Game Talks

Old games never die; they just wind up ported to Xbox Live Arcade. The two-decade-old TurboGrafx-16 game Military Madness: Nectaris is the latest oldie-but-goodie to be resurrected in the Xbox 360’s online marketplace, although the turn-based strategy game’s time has clearly passed. The main appeal of the game is that this genre is underrepresented on the Xbox 360, with most games of this sort now coming out on either the PSP or DS. Still, only retro gamers are likely to appreciate such a dated, superficial design.

And the turn-based tank rush begins.
Even if you’ve never played the original Nectaris games (the franchise was given new life on the PlayStation in 1999 and then released for the Wii in 2006), the scene here should be familiar. The time is the late 22nd century and the setting is the Moon. On it, a civil war has erupted between the Earth’s Union forces and a breakaway former prison colony now dubbing itself the Xenos. Your goal in the standard and advanced campaigns is to end this pesky little conflict, courtesy of fighting through more than a dozen turn-based missions. Mechanics and structure are very old-fashioned. You have a base guarded by colorful if blocky and archaic-looking tanks, infantry, aircraft, artillery, and mechs. The other guy also has a base, guarded by the exact same forces in a different color. So the goal is, of course, to duke it out to the expected martial music and generic game ka-booms, with the lone victory conditions being either the destruction of all enemy units or domination of the rival base. Most missions also have factories that can be conquered by infantry, giving you access to a limited number of reinforcements. You can play solo or in multiplayer matches that function the same as the single-player missions with the addition of turn limits, point-based victory conditions, and commander units that can be somewhat customized. And that’s pretty much it.

Tactical considerations here are minimal. Both sides feature the exact same units, which means you don’t have to spend any time figuring out a rock-paper-scissors formula for launching offensives and defending against the enemy. Terrain is a little more involved. You have to take account for the moon’s rocky surface in every battle. Hills and craters provide positives and negatives to battle calculations, as well as slow down unit movement. Gaining the high ground is key before committing to a fight. Planning an end goal before you start pushing tanks and troops around lunar battlefields is also vital. If you fail to think a couple of steps ahead, you can easily wind up being ambushed by foes from atop cliffs or cause an armor column to be struck trudging slowly forward amidst a bunch of craters. The other strategic consideration comes from maneuvering units into smart positions before attacking. You gain big bonuses in battle by surrounding enemies before the guns start going off. This adds a realistic military dimension to combat, albeit at the expense of game flow because you often have to slow down tank rushes and spend many turns positioning units to gain the best results when attacking or defending. Every battle result is important, too. Unit numbers are generally quite limited on each campaign map, so you can’t afford to lose even a couple of tanks through a movement mistake.

Such a limited strategic scope makes Military Madness awfully shallow. With that said, missions in the campaigns can be quite challenging, with difficulty nicely gearing up over time. You go from basic base assaults with a handful of tanks and infantry in the beginning to full-fledged battles with tanks, troops, artillery, aircraft, and mechs by about the sixth scenario. The artificial intelligence is solid, too. Enemies hone in on unguarded bases and factories, as well as quickly recognize when they’re in danger on the home front. Your rival always targets infantry first and foremost, which is smart because these are the only units that can end missions immediately by occupying bases or do major damage by taking over a factory.

At last, the world of Azeroth, first glimpsed in the original Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, is brought to life in glorious detail. Join the eight million players (and counting) currently adventuring in Azeroth as well as beyond the Dark Portal, and see what journeys await for those who would plumb the many secrets of this ancient realm.

As a massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft enables thousands of players from across the globe to come together online – undertaking grand quests and heroic exploits in a land of fantastic adventure.

World of Warcraft draws heavily upon the lore of the Warcraft universe. Long-time fans of the Warcraft games are finally able to step into the world from a players perspective, and experience the universe firsthand.

People, places, and units from the strategy games are brought to life in World of Warcraft. You can visit such places as the Burning Steppes, where Grom Hellscream fell in battle against the demon lord Mannoroth, and Ironforge, where the dwarves make their home below the mountain.

Legendary heroes, such as Thrall, Cairne Bloodhoof, and King Magni Bronzebeard, are also in the game, presiding over their respective peoples as leaders in their races capitals.

Guards in the human city of Stormwind look just like footmen from Warcraft III, peasants in the human town of Hillsbrad look exactly like their counterparts in the strategy games, and orc peons shuffle about the farms of GoShek in the Arathi Highlands. Night elf players can even see gargantuan Ancient Protectors patrolling the elven lands of Teldrassil, while a towering Ancient of War waits to greet all visitors to Darnassus.

The Warriors series continues to set the standard for repetitive button mashing in this dull, ugly sequel. Released last year for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 2, Warriors Orochi 2 demonstrated a stalwart dedication to the shallow, repetitive gameplay that has characterized most games in the Warriors series. This hack-and-slash button masher has now made its way to the PSP, and series fans can rest easy: All the crushing boredom of the console versions has survived the transition to Sony’s handheld.

The heroes of Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors found themselves united by a time-bending, world-merging serpent king in Warriors Orochi. Warriors Orochi 2 carries on that crossover and introduces new characters to bring the full playable roster to a whopping 96. There are five stories to choose from in the Story mode: one for each of the three kingdoms of China, one for the samurai warriors of Japan, and one for Orochi and his followers. By this point, the personalities of these characters and the relationships between them have been developing for a long time across their respective series. The basic story of good versus evil is simple and easy to follow, but unless you’re a series devotee, you’ll likely find all of the name-dropping and much of the dialogue impenetrable. Who is Yoshimoto Imagawa? Why is he pining for a kemari partner? Does it matter? It doesn’t help that the storytelling is terrible. There’s the occasional cutscene, but for the most part, the game employs static portraits of characters who utter wooden dialogue. Most of the characters are unlikable, too; the historic personages who make up the cast are imagined here as arrogant nobles, sultry seductresses, and monosyllabic buffoons. The company of the heroes and villains alike is not enjoyable.

Each of the game’s five stories takes you through a series of battles that play out in large environments. The action consists mostly of running around the battlefields and frequently pausing to tap the attack button for a while. This tapping results in the slaughter of hundreds of enemy troops who would rather stand in place and let you kill them than make any attempt to hinder your progress. You can also perform the occasional special attack, which is useful for more quickly defeating the enemy captains you encounter. Being powerful enough to slice through so many of your enemies with such ease should be intoxicating, but here, it’s simply a chore. Before each mission, you compose a team of three characters, and as you play, you can switch between them on the fly, though there isn’t generally much need or incentive to do so. Sure, there are 96 playable characters, but each character falls into one of just three basic categories: power, speed, and technique. Each category has its own special ability, but the differences between them have little impact on how they actually play.

While you probably won’t often be threatened by enemy attacks, your allies are not so powerful or competent. During each battle, you’ll receive constant updates on such things as shifts in morale and allies who are struggling elsewhere on the battlefield. This should contribute to the sense that battles are dynamic and large in scope, but in fact, very little of this information has any concrete impact on you as you run around slaughtering bad guys. There are conditions by which you can fail each battle, however. You will need to watch these updates for any mention that your main camp is in danger or that some ally who must not be defeated is struggling, so that you can hurry to the rescue. Repeatedly being forced to dash across the battlefield to rescue a helpless ally will make you feel like more of a babysitter than a powerful warrior.

Looking at the menu between battles–which features such options as abilities, character growth, and customize weapon–you might think that there are significant role-playing elements here. You do earn experience and level up over time. You can also fuse weapons to make them more powerful and unlock a host of passive abilities that you can equip your team with, such as increased speed or a gradually recharging a life bar. These aspects have little impact on the action, though, serving only to make you wish for a gameplay experience in which growth and development actually mattered.

Sony Computer Entertainment America announced today a new and exclusive PlayStation 3 offering for the critically acclaimed God of War franchise, God of War Collection.

Scheduled for release this holiday season, God of War Collection will feature reworked versions of both God of War and God of War II on a single Blu-ray Disc at full 1280 x 720 resolution. Both critically acclaimed games, which were originally developed for the PlayStation 2, have been remastered with anti-aliased graphics running at 60 frames per second for a smooth gameplay experience on the PS3. Additionally, the Blu-ray Disc compilation will bring PlayStation Network trophy support to the franchise for the first time (included for both games). The compilation of both best-selling games costing just $39.99 MSRP.

Developed by Sony Computer Entertainment, Santa Monica Studio, the God of War series brings epic mythological battles to life with stunning graphics and an elaborate plot that puts Kratos, the triology’s main character, at the center of carnage and destruction as he seeks revenge against the Gods who have betrayed him. God of War III is scheduled for release exclusively on the PS3 in March 2010.

“We are excited today to announce God of War Collection,” said Scott Rohde, vice president, Worldwide Studios America. “Our fans spoke and we listened; thanks to our partnership with Bluepoint Games, fans and newcomers to the series can experience the epic God of War and God of War II saga in stunning 720p on PS3. This Blu-ray Disc compilation brings Kratos to PS3 even earlier than expected.”

There are three basic categories of Radeon HD 4890 cards available on the market today. On the low-end are the plain jane reference designs that are exact replicas of each other and rely on the bone stock cooling and clock speeds ATI dictates at a minimum for the Radeon 4890 GPU. These cards tend to be priced cheaper – often right around $200 or less – as they’re essentially competing for the gamer on a budget who wants no frills, and just wants to get their hands on 4890 technology at the lowest price point possible.

Then there are the hardware enthusiasts who want performance. For this user, card manufacturers offer their factory OC’ed 4890 boards.

Earlier this summer these cards tended to rely on the stock ATI cooler as well, but newer boards released in the last two months have offered significantly better cooling. These cards tend to reach for clock speeds approaching the 1GHz core clock frequency, and are priced appropriately.

The third camp wants the high-end cooling found on the aforementioned OC’ed 4890 cards; ATI’s stock cooler isn’t good enough. At the same time though these users don’t want to pay the $220+ many of the fastest Radeon 4890 cards sell for.

Basically, they want good GPU cooling, but they don’t want to be forced to donate an organ to afford it either.