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.

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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.

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From time to time in video game history, there were ideas that sounded great on paper, and the final products were just as fantastic as advertised. There were ideas that sounded really promising on paper, but came out being a turd.

(Great concept, even better execution)

(The guy who came up with the concept deserves an execution)

And then, there were the games that made people slowly turn their heads while massaging their temples ever since the day they were announced. No one ever understood who came up with these ideas, more importantly, who bank-rolled these projects. The end products, if they actually do get produced and put on shelves, did not change anybody’s mind – Kabuki Warriors is one of these games.

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One of the high points of my early gaming years was on my cousin’s Famicom (FC), or NES for you North Americans.

I love action games, I played Super Mario Bros and thought that it’s cool, yet a little bit “vanilla”. Now “Double Dragon” and “Contra”, they involved people getting punched or shot in the face point blank, and better refined my definition of what a decent side scroller should be.

And then along came Capcom’s “Bionic Commando”, with a way cooler title name for the Japanese release – ヒットラーの復活 トップシークレット, translates to “The Resurrection of Hitler: Top Secret”. There’s no debate that this title won’t fly in the Americas and Europe, so all instances of the Nazi/Swastikas/Hitler are gone in the US version. Read more

The time was 1988, not long after I was given my first game console – the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES, or the “Grey Machine” back in the day). Unlike most other kids who had a Famicom, the japanese version of the NES which was sold in import game stores, my parents bought mine at a local department store that sells the “localized version” of the system which was the NES, and game cartridges are the large, palm-sized ones as opposed to the Famicom ones which are half the size.

Stuck with my “Super Mario Brothers” that came with the console for forever because I lacked skills (or “lack” rather.. things haven’t changed that much over the years), I did not get a chance to try out some of the other titles that my friends/neighbors were playing at the time because they all played on the FC, the two types of cartridges were not interchangeable (until I learned about the honeybee converter much later on). One time I was invited to a neighbor’s home to play on her FC after school, she’s playing all these crazy games that I never knew existed – Dragonball, Saint Seiya, and what’s this? A McDonalds game?

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