its PC counterpart, as DICE designed B2:MC for the Xbox from the ground up. It’s a similarly intense action shooter, yet provides a different and exciting gameplay experience from the PC version.

One aspect of B2:MC that is different is the single player campaign. Like many war games, you’re tasked with completing certain missions in campaign style. B2:MC is a little different to most in that it places you in the sides of two forces – NATO and Chinese – concurrently. Every few missions the game will swap you to the other side, and you’ll play a mission as the other side, complete with news broadcasts letting you know how insidious the other side has been. This negates the whole “good” versus “bad” ideal that so frequently occurs in these types of games, as well as allows you to experience quite a wide range of vehicles and weapons from time to time.

Each mission varies greatly in its objectives, and you’ll be tasked to blow up bridges or installations, defend an area, attack an area, and each encourages you to utilise a whole range of different troops, such as snipers or engineers, and vehicles. In fact, there are 5 different types of troop you can be – Assault, who is your typical on foot combatant; Sniper, who not only snipes, but can locate enemy troop locations with his “GPS Forward Observer”, and paint targets for missile strikes. There’s Special Ops, trained in stealth and sabotage, whose weapons are silenced. They also carry C4 charges, designed for blowing things like bridges off the face of the planet. The Engineer is Mr Fixit, who can repair vehicles with the blowtorch, and lay landmines to stop enemy vehicles. Failing that, he can whip out his rocket launcher, which is brutally effective against tanks and helicopters. And bringing up the rear is Support, acting as field medic, administrating health intravenously, and also able to call mortar strikes to devastate an area.

Missions help you rise in rank. The quicker you complete a mission, the less men you lose, the more enemy you kill, objectives completed, and so on, the higher your Combat Score. Medals are also awarded for doing certain things in a mission, such as Hotswapping (more on that later) a certain distance or number of times, getting so many sniper headshots, planting so many explosives, that kind of thing. At the end of a mission, time, kills and casualties are tallied up, along with any medals you’ve earned, and you are awarded stars for certain point milestones. The more stars you earn, the higher your ranking will go. Ranking gives you access to better weapons and equipment, as well as more health, ammo, and so forth.

B2:MC also allows you to pilot tanks, jeeps, boats, amphibious vehicles and helicopters. Run up to a vehicle, press B and you’re in and racing. AI Teammates can operate mounted weaponry, or by simply pressing the Black button you can switch to the mounted weapons while the AI drives. This is great for when shooting is more important than driving. However, the AI isn’t anywhere near perfect, and often drives into enemy fire, or occasionally gets stuck on obstacles, so being able to switch so quickly is a godsend in some missions.

Speaking of switching, something absolutely awesome in the single player game is Hotswapping. If you see a fellow trooper on the other side of the battlefield, simply pressing the Y button zooms you into that player. The player has to be in the line of sight, which indicated by the icon above their head turning white. This allows you to, for instance, snipe some guards from one position, Hotswap to a tank and attack another position, zoom into a Special Ops to breach a wall, and then hotswap back to the tank and roll into an enemy compound. It is a fantastic gameplay mechanic that works incredibly well and is a lot of fun to use, and it allows for some great tactical manoeuvres and is totally unique to the single player aspect of B2:MC. I just wish it were available in Multiplayer as well!

Apart from the single player campaign, there are minigames that allow you to increase your star rating by up to 3 stars per game. This include a hotswap challenge, where you have to hotswap from person to person travelling across a map; a racing challenge, where you drive or fly through checkpoints; and shooting challenges which test your accuracy with a particular weapon. These are also a lot of fun, and often more intense than the action of the campaign missions, and extends the single player game further than the rather large 20 mission campaign. For a game that is mainly meant to be for online play, they sure have catered well for the single player.

Online, the game is just as fun and addictive as both the single player, and PC counterpart. With up to 24 players Conquest is where you have to hold certain key control points on the map to get hold ‘tickets’, which are essentially remaining soldiers. The less control points the team hold, the quicker the tickets decrease. Unlike the PC version, you don’t have online bots though, just your human counterparts, so in that way it is a little tougher to capture and hold points. Capture the flag is the traditional capture the flag – storm an enemy’s base and steal their flag, and this seems to be the less popular online mode.

Getting into a game is pretty simple –Quick Match finds games quickly enough, and optimatch allows you to choose your favourite game type and map, although on the odd occasion I got a ‘server is full’ error when it said there were only 15 out of 24 players. I also got a few mysterious disconnections, but no more than usual for Xbox Live. Lag was non-existent, and voices were crisp for the most part. In fact, unlike other Live games, the talking was, 90% of the time, just about the game. Most of the players seem pretty serious about playing and having fun – there’s very little Team Killing, very little Griefing, which makes B2:MC all that much more enjoyable.

The maps are varied enough to keep you interested for a while. Some obviously suit vehicles more than others, but on the whole the maps provide a balance for all kinds of players. Snipers can set up on top of buildings and the like, but most buildings can be entered from below, and rooftops accessed by stairs, so there’s never a sense of the sniper ‘sweet spot’ that occurs in other shooters.

B2:MC isn’t going to win too many awards for its graphical presentation. It’s not that it looks particularly bad, it just doesn’t stand out. The interface is rather bland, featuring mainly text and a few 3D ‘army sim’ style graphics, but it’s not a shining example of a great user interface. The in-game graphics are solid, and the game moves so fast that you don’t really notice anything too bad, but it’s no Halo. Explosions look quite sad, as vehicles disappear in a puff of smoke, and often it’s hard to see where the tracers of enemy bullets are actually coming from. And there’s certain sameness about all the maps you play on, particularly in single player. However, there are nice touches, like smashed windows, graffiti covering bridges and disused city blocks, and the smoking remains of ruined vehicles.

Audio wise the game is pretty solid. Weapons sound different enough, and the clink and clank of tanks and other vehicles sounds authentic. Explosions, whilst looking weak, sound great. The voiceover for your fellow soldiers give them personality and vitality. However, one really annoying thing about the audio is the Chinese voice over in the mission briefing. It sounds like someone putting on an accent, and a rather bad one at that.

Conclusion:
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat may disappoint fans of the PC game who expect a PC port, but don’t let that put you off. It is still a fabulous game, with single players being well catered for, and online players having a similar, although more arcady and faster experience than their PC counterparts. And with Hotswapping being so damn cool and a hell of a lot of fun, it is sure to become common in more and more games in the future.

Pros:
Single Player well catered for
Excellent Online Play
Hotswapping is a very cool device

Cons:
May be too arcadey for those use to the PC version
Vehicles sometimes get caught on obstacles.
AI isn’t too good at driving.
Bad voice acting for the Chinese forces.

85/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Blinx 2: Master of Time and Space

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I have to fess up – I never played the first Blinx. When it came out, although the idea of the action being recorded onto the Xbox’s harddrive, thus allowing you to manipulate time in the game world intrigued me; I simply wasn’t a fan of platformers.

I had been a PC gamer for many years prior, and I couldn’t get my head around the 3rd person perspective introduced in Super Mario 64. However, since getting an Xbox, I have become a convert of platform games, and enjoy the problem solving puzzles so common to platformers, and even the dreaded double jump.

Most reviews of the previous Blinx game comment negatively on the way Blinx and his time sweeper operate. The camera control was very clumsy, the level of difficulty very high with an arbitrary 10-minute limit on each and every level. Blinx was said to be slower than grass growing, causing one reviewer to exclaim “Couldn’t there be a run button? Or heck, just make him move a bit quicker. That vacuum can’t become a jet pack or something? Anything?!” There was no aiming mechanism, making aiming to shoot at Time Monsters and Tom Tom gang members incredibly hard. Furthermore, you had to collect time crystals in order to use Blinx’s time controls, with some people becoming frustrated at repeating certain parts of the game over and over because they didn’t have the right powers on hand.

Thankfully most of this has been corrected in Blinx 2: Master of Time and Space (from now on simply Blinx 2). I found very little to annoy me about the camera, and whilst not perfect, it’s more than up to the task of being able to guide you around the 10 different worlds you’ll visit. Aiming, which was apparently dodgy due to the unwieldy camera movements, has been infinitely improved with the ability to lock on using the Left Trigger. This makes killing enemies much easier, although it takes a lot of the skill out of the game as well. The 10-minute limit has been removed completely, replaced by a money bonus if you complete the mission in a small amount of time. The time crystal gathering has also been simplified; now Time Monsters will drop a number of different time crystals, and you can collect them in any order.

The level of difficulty has been reduced too, but it has been replaced by a degree of oversimplification. Every time you encounter something remotely out of the ordinary, a pop up box will appear and tell you what you have to do. This is fine for the first level, and acceptable for the second level as things in the game change, but it is just ridiculous when you’re up to the world number 4 or 5. Even more annoying is this halts the action, requiring you to press the A button to continue.

The difficulty isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Instead of playing Blinx, you play as a Time Sweeper, and you can customise the look of your character to quite a high degree. Name, ears, colour, eyes, height, it’s all customisable. Whilst it’s fun to do this, it detracts from the continuity of the game. Another criticism of the first game was that Blinx had no personality, and thus you didn’t care for him. By making a character you have greater attachment to that character, but it’s a double-edged sword, because now there is no personality to the overall game. Imagine if Mario changed every game – if one game he was skinny, another time was dark in skin colour, and another time wore a suit like James Bond – would he be the icon he is today? Of course not! Furthermore, now instead of an identifiable hero, even if he was a dull one, you now have a generic character that is dull. At no time did I feel engaged by my character, or the story.

Your Time Sweeper can perform the same time control moves as in the first game, such as slow, pause, rewind, fast forward and record time. For example, if a bridge is blown up, your Time Sweeper can rewind to a time before the bridge blew up. You can use pause to freeze time monsters, to use falling rocks to jump to a higher part of the level, or to expose an underwater button to air. Fast forward is used to run really fast, and jump through gates which lead to different parts of the level. Record is used to record your movements. Record yourself standing on a button, and then play that back whilst you go stand on another button to unlock a door. Slow slows all that is around you, while you continue at normal speed. These mechanisms are an interesting way to play a platform game, but they don’t extend the gameplay. You still feel as though you are playing a generic platform game, running about to collect this that and the other.

Another change is that you get to play a member of the Tom Tom gang. As the Tom Tom pigs don’t have time controls, they use space controls instead. These are found in crates, or can be purchased at the Club shop, and include things like Warp Tunnel, which rip a hole in space and allow you to pop up elsewhere; The Hypercloak which makes you invisible, but you’re unable to jump or shoot; the Space Bubble which traps anything in it’s radius, and a number of other tools. The Tom Tom Gang parts are much more stealth based, and here the camera can become a bit more of a problem, especially when you are underground in a Warp Tunnel. Your Tom Tom Gang member is also very customisable in the same way as your Time Sweeper, but again, there’s no real sense of character to the game.

There’s a multiplayer component this time as well – you can play the game through with a friend in a co-operative mode, or play 4 player free for all battle. These are nice additions, but felt somewhat lacking. Co-operative mode is much more exciting than the deathmatch portion, although it is funny to use your time skills to reduce your enemy to a kitten or piglet. Maybe I’ve just been spoilt by Xbox live.

The art direction is pretty standard for a platformer – it’s very colourful and over the top. Things like explosion, water, smoke effects look great, and all the characters are animated well. There’s some weird goings on in the cut scenes though – it’s as if the cuts are in the wrong place at times, especially when it’s showing an item you just recovered. However, if you’ve played some of the other great platform games on the Xbox, such as Voodoo Vince or Dr Muto, you really see that Blinx lacks that element of style that makes other games in this genre stand out. The sound effects are adequate, and the cats are rather cute when they meow, but the repetitive music will drive you insane. As there’s no option to load your own music, go into the set up and turn it off, and shove something in your stereo.

Conclusion:
Blinx 2 suffers from a real distinctive lack of style. Nothing about it stands out, even the fancy hard disk recording Time Control mechanism. There’s nothing about the game that really grabs you and keeps you engaged. I can imagine that kids might like it for the cutesy characters and platforming elements, but I think that even then they might grow bored of it. There’s not much of a story, you can’t get attached to the characters, and the gameplay, even with time controls, is pretty generic.

Pros
Time controls are an interesting gameplay device
Many improvements over the last game
Ability to play as either Time Sweepers or Tom Toms

Cons
Generic gameplay across the board.
Annoying handholding throughout the game
Characters have no personality – and you don’t get to play as Blinx
Repetitive, infuriating music

70/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland

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Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland (simply THAW from now on) sees the series return to the more recognisable pastures of the Tony Hawk series. Gone is the MTV inspired craziness of THUG2 (XBW: 82). Gone are the vehicles of THUG (XBW: 88). And in its place we have a few more new moves, BMX biking ala Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX, and whilst all elements of the entire series are still retained, the biggest addition for Xbox gamers is Xbox Live! online play.


The series has always been known for it’s great presentation, but this time it’s been upped a notch by the inclusion of art by famous Santa Cruz artist Jimbo Philips. The name might not be familiar to those who live their lives on the Xbox, but those of us with even a passing interest in skating, surfing and the associated scene will be very familiar with Jimbo’s wacky designs and intense yet funny artwork. Jimbo’s art shows up in cut scenes, and the cut scenes tell the story of a young country boy (you) who makes his way to LA to make it big on the skate circuit. Once he arrives, he’s robbed by some skate thugs, but befriended by punk chick Mindy, who helps him get his stuff back. In return, the skater boy promises to help Mindy get her skate ‘zine ‘American Wasteland’ published. Along the way you get to help a bunch of misfits build a skate park, and impress the pro scene skaters.

The gameplay of THAW hasn’t altered too much from the paradigm set up in THUG. You skate up to people with Stars over their head, and they will give you goals to achieve in order to progress the story. Most of these involve tricking off certain items in the map to proceed to the next goal. All the old tricks are available, and if you know the series you won’t have any problems performing them. The key to most goals is to perform the tricks called out, or gets the highest possible score in a combo. New tricks include rolls, off the board skills, and old skate tricks pioneered by the Dog Town Z Boys. Rolls are where you spin your entire body when in the air, and they look cool although they’re quite difficult to pull off. The off-the board skills involve wall climbing and flipping off walls. The old school moves include the Natas spin which is spinning on a pivot, and the Bert Slide, which is where you put your hand on the ground and pivot on your hand, much like how surfers touch the wave when surfing.

Once you unlock the skate park, usually the goal will involve tricking off something in the environment causing it to crash or smash, and then the item will be transported to the skate park, where you’re encouraged to make a big score off of it in some way. This is a little different to the THUG series where the goal was just to cause destruction and open up new areas of the maps. This does happen in THAW, although not to such a great extent. Something that is different is that you can now skate from one side of world to the other without seeing any loading screens. This makes the game world seem much more cohesive, and it’s a lot of fun skating and tricking from one area of LA to another. For example, it’s possible to skate from Hollywood to East LA via the subway. There’s a bit of slowdown in the connecting areas, but it’s barely noticeable.

The BMX is a new feature and replaces the vehicles found in THUG. Whilst the controls are similar to the skateboard, the bike does have different physics and some different tricks. For example, you use the triggers as the front and rear breaks. And yes, you can flip the bike by applying too much pressure to the front break at too high a speed. Tricks are pulled off using the same face buttons as skateboarding, as well as the Right Joystick to do further BMX specific moves, such as tail whips and crank tricks. The bike isn’t used a great deal in the story, but is a lot of fun to ride – much better than the vehicles in the previous series, and by finding the guy with the bike icon above his head and performing certain tricks, you can make money to customise your skater.

Classic mode returns with classic maps from the entire Tony Hawk series, and like in THUG, this is a welcome addition to the game, as it extends the gameplay greatly. This time Co-operative Mode on classic allows two players to try and achieve the goals in the two-minute time limit together. In addition to these modes, all the usual Multiplayer of the Tony Hawk game are included such as Trick Attack, Score Challenge, Slap!, Combo Mambo, Firefight, and a new one called Pot ‘o Gold, – the person who is “it” scores points until they are hit by another player, who then becomes “it”. And also the Create-A- modes make a welcome return, allowing you to customise your online skater, create tricks, new graffiti tags, and skateparks. Unfortunately you can’t take your parks online, which is a shame.

Xbox Live play makes a welcome entry into THAW. There are three extra modes available on Live and they are Elimiskate, Goal Attack and Capture the Flag. Elimiskate is like trick attack, but the person with the lowest score at the end of the round is eliminated. This seems to be the most popular game on Live, and playing it I experienced a little bit of lag, but never enough to really cause concern. Sometimes the lag will cause you to do utterly weird things, like change direction in mid air, but it never seemed to actually interrupt the flow of the game. Goal Attack is like playing classic mode against other people – the person to score the most goals like collect the Videos, or find the letters SKATE – wins. Not knowing the maps makes this mode a little more difficult for n00bs, so practice in Classic mode first. Capture the Flag is fun, but I have difficulty finding players. Overall the Live experience is just like playing in with a friend, and is great fun, and a great break from all the shooters and driving games.

Apart from the cool artwork of Jimbo Philips, THAW doesn’t really boggle the mind with its graphics. The levels are colourful, but the detail is lacking in the skater models. There are certain times where graphic and animation glitches occur, especially when on the bike and you end up in an unusual position the animation will freak out and you’ll see your skater spin or jump around in place, but these occur fairly infrequently. There are some cool animations though, and the breakdance move is classic, especially when you do it in the alien costume.

The music is, as always, top notch. The game kicks off with Dead Kennedy’s Holiday in Cambodia, which made me rate the game highly right from the beginning. The soundtrack is full of old and new punk, hiphop and rock, and of course you can have your own soundtracks, but there was never I moment when I thought the music was repetitive or boring. The dialogue is a little less top notch, with some scenes the game pausing a little too long when loading the next line, making it seem very much like the lines were read rather than acted. There doesn’t seem to be too much emotion in the readings either, but it’s never enough so you want to mute the game.

Conclusion:
THAW shows that the series isn’t quite dead, but like THUG2 it’s really hard to see what they can do with the series in the future. The addition of Xbox Live means fans can finally compete and rank themselves against each other online, and it’s more than worth the price for that. But if you’ve played THUG and THUG2, then THAW isn’t all that different. The return to more trick based gameplay is welcome, but there doesn’t seem to be much more they can do with the series. Then again, I said that at the end of my THUG2 review, and Neversoft have delivered an enjoyable gameplay experience once again.

Pros:
A welcome return to trick based gameplay
BMX is really fun to ride
New tricks and animations that look cool.
Finally Xbox live enabled, with fun, relatively lag free skating to be had.
No loading screens between areas.

Cons:
Some graphical glitches
Voice acting not that great
No real improvement to gameplay (but that’s only because it’s so good to begin with)

87/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

FIFA 2006

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EA get a fair bit of flack from their policy of releasing new revisions of their franchise games every 12 months or so and charging full price for seemingly small changes. Sometimes this is warranted, and other times it is not. The problem with the FIFA series is that football is such a well-loved sport, and EA has tried to buy the sport through exclusive licensing deals, that people often slag EA off before giving the games a really good chance. I couldn’t say I’m a football fanatic, but I do enjoy the sport, did play in my youth, and I have played all the FIFA series of games on Xbox, and it’s my opinion that FIFA 2006 is the best to date.

One of the primary causes of concern amongst football fans about FIFA was the scorelines. People on forums constantly whinged about how in “real football” there are no 4-4 draws, or 6-3 wins, and said that the FIFA game should reflect more realistic scores. I’m not going to enter a debate about how boring a nil all draw can be to watch, but for me this arcade score line made the game extremely fun. I come from a background of playing games like Sensible Soccer and Microprose’s International Soccer, which were lots of fun, had crazy scorelines and realism wasn’t the entire point. I’m of the opinion if you want “realism” in a soccer game, go play a game like Championship Manager – they’re made for geeks in glasses who obsess over numbers and statistics.

However, FIFA 2006 has indeed addressed this complaint, and it’s quite tough going to score at all in FIFA. This is both a blessing and a curse. For someone used to scoring high in matches, it can seriously put a dent in your ego to win by only a goal or two, and to have more draws than wins. However, at the same time that makes it one of the most intense FIFA games to date. Every strike has to be on target, every loose ball has to be won, and every time the opposition gets close to your goal square the anxiety levels rise.

Part of this is the result of smarter AI. It’s a subtle change over the previous release, but after prolonged play it becomes more apparent. The AI is tougher, sticks to the player, and plays much more aggressively. They’ll play advantage, but they’ll also play towards the sidelines when in defence when you’re in a threatening position. Speaking of playing advantage, I was shocked the first time the commentator said, “the Ref has given advantage” after a bad tackle. The ball was held up in play, the whistle blew and I was awarded a free kick. This could be in other games, but this was the first time I noticed it, and the first time it was an accurate reflection of how the play-on rule works.

Another reason the game seems tighter are the physics of the ball are a lot more realistic than previous FIFA titles. The theme song of this years release is Jamiroquai’s “feels just like it should”, and sums up the ball physics perfectly. It actually moves like a ball on a pitch, rather than a sprite in a game. When it rains the ball becomes slippery and heavier. When a kick is reflected off the gaol post it’s reflected in a real direction. And in addition, this year the player stats do actually seem to mean something. Fast players will be able to outrun slower players, tougher players will be able to force players off the ball with their body, and the strong kickers will be able to kick the ball more accurately.

However, there are some major problems with the game, holding it back from being a truly great football game. When the ball is kicked into midfield, the game suffers a quite noticeable framerate drop. It seems that having so many players in the midfield cause the game to stutter and slow down, which is really unfortunate. When there doesn’t seem to be much going on in the terms of onscreen action, especially compared to a shooter or racing game for example, it really does seem like an inexplicable problem. And it is enough to make a player have second thoughts about playing it. You do become accustomed to it, but I was ready to stop playing and give a dismissive review the first few times I played.

Another issue is the Team Management section. Even though I’m not a great fan of team management games, finding the statistic crunching to be rather dull, I am prepared to admit they usually do impact on a game. FIFA 2006 has attempted to bring in some form of team management, but it fails because it doesn’t seem to have too much an impact on your team, but enough to simply annoy you. This year, instead of gaining points for winning and spending it on certain coaches, you earn money from home ground ticket sales and sponsors. You then use the money to improve your coaching field, improve your grounds and pay your players.

However, choose the wrong sponsor and you could find yourself losing money every match, especially if you’re not getting wins every game. This makes it hard to improve your coaching line up, which in turn means your players don’t play as well, and their team and individual morale drops. This in turn affects team chemistry, that unquantifiable quality that means certain teams play better together, which is sadly given a score that you have to try to improve on. When your team is not playing well, crowd attendance will be down, meaning you lose more money, and sacking players doesn’t help team moral much either.

On top of that, you get wildcards, as per the Sims, where a scenario presents itself, such as “Management has heard rumours of dissention in your team” and you have to answer appropriately from a choice of three. Sometimes answering the question appropriately doesn’t seem to give a satisfactory result. It does all seem rather light, and there’s no option to turn it off in the main Manager mode. It only mildly impacts on your teams’ on-field performance, and makes transfers and recovery of players more difficult than perhaps it should be. EA should go all out with this mode and give a rich and deep transfer and management market, and give players the option to simply turn it off.

For those who like playing with mates, FIFA2006 has you well covered. Not only is there Xbox Live functionality with the ability to play in online leagues and track your wins and losses, but there’s also FIFA Lounge, which allows you to create a local league of mates on your xbox and rank you against each other. Lounge allows you to play a round-robin knockout game, or a full tournament, and also allows you to get “Cheap Shots” like issue Yellow Cards at the start of a match to really piss your mates off. Xbox Live games were fairly free of lag, but I had fairly regular server disconnections from the EA severs. Admittedly I didn’t do any of the set up things suggested when I first signed in, like opening ports and so forth, but then again I shouldn’t have to when most other games work fine. And that information should be in the handbook, not on a screen that can be quickly skipped.

Graphics problems mentioned above aside, the game does look quite impressive, with players looking much like their real life counterparts. The stadiums look great, and the shadowing on the pitch is very impressive. The crowd looks a little like 2D cardboard cutouts though, although the crowd roars and stadium ambience is excellent. When you’ve got the ball and the crowd are chanting out the teams name, it really does strive you on to excellence. As with any sports game the commentary can get a little repetitive, but this year the dropping of Ally McCoist and John Motson inclusion of Clive Tydsley and Andy Gray mean that there’s less inane chatter and much more action orientated discussion, which is very much welcome. The music that plays on the menu pages is quite a good selection of world beats, being mostly free of crap rap and rnb.

Closing:
Playing FIFA 2006 was a really good experience after I got over the initial disappointment of the framerate drop when the ball enters midfield. The game is a real challenge and a real improvement over last years’ release. The AI is especially tough, but never so much so that it becomes frustrating, and unlike previous FIFA games I never felt that the AI scored against me by using cheap shots or cheating. Likewise, online play is equally challenging, but again I never felt that a better player overwhelmed me. The Team Management section just doesn’t seem robust enough to me, which indicates that it will be seen as wasteful by the hardcore football fans, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Pros:
Overall improvement in realism from player representations to scorelines
Excellent and challenging AI
Great Ball Physics
The aftertouch plays are still a great inclusion
FIFA Lounge is fun – especially the ‘cheap shots’

Cons:
Heinous framerate drops in midfield
Team Management not robust enough
Bland stadium crowd animations
Frequent disconnection from EA Servers

82/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Lockdown

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Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six series started off as a strategic command type game where you planned your mission, then executed GO codes to your teams and watched them do their thing. As the series evolved, it became a first person shooter to suit action orientated console gamers. Initially this move was met with some scepticism, but after the first Rainbow Six game (XBW: 94) hit the Xbox, we knew Ubisoft was onto a winner. It was action packed, but still tactical, strategic and well paced, and had awesome online modes that captured the single player intensity but pitted you against other humans.

The single player contains the usual story of evil, radical organisation taking action against various governments around the world, and also has a few little twists to try and engage you more fully. I’m not going to spoil it, but if you’ve read the book then the game’s story treads some familiar territory, although this time more close to home. For some reason though, the story isn’t as engaging as in the previous games. Part of this is the voice acting, but most of it is the overall feel of the game. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something that isn’t cohesive about the whole experience.

Gameplay wise, the feel is similar to the previous Rainbow Six’s, but a little more action based. You can pretty much run and gun through the levels and survive with your entire squad intact. There’s not so much of the careful manuvering and planning, and much more shooting. Part of this is due to the new heart detection device that shows you the heartbeat of enemies through walls. When you know there is a bunch of baddies in the next room, you know to flashbang or grenade almost every time.

There is a nice addition to the gameplay where you take the role of the sniper, and it’s like a shooting gallery. It’s quite a lot of fun, and your skill does reflect on the difficulty of the on coming mission – if you’re too slow in eliminating the enemy, and your team gets walloped, you’ll have an injured team to play the rest of the mission with, which can make it a lot more difficult. However, there is a problem with this mode, in that you’re informed of more enemies arriving, but it’s rather imprecise. For example, you’re told in one level that there are snipers on the balconies, but there are four balconies – if a special ops team was that inaccurate in real life, I would be very concerned about their training.

Another problem arises with the team and enemy AI. Sometimes it’s good, and others you’re left wondering what the hell has gone wrong. In one instance, one of my team just simply refused to climb the ladder. This meant for the rest of the mission I couldn’t actually order my team to do anything. Another time, pressing the A button to order the team to open a door meant they would prepare, but the “go code”, accessed by the black button, never appeared. Often they would clear out the immediate area, and then give the all clear, and you would walk into sniper fire. With enemy AI, you can pick off bad guys in a room without others in the room noticing. They will patrol, but don’t wander too far out of their zones, and will do really odd things like throw grenades when their teammates are in the way.

Moving onto the online modes, I was hesitant about the Persistent Elite Creation (PEC) mode. Luckily, you can choose to ignore this, and get right into the thick of the game. There’s the usual Team Survival, the elimination deathmatch; Team Sharpshooter which is deathmatch with a time limit; Total conquest, where you have to hold locations for a given time limit, and Retrieval, which is essentially capture the flag. Plus, you can join with up to four friends and work through the missions or play terrorist hunt.

The PEC mode is a new addition to multiplayer, allowing you to choose a class and upgrade your equipment. There are four classes – Commando, Engineer, Special Ops and Medic. These are pretty standard roles in shooters, and there’s nothing really outstanding in Lockdown to differentiate these roles to any other game. For example, the Commando can develop skills that allow him to dish out more damage, take more damage, and set up ballistic shields to protect his allies. The medic can heal either on the run, or set up mobile field restoration points, and the special op can sneak and use sniper rifles. The Engineer can lay mines and set up machine gun turrets, and open or lock passages and routes through the maps.

At first, I though I would be at a disadvantage, because I was a low level character and was up against level 40 players. However, after a few games, as you find your feet, and start to get a feel for your role, you do start to advance quicker. And, as you kill more opponents of higher ranking, you also advance further, so it does enforce more of a run and gun mentality. In addition, people don’t seem to utilise their extra functions properly. I never saw a ballistics shield or a weapons emplacement, although engineers did appear to block off routes, and medics did heal me on the odd occasion, but these abilities were not as utilised nearly as much as in other combat games that have ‘roles’.

The multiplayer maps are very well designed, but I found that a lot of them seemed more to facilitate spawn-rushing more so than other games. Even though they had intricate back routes into enemy bases, simply rushing to the enemy spawns seemed to be the most logical way to fight. Admittedly the tactics changed with the people you played with, but there never seemed to be the same levels of communication I experienced playing Rainbow Six 3 or other online game like Halo 2 or even Return to Castle Wolfenstien.

Rainbow Six has always looked good, but unfortunately Lockdown seems to have dragged the chain here as well. The new visor effect is cool, especially how it fogs up if you go into a cold storage room, and how the more beat up you are, the harder it becomes to see as it gets cracks, holes and grime on it. The environments all look nice, but they don’t have the impact and the wow factor of the previous games. And, perhaps more disappointingly, the explosions look quite average. The rolling fire effect doesn’t look good at all – throw a grenade and you expect something bigger and better. The different vision modes you can employ don’t have the same impact either, with both thermal vision and low light seeming to be washed out, making it harder to determine objects and enemies when looking in these modes. There was also so unexpected slowdown in framerate in single player, something I’ve not noticed in the series before.

The sound is also simply OK. The characters seem to lack the individuality the previous Rainbow Six games infused into them. There is a certain level of distance and detachment that wasn’t present in the previous games. Before you actually cared is Louise got taken down, now it’s more of a case of inconvenience. The bullet and explosions all sound good, and the score is a little more upbeat and rocking, but I did notice a few odd glitches in multiplayer where the gun firing only had the tail end of the sound on more than a couple of occasions.

Conclusion:
Lockdown is a competent shooter, which is disappointing because the previous Rainbow Six’s were fantastic shooters. Slipping further into the realm of action forsaking its origins, the single player suffers from inconsistent AI of both teammates and enemies, and even though the environments are a little more interactive, they seem to lack the realism that was the hook of the first game. The PEC multiplayer mode does add a new dimension to the usual online way of playing, and does hook you at first, but the online matches do seem to degenerate into spawn rushes and feel more like a simple run and gun battles common to all shooters than the tactical and epic battles that so absorbed players of the previous games.

Pros:
PEC Mode is a great addition to online play.
Environments more interactive than previous Rainbow Six games
New sniper action at start of round is lots of fun
Visor effects and decals are cool, even if they do obscure the action.

Cons:
Inconsistent AI for both AI and teammates
Online matches all too frequently devolve into spawn rushing
PEC Abilities seldom used
Doesn’t look as good as previous versions of the game.
Unexpected choppiness and slowdown in framerate

81/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Outlaw Tennis

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I’ll probably burn in hell for saying this, being that Australia is a nation that loves it’s sports, but many sporting activities are really, really boring to watch. If there’s no physical contact between players, it becomes simply a matter of skill, and quite frankly I get bored of watching people hit little balls around. Golf, Cricket and Tennis are the main culprits of interminable drudgery, taking up hours if not days of valuable TV screen retail space that could be better served by showing re-runs of The Simpsons.

This is why ‘extreme’ sports developed – people were bored of watching pros do nothing to make millions, so they started extreme sports where people could get hurt or killed… now that’s entertainment! The Outlaw series of games’ goal is to take these dull sports and catapult them into the extreme. Outlaw Tennis’s focus is of the very noble pursuit of tennis, a sport of skill, concentration and endurance, which of course is boring as hell. It has some wacky scoring procedure that makes a joke of mathematics, an Umpire who is raised above the action like a demigod, and the crowd aren’t even allowed to cheer or shout out during the game!

Whilst tennis has had it’s colourful characters, from the tantrums of John McEnroe to the grunting of Maria Sharapova (who’s grunts are about the same volume as small aircraft landing), nothing matches the Outlaw series of misfits. A stripper, an ex-con, a dominatrix and a Spaniard of dubious sexual orientation are available at the start of the game, and a further 12 are unlocked as you play the game, including a ninja, a white boy rapper, and a disco diva. These colourful characters each have similar skills at the beginning of the game that can be upgraded during drills – essentially mini games where you’ve got to beat a number of objectives, not unlike training in Top Spin (XBW: 90) – and each unlocked new character has better skills again.

But far more interesting than the characters are the available match modes. Tour Mode takes up the bulk of the game, which take each character though 5 games then the finals. The four starting players begin with a usual game of tennis with the usual game rules. This plays much like Top Spin, with a few differences. The A button is a flat shot, the B button is Top Spin, X button is slice / drop shot, and Y is lob. Holding the left trigger gives extra spin to the top spin and slice, and the Right Trigger gives you a boost when serving, returning or running for the ball. Serving is done using a power meter – you hold A, X or Y and release it when you get the meter full. The meter rises and falls, so holding the button too long will result in a bad serve. Holding the Right Trigger gives a power serve, but you need to get exactly 100 on the meter to pull one off.

Like the other Outlaw series, the “star” of the game is the humour and the fighting. I was hoping for a simple fighting mechanism like in NHL Rivals (XBW: 84), but unfortunately the fighting is simply button mashing. The upside of fighting is it gives you unlimited turbo for 30 seconds, which becomes very handy. The humour in the game is quite childish and grows tired rather quickly. Admittedly some of the stuff is funny at first, but when you hear the commentator say, “that serve was bad like this hotdog, is that a toe nail?” for the 10th time, it loses it charm. The reactions to points won or lost are also funny at first, but it cheekily alters the script on a few of the animations, so for one animation there may be up to 4 scripts. However, even with this variance, it still gets old quickly.

In the second game of the Tour of the default characters, the match modes become available, and these offer interesting variations to the usual rules of Tennis. Hot Potato takes standard tennis rules, but puts a countdown timer on the ball, blowing up when striking zero, taking out whoever has the ball on their side of the court. It becomes a game of strategy and timing, returning the ball to the other side as quickly as possible. Casino adds money to a cash pool each time the ball is hit, and each point won gives you the pool. Standard tennis rules apply, but the winner is the person who has the most money at the end of the match. Even though you can win the match, there is a chance you might not have a great deal of money, and lose. Pinball places bumpers on the court, and hitting these bumpers gives a score. You have a number of turns; only get score points when serving, and lose score points when you lose a game point. At the end of the turns, the person with the most points wins. It sounds complicated, but it’s not when in action, and is quite fun as the goal is to force long rallies rather than beat the other player.

Then there are the sports rules. These are the rules of Ping Pong, Baseball, American Football applied to Tennis. There’s Ping Pong, which takes the scoring of ping-pong – one point equals one point, and it’s the first to 11 to win. Baseball relies on long rallies too, as the more the ball is hit over the net, the more bases you get, to a maximum of 3. Aces count as home runs, so if you have 3 bases full, and get an ace, you will score 4 points. Losing a point is an ‘out’; 3 outs and you switch servers. There are a number of innings, and the person with the most points at the end of the innings wins. Football uses gridiron rules – the server has the ball, and has to get it to the other end of the field to score. There’s four quarters of a minute each, and scoring points increases the yardage, with the longer the rally the more yards gained. An ace counts as a 35 yard sprint. Losing a point is a turnover, and the winner is the person with the most touchdowns at the end of the four quarters.

As if this wasn’t interesting enough, there are a variety of options that can be applied to the matches. These include timebombs that are placed wherever a point is won, and blow up knocking the opponent on his or her ass. This usually results in you winning a point, but not always. There’s a match timer which counts down whenever the ball is in play, and the person with the most points when it gets to zero wins, whilst the team match timer counts down whenever it’s your return, and stops when you’re in control of the ball. Then there’s the Blocker, which moves along the net, and hitting the blocker means you lose the point in whatever game mode you are playing. Hot Potato with a blocker becomes an incredibly tense battle of timing and wits!

Graphically the game is ok, but offers nothing too exciting. The courts are quite interesting from the usual tennis game fare, being set in a drug runner’s mansion, in Antarctica, in an old castle, even in Hell! Each character is well animated both in game and during the reaction scenes, and there’s a variety of clothing that can be unlocked for each character. The sound is the usual thwock of balls, the inane commentary, but surprisingly good soundtrack. Some of the rock tunes will have you headbanging along, whilst the drum and bass style tunes could be played in clubs to an appreciative crowd. Of course, there’s always the option to use your own playlists too.

The many variations make for exciting and challenging play, and there can be some epic battles in single, doubles and online play. However, these battles are often let down by cheating AI. Unless you max out your scores via the drills the game seems unfairly to the favour the AI. They always seem to return aces and powershots, and always seem to be able to make a comeback. Even on Amateur, the easiest setting, I found the games to become exercises in controller throwing frustration. Online play is also reasonable, but there are some parts when the game lags badly, especially on serve returns. But like most xbox games, the set up is easy, and being able to play online doubles is cool. In the single player game you can play Canadian doubles – 2 against one – and this would have been really cool over live, but you can only play against another two people on a console.

Conclusion:
Outlaw Tennis offers enough variety to keep most players busy for quite some time, but it suffers from cheating AI and annoying humour. Fortunately the humour can be cut out of the game in the options menu, but this removes the whole Outlaw aspect, and just gives you ‘Tennis With A Bit More Variety Than Usual’, which isn’t a very catchy game title. Online play extends the title, but finding players can be a little tricky.

Pros:
Fantastic additions to the normal rules of tennis.
Wide variety of gameplay options for both single and online play
Lots of unlockable characters, clothes, songs and courts
Nice soundtrack with a range of genres.

Cons:
Humour gets old really quickly
The AI seems to cheat, especially against the default characters
Online play can get a little laggy
Not many online players

77/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Halo 2: Bonus Map Pack

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From the hilarious Red Vs Blue (www.redvblue.com) to the pages upon pages of fanart that can be found on the net, the universe Bungie created in Halo and extended in Halo 2 has captured the hearts and minds of gamers around the globe.

This universe has both intrigued and infuriated; intrigued by introducing new worlds to visit, new aliens to menace humankind, and compelling and involving storylines, and on the other hand there’s nothing more infuriating than wandering around a new world, looking at the beauty of the awe inspiring and mysterious Halo that floats above, or examining the ancient and bizarre Forerunner installations, mentally mapping out the multiple paths through structures, than to suddenly find an iniquitous plasma grenade lodged in your chest armour, or a well placed sniper shot shatter the otherwise peaceful surrounds. For that is the danger of the Halo universe – beautiful one minute and deadly the next.

The new Halo 2 Maps have been lovingly crafted to extend the multiplayer aspect of the game, which is, it must be said, the games’ biggest strength. The original Halo engaged people with it’s story and action, but the sequel seemed to let quite a few people with it’s rather incomplete ending. However, it more than made up for this by providing one of the most solid multiplayer games available on a console, if not in any game, with an incredibly well developed online interface that intergraded with Bungie.com. The ability to track scores, form clans, and download extra content through Live has seen the Live service grow to over 2 Million users.

The new maps are either brand new, or a development of the maps found in Halo, and even one from Bungie’s original first shooter, Marathon. Each map has been made for a specific game type, although they work well in their other modes. For example, Terminal, set in Old Mombassa (one of the locations set on Earth) is great for Assault and CTF, but also great for Slayer matches in its tight urban environment. There are small maps like Backwash, set in a swamp reminiscent of 343 Guilty Spark in the first Halo game, to massive levels designed to present interesting vehicular combat in Containment. The manual presents a minimap of each of the maps provided, showing weapon and vehicle locations, as well as some informing of best tactics to use. In this case, it really does pay to RTM.

For those without Live but like to get together with friends for split screen or system link action, then the Bonus Maps are a godsend. Not only do they give you 9 new maps, they patch up glitches and eliminate exploits and cheating, and also give offline players a chance to hone their skills on levels where they previously couldn’t. Considering the disc isn’t required to play (although the original Halo2 game is), it’s great for people who play LANs – people can split the cost and pass the disc around. I don’t think Bungie would mind me saying that, especially considering the maps will be free for download at the end of August.

If you’re a Halo nut, and an Xbox Live subscriber, then the Map Pack is a must. You will find it patches Halo and eliminates cheaters, although I still had to download an extra live update even after installing. Furthermore, if you don’t have it, you may find it hard to find games of certain types using Optimatch, and there’s nothing worse than not being able to play with your friends because they have a map that you don’t. And if you do wait until they become free, everyone else will know the maps rather well and you’ll find yourself at distinct disadvantage. You’ll be stumbling around trying to find the rocket launcher that someone will tell you to get from “near the pillars” – not a good idea when you’re trying to keep your stats up!

The bonus, non-map material, whilst appealing, is only of minor interest. The Developer Video provides some useful tips, like being able to hide yourself on the moving platforms in Elongation by squatting. However, you’ll gain no massive advantage from watching it. The short movie is pretty cool, but for me it just reinforced the notion that the single player mission could have been much more developed. It shows an aspect of the Halo Universe that is never really expanded – urban squad combat. I’m not proposing that Bungie turn the game into Rainbow Six, but I really enjoyed the urban battles set on Earth, and wished there were more.

But if you’re simply a casual fan, then it’s probably best to wait until they become available for free at the end of August, because, well, they’re just extra maps. There’s absolutely nothing here for the single player, which is a little unfortunate really. Although the Xbox Live service has reached 2 million subscribers, and that’s only a small proportion of the 10 million plus units that Halo 2 has sold. When you look at it from that perspective, the Bonus Maps is a slight disappointment, especially that many think the single player of Halo 2 is severely lacking in many places.

Conclusion:
What the Map Pack does is show that Bungie really does care about the community it has helped foster through Halo 2. With one simple gesture, Bungie has offered to even the playing field between online and off line players, allowing patches and content that they could have offered to online customers as individual downloads, in one well presented package for a reasonable price. Being able to share the disc around counters the cynical notion that this is a money making scheme – I’m pretty sure Bungie are sitting pretty anyway – and reinforces the idea that Bungie really do understand the players of Halo2’s needs.

Pros:
Provides content for those without Live for a reasonable price.
Nine extra maps that have been researched and refined to perfection.
Updates Live and patches the game quicker than downloading.
Disc can be shared around friends.

Cons:
Absolutely nothing for the Single player.
Will be available free for download soon.

90/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Spy Vs Spy

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The concept of Spy vs Spy comes from the mind of Antonio Prohias, a refugee from the Cuban Cultural Revolution who arrived at the doorstep of Mad Comics and proceeded to wow everybody with his comical take on two opposing spies trying to outdo one another. The masked spies became a beacon of popular culture, and synonymous with Mad Magazines’ quirky and off the wall humour.

So it is surprising that this game seems to ditch that humour and present us with a really average, uninspired and boring single player platform game, along with a somewhat fun, but ultimately flawed multiplayer game.

The single player component sets you up against your opposing spy, black or white depending on whom you choose. There are various henchmen to deal with as well as your opponent spy, and you proceed through the levels completing a bunch of goals and then fighting a boss battle at the end of the level. In all there are 8 levels, and these are the same 8 levels you will be playing in Multiplayer.

The problem isn’t the game play so much in itself – it is really just the same old thing over and over. Go through this door, shoot those guys, collect the coins – after all, it IS a platform action game – and then move on to jumping puzzle, open the next door and do it all over again, then kill the big boss at the end. Essentially it is the same as every other platform action game, and adds absolutely nothing new to the genre. That damn Italian plumber certainly has a lot to answer for!

A great part of the problem is the game is just not funny. The humour in the game makes Rove McManus seem like a comic genius comparable with the likes of Barry Humphries. The potential of humour in games is more than readily apparent in games like Voodoo Vince (XBW: 83) or Armed and Dangerous (XBW: 82) and it’s a great shame that Spy Vs Spy misses the boat altogether. Given the source material, there is so much potential for something side-splittingly funny, but to use a cliché as tired as the game, there are more laughs at a funeral.

Part of the wacky appeal of the comic series was the crazy traps the spies laid out for one another, and the fact that these ingenious and deadly traps would backfire with hilarious results. You can lay traps for your hapless foe in the game, but there is no real satisfaction in it, because for the most part it is simply pressing a button and waiting for the scripted AI to trigger it. And although it can backfire, it’s normally because you’ve forgotten that you’ve pressed the button to set the trap, and backtracked into the trap by accident. It just seems all rather useless, especially when most of the time you encounter the dreaded opposite spy outside the scripted events, you can club them to death or simply shoot them.

The multiplayer aspect of the game is marginally better, in that you run about attacking black or white or red or blue spies in a Deathmatch style fight. There are two modes Classic and Modern. Classic is an all out Deathmatch, where the winner has to collect all 4 pieces of a special item to win. These items are located in safes, so you have to open the safes – but other spies can trap them, and if you’re killed you lose your items. You can find ways to disarm traps, and use decoys to confuse your foes. Modern is essentially the same as classic, except you have the option of a safe house in the level. But beware, there are extra ways the opposing spies can get into your base and steal your items, so there is a little bit more strategy going on.

With 4 people split screen the game is quite fun, and there is a lot of customisation and additions you can add to make the game more fun. For example, in Classic mode you can choose to have the Briefcase modifier, which allows you only to carry only one item at a time until you grab the briefcase. When this item is obtained you can carry more, but of course if you die your opponent can grab the case and all the items. Unlike single player, it is kind of funny when you press a button to set off the scripted traps, or even better they fall for one of your safe or anvil traps.

Unfortunately the maps seem too big on less than 4 players and you can spend a long time not seeing another spy, but luckily you can add bots to the game and play with a full complement of players. However, fun as it may be, the laughs don’t last long. The game grows tired rather quickly, and even though there’s a Xbox Live! component, there’s simply no one playing.

Graphics for the game are quite respectable. Your spy can be customised with different outfits that are unlocked during single player, and these all look pretty cool. The iconic spies are realised quite well in 3 dimensions, and the levels are very colourful and have a comic feel to them. The weapons and effects are very over the top, and fit in very well with the source material. The sounds of the weapons and squeals of your injured spy are also very appropriate, although I found the loonytunes style cartoon music to become rather grating after a while.

Conclusion:
Spy Vs Spy suffers from a very pedestrian single player game that lacks the humour of the comic on which it’s based, which is very disappointing considering how funny and clever they often were. Multiplayer is more fun, and is a good game for weekend hire – maybe to play with young teens or possibly with some mates and some beers, but at the end of the day there are better, more humorous, more exciting multiplayer games available.

Pros:
Good 3D realisation of the original 2D cartoon
Fun Multiplayer with lots of options

Cons:
Single player seems like a bad afterthought.
Very repetitive
Nowhere near the hilarity of the source material.

60/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict

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Unreal has been the staple for fast paced frag action on the PC for years. It captured the minds and hearts of gamers and critics alike with its intense shooting action and gameplay. As the years have rolled by, the game has made its way onto Macs, Playstations and our beloved Xbox. Unreal Championship was essentially a port of Unreal Tournament 2003, and whilst it played well enough and looked great at the time, it still felt like a PC port.

For Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict (UC2 from here on in) rather than port Unreal Tournament 2004, the game was designed from the ground up to be played on Xbox – and it Midway and Epic have done a damn fine job in making this iteration of Unreal one of the best. Whilst the game is made for multiplayer mayhem, the single player side of things isn’t a mere add-on. The Ascension Rites single player story mode is a little clichéd and short, it does two important things – it demonstrates what has changed and prepares you for ownage.

Ascension Rites puts you in the role of Anubis, a member of the Nakhti race and shamed tournament player. He rejoins the tournament to prevent his ex-lover Selket from winning the throne and gaining dominance over the Nakhti. Anubis has to deal with the meddling Liandri Mining corporation as well, who seek to control the tournament for their own nefarious ends. Whilst not exactly a David or Goliath story – it’s clear from the start that Anubis can handle himself in battle – it is set up from the start that winning is something Anubis must do, or the world as he knows it is doomed.

Ascension Rites begins with a tutorial, where the new concepts set up in UC2 are introduced to the player. One of the most important differences in UC2 is that while you can play in first person view, you’re likely to play the whole game in third person view. Traditionalists may baulk at this idea, but there’s a good reason for it – melee combat. The bi-line of the game is “bring a knife to a gun fight”, but that understates the importance of the melee weapons. These aren’t just petty combat knives, these are melee weapons of such destruction that Saddam would be in trouble if Dubya found them in his possession. Just as a few rockets from the traditional RPG will send you to your maker, so too will a few good whacks from a melee weapon.

Some new moves have been added to make melee pleasurable. There’s the basic spinning attack, and continuing to hold the Right Trigger will turn you into a whirling dervish of destruction. The B button gives you a harder hit, but leaves you open at the end of your attack, so use it wisely. Jumping with the A button and pressing the Right Trigger does a devastating Matrix style Jump attack. Jumping and pressing the B button will tear your enemy a new a-hole, but likewise be wary of a counter attack or even a shield block.

Another new addition introduced to the UC2 gameplay is the “Freeze”. Hit an opponent with a melee weapon enough times, or using the alternative fire of the pistol, and you’ll freeze your opponent. In a nod to Mortal Kombat, if equipped with a melee weapon and locked on by clicking the left thumbstick, you’ll hear the familiar “Finish Him” and using a combination of button presses perform a “coup de grace” and splatter your foe across the level.

The melee weapons aren’t overpowered however. This isn’t like Halo2 where you’ll bolt at the sight of someone holding a sword. Although bullets and rockets can be deflected with melee weapons with a well-timed press of the L trigger, a well-placed rocket at their feet or sniper shot to the head can take out even the best melee combatant. Furthermore, a simple button press will change from melee to gun and back again, so often you’ll find yourself fighting in close, then jump away and switch to a projectile to do long range damage, then jump-attack to get up close again.

Adrenalin, which always seemed an afterthought for me playing on the original Unreal Championship (and probably the reason I was beat so often) is now at your command with a few simple button presses. Pressing X brings up an onscreen menu of the available Adrenalin moves available, and these are accessible with another button press. For example, “Nimble” which allows you to jump higher and control your movement better is X and A, whilst “Heal” is X + X + A. Each character has different moves, so it’s good to play each character and get a feel for what you like.

Throughout the single player campaign you’ll play through the different game modes available, and they haven’t changed too much from the Unreal staples. There’s the ol’ Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, as well as Capture The Flag and Survival. Two new additions are Nali Slaughter and Overdose. Nali Slaughter is just that – you run around a map and slaughter as many Nali – essentially non-combatant sheep people – as you can, aiming to beat your opponents total before the time runs out. Overdose is variation of Bombing Run, where you grab a ball and return it to a goal. The longer you hold a ball, the more irradiated you become, and when you score a goal when your radiation meter is full, and you get an overdose and gain extra benefits. Unfortunately Team Deathmatch and Capture The Flag are the only team modes available, and I was a left a little disappointed – I loved team Bombing Run and felt that more co-operative play would have been more fun.

The Ascension Rites campaign is quite short, but it’s not easy. Whereas some games have less than intelligent bots, the AI in UC2 can only be described as vicious. The AI has an uncanny ability to appear almost human in some respects. If equipped with a sniper rifle, the AI will often camp and attack you from afar, then switch location when you discover them, or switch to melee and bring the battle to you. They use the terrain and cover brilliantly, dodging and weaving through the levels. They’ll use power-ups to devastating effect, which can be irritating especially if you don’t know the maps.

After Ascension Rites there’s Challenge mode, whose completion is required to unlock a certain character with a stormy disposition. If you found the Ascension Rites campaign to be nasty, this is downright evil. You’ll start each round at a disadvantage, and need to catch up and overtake your opponents at whatever game you’re playing – for example you might be two to nothing at capture the flag, and be playing in a team of slow moving characters against a team of fast moving characters. You will have tantrums, you will throw the controller, and you will sweat and cuss more than a footballer on a losing team, but when you succeed the sweetness is palatable.

Multiplayer is where the real action is at, and split screen or on Live! it’s fast and furious fun. Although there was initial scepticism at the 8-person limit, any more people and I don’t think the game would be as well balanced as it is. The melee combat is blazingly fast, and more people would ruin the enjoyment. As the amount of team modes has been reduced, there is no need for many players on one team. The range of characters to unlock, mutators to play with and over 40 maps mean that there are hours upon hours of fine fragging entertainment on offer.

All the new moves and characters wouldn’t be worth jack if they didn’t look good, but each character is brilliantly realised with their individual acrobatic moves and attacks. You no longer think that you’re playing the same character in a different skin, each character feels quite extraordinary to play, and you will most likely develop a liking for one or two characters in particular, depending on your way of playing. The maps are very well conceived for the smaller limits of players, but occasionally they’ll seem a bit large as you run around trying to find campers when playing one or two other people. The background graphics, special effects, shadowing and so forth are up there with the best of the current slew of Xbox games, and the cut scenes are really impressive. Sound wise the game is equally remarkable, with Dolby in game sound on offer and with plenty of cussing and splatting to hear you’ll enjoy the audio as much as the visual aspects.


Conclusion:
UC2 is an incredibly fun game to play. It looks slick and plays well in both multiplayer and single player alike. The melee combat adds such a difference it almost feels like you’re playing a new genre of game. The enormous number of levels, playable characters and challenging gameplay mean that you’re not going to get bored of it too soon. Even if you don’t have Live! the AI Bots in single player are enough of a challenge to keep you coming back.

Pros:
Excellent blend of melee fighting and shooting.
Intelligent and challenging AI in single player mode.
Fantastic fast paced online action.
Wonderful graphics and audio.

Cons:
Cooperative team play has been cut back.
AI can be a little too tough at times.
Some maps can seem a little too big with only a few players.

91/100