the grunter

The Unreal Engine has defined first person shooting (FPS from here on) genre standards for the longest time, thanks to games that were built on the engine such as Counter Strike, Half Life and Team Fortress. As games like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor came out in attempt to challenge the multiplayer FPS throne, Epic Games answers with their first title developed in the then brand new Unreal Engine 3. This game is Gears of War (Gears from here on), an original Xbox 360 exclusive title. The reception – not only did Gears raise the bar on the level of quality and details visually, but also introduced an entirely new gameplay concept that no copycats have been able to successfully duplicate.

Read more

New York, 1945.

A young couple chat on the streets of Little Italy, a nearby store explodes and killing the couple. The man from the couple works for the Corleone family, and he promised his girl that he is going to take care of some troubled kid who is getting his ass beat in a back alley. That is pretty much the premise of The Godfather: The Game, sorry if I missed or remembered wrong on the details, I could not bring my full attention to the 2006 low res pre-rendered FMV sequence.

Anyway, not much of an opening I know. Especially got a game adapted from one of the most popular movies of all time. But this is a story about a guy who starts off as a no-name runner doing Fedex runs for the mob family, eventually climbs his way up to the Don of NYC. You cannot argue with this plot – If you’ve watched The Godfather II you’d know that’s how the Don became the Don.

For most people, the fact that this is a movie-based game already sets an alarm, and the fact that it is a GTA-style sandbox game quickly sets another alarm. But read on to find out why this game deserves your attention.

Keep in mind that this review is written based on a playthrough on the PC version of the game, The Godfather: The Game is also available on Xbox, Xbox 360, PS3 and PSP.

Read more

http://www.facebook.com/foodforjapan

I was going to get some PS2 action going over the weekend, but couldn’t find the two memory cards that I’ve been using (one of them the original black card, the other a Virtua Fighter 4 transparent card). Pretty frustrating, not that I got precious game saves on there or anything (I’m not even gonna pretend I remember what I have in those) but it’s messed up when I really wish to play a game but because there’s no memory card in the console, I can’t really start playing. This is the one thing I like the most about cartridges where the game saves get stored in the game itself.. nowadays I gotta have a memory card, a gamer profile, internet connection, 6 kinds of blood/urine and stool samples before I can just crack open a game and enjoy for 10 minutes. Ridiculous.

So in the midst of flipping my video game accessories drawer upside down, I found this little guy sitting in a cool leather jacket. I must’ve gotten it with the Japanese release of FFXII, I honestly don’t remember having that. But oh well, welcome to the family, gonna be using you from now on.

Back in the day when the original Xbox was trying to knock PS2 off its throne of being the most popular console (and eventually failed), an internal competition within several titles of the then-new sandbox genre was heating up as well. Grand Theft Auto III by Rockstar Games was the champion and Mafia from Illusion Softworks(Now 2K Czech) was one of the challengers. Others include True Crime: Streets of LA and Simpsons: Hit and Run.

It has been a while since I finished Mafia, but I do remember it being quite an entertaining game. Strangely my instincts for picking games have always been steering me away from a lot of the mainstream titles, as a result I have never finished some of the classics such as GTA III, Kill Zone 2, God of War and much more. Mafia might have caused less damage to the undefeated GTA III than it desired, but I can say with confidence that if it wasn’t for Mafia, we wouldn’t be seeing other mob-themed sandbox genre games such as The Godfather and Scarface. I cannot comment on whether this was good news or not, unfortunately.

Mafia was original, it puts players in the time where the mob power was the largest in the city so it was a big deal, and the game definitely offered me something that GTA III didn’t (I didn’t finish the game, but I did get far enough to know this much).

Read more