Do you like the Bioshock series of games?  Like being immersed into a world that seems to have existed on it’s own for many years?  Do you like exploring said world and discovering that something has gone horribly wrong?  Do you like to manipulate time?  Do you like to kill creatures by shooting them or manipulating time?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, stop reading this and pick up Singularity.  Raven Software are the developers of this game and you may recognize them from Wolfenstein or X-Men Origins: Wolverine amongst other great games.  They do a great job creating a world that you can really get involved in as well as destroy or rebuild.

The shooting is pretty tight, the guns definitely feel real and the graphics are slightly above average.  A’la Bioshock, the game is a little creepy with it’s atmosphere and it’s story telling but that makes it fun and interesting for me.  The premise is this, Russia has created a substance called E99 that they plan to use to make themselves a stronger world power than the USA.  While developing E99 something goes really wrong and causes mutations in people and destruction of things.  Years later 2 American soldiers are investigating something (I forget what) and they end up on this island when their helo crashes.  1 of the soldiers ends up discovering this device called the TMD that allows him to manipulate time and space.

There is a bit of language as it’s an M rated game and when you are dealing with mutants and Russians you are gonna see some violent content.  Kids, stay away.

That’s it!  There’s a ton of fun to be had with this game, for me because I liked Time Shift and Wolfenstein this game was right up my alley.  Check it out.

Come on, did you honestly think this game was going to be good?  Well that’s exactly how I felt about the game before I had played it but now I cannot wait to buy it on launch day.

The premise of the game is team on team battle or objective based gameplay.  You choose your class (only 2 to choose from in demo) and you hunt down and destroy the opposing team.  The gameplay is tight, aiming and such is spot on unlike some 3rd person games and the arsenal of weapons to use is vast.  You can melee with a sword or giant hammer, transform your character to a vehicle (each has their own unique abilities) and basically rock the house.

There is nothing to not like about this game and it has the potential to be overlooked considering the first 2 Transformers games were terrible.  You owe it to yourself to try this game out if you have an Xbox 360, sorry PS3 guys you have to wait until the game is released to try the demo.

I have played a lot of video games in my day.  A few have accomplished the almost impossible task of freaking me out while playing.  Most “survival horror” games boast a factor of fear and cannot deliver.  From the first time that a zombie dog broke through the window of the mansion in Resident Evil I have longed for the same level of adrenaline-pumping-scare-my-socks-off type horror that only comes around every purple moon.  Alan Wake is the answer to my long awaited prayer.

With most games that take eons to come out though they were promised years before, I had my reservations about Alan Wake a’la Too Human.  The concept seemed interesting enough, but in our waiting process a few copy cats had arrived to try and steal Alan’s thunder.  Alone in the Dark and Deadly Premonition are games that are almost identical in theory to Alan Wake, yet failed to deliver any type of gaming enjoyment.  Not so with A. Wake.

From the very beginning you are immersed into one of Alan’s Nightmares and introduced to one of the games enemies “the Taken”.  These dark shadowy figures are human-like and desire to kill you for unknown reasons. Some of the lower level Taken may sling knives at you while others wield axes and will lunge at you to cut you into pieces.  Their laughs are maniacal and disturbing and their growling and gutteral sounds leave you feeling uneasy.  In order to do away with these enemies you must shine your flashlight onto them until the darkness is dissolved and then shoot them with your guns leaving them to dissipate into thin air once defeated.

Throughout the entire game Alan narrates everything that happens audibly as opposed to reading the thoughts on screen a’la Resident Evil and “The staircase is darkly lit and leaves you feeling disturbed”.  As the player you truly feel like you are experiencing the story with Alan.  There are moments where it feels like the game is just having you walk from one cut scene to another however each cut scene tells an important part of the story and further digs you in to it’s hole and the action can be so intense at times that it will make you forget that the last part of the game you played you didn’t do anything exciting.

Each level plays out like an episode of a TV show complete with a “previously on” made famous by Lost.  On the second to highest difficulty each episode has taken over an hour to complete.  Depending on how much exploring you choose to do to find manuscript pages or coffee mugs will significantly shorten your episode time.  I would recommend turning the lights out, turning up the surround sound and taking your sweet time to play through because no other game has provided an experience thus far like Alan Wake has for me.

With only a T rating and a slight bit of language, the only negative connotations so far is the darkness, but in a sense you are fighting it off and in a nice little allusion it takes the “light” of a flashlight to destroy the darkness.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the original Just Cause.  It reminded me a lot of every other open world game out there, the only cool things about it were the limited use of the grappling hook and the parachute.  Still, the game was somewhat of a success for the Xbox 360 and it spurned a sequel which will be released tomorrow 23 March.

In the demo you get 30 minutes to explore the game and it’s content.  If you cause enough chaos you get time extensions and I was able to play almost 40 something minutes.  Just Cause 2 seems to me like a complete overhaul of the original game.  The concepts are the same but the graphics, control and fun factor are all upgraded and well received.

The first thing you will learn is that your grappling hook is a completely integral part of your arsenal.  You can grapple onto almost anything and not only that but you can hook your grappling hook to something and then attach it to something else and let the physics take over.  For example, you can grapple an enemy and then grapple an oncoming car and watch as the enemy is dragged away.  You can also attach your grapple to a helicopter and then to a building and the chopper gets stuck.  There are an unending amount of things to do with just the grapple. My own personal experience involved me shooting at a propane tank and as it propelled into the air I grappled myself to it and was shot like a rocket into the sky.  I then opened my parachute and floated around the world.  It was an awesome experience and it’s things like that that will make this game a playground for anyone who is playing it.

The shooting has also been improved and the hit detection seems pretty spot on.  You can shoot someone in the leg and they react to the shot which I personally find to be important.  There are numerous vehicles to ride in and tons of environments to destroy.  The game is a cross between, GTA/Mercenaries/Crackdown and Bionic Commando (except fun).  I can’t recommend this game enough just based on the demo and it will be a day 1 purchase for me.

Can I just be a little school girl for a second?  Oh my gosh Killzone 2 multiplayer is sooooo freakin awesome!

Ok, now I’m done.  I picked up Killzone 2 last night at Walmart.  I was the only person waiting for it, felt pretty dumb being “that guy” in my pajamas standing in an invisible line.  After learning that my local Game Stop wasn’t having a midnight launch due to no reservations.  No reservations?  Seriously?  Not a really good start for the game that will save the world and put Sony back on top.  I guess I live in an Xbox and Wii town.

So I popped in Killzone 2 as soon as I got home, instead of starting the single player missions I decided I wanted to try out the multiplayer first.  Guess what?  No game install!  Can this be true?  What has happened to my PS3?  Did it change over night?  I set up my region settings and got right into a game.

I played all night with 31 other people online, that’s a lot of people to kill.  Thankfully due to Killzone 2′s unique experience I didn’t have to focus on killing everyone all the time.  As each game progresses you have different objective to overcome.  Just as we explained in episode 98 of the Hardcore Christian Gamer Cast, you can start off killing as many of the opposing team that you can.  Then you move to escorting a propaganda speaker from one location to another.  Next you may have to find the target and assassinate him.  It keeps changing throughout the rounds keeping things chaotic and fun.

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Love Foul Language? You’ll Love This Game!

When I say adults, please know that I am specific when I say that only adults should be playing this game. Although House of the Dead Overkill is a rail-shooter with arcade aspects, the language alone is enough to take the genre to a different level. The amount of mature language in this game would make Samuel L. Jackson blush, it’s completely unnecessary and gratuitous.

Language aside, the game introduces a whole new element to the HOTD series. If you are a fan of the recent Tarantino Grind House films you will definitely see where the developers drew their inspiration from. The game does a great job evoking the sense of watching an old Grind House movie including fantastic voice over acting and narrative.

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As a sucker for scary games/movies F.E.A.R. 2 is right up my alley.  Monolith has a way of scaring the pants off me.  I am not sure if it’s just me but every time I play a game I literally loose my pants.  (probably cause I usually play in a robe) sorry for the visual.

I enjoyed the F.E.A.R 2 demo on the marketplace immensely and even the demo scared me but it was only a slight tease compared to what I experianced in the first few hours of gameplay with the final version.

F.E.A.R 2 starts off approximately 30 minutes before the ending of the first game.  You play as Michael Beckett, part of a team of special ops personnel who are dispatched to rescue Dr. Genevieve Aristide from a facility that has been breached by black ops operatives.

Instantaneously I was immersed in the atmosphere of the game.  The game is so well done in environments and graphics.  I even noticed a little AI at the very first part of the game.  As I was exploring the outside of the building we were getting ready to enter, I walked into a giant water fountain and my partner said “What you want to take a bath?” and then upon entering and our platoon leader asking what took us so long my partner said “Becket decided he wanted to take a bath in the fountain”.  It’s the little things like that-that set the game apart from the first version of F.E.A.R.

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I want to like this game.  I truly do.  I want to like it so much that I even recommended a friend to create a European account just to try the demo early.

I don’t know much about the Killzone franchise, so please don’t butcher me with my knowledge of past games.  From what I understand is that the first Killzone was a rather mediocre game on the PS2 scoring a 70 on Metacritic.  So why all the hype about Killzone 2?  Apparently a video surfaced before the release of the PS3 and had people going crazy over the graphics and fluidity of the game.  The video turned out to be a CG experience however the developers promised that the game would look as good upon release.

So, as we are close to release the Killzone 2 demo became available for pre-orderers and the European market.  I want Killzone to be an awesome experience giving me a reason to love my PS3.  In fact Sony seems to believe that Killzone 2 is going to be the game to make the PS3 a household name.

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I played through F.E.A.R 1 when it first came out.  It was a direct port from the PC to the 360 which was obvious in a lot of aspects.  The shooting was off, the graphics seemed blocky, the hit detection was lacking and much more.  However the first F.E.A.R. wasn’t really that bad of a game at all and it certainly had it’s scary moments.  One of the best parts of F.E.A.R. was the bullet time sequences that you could use, where you would literally slow down time and take out your opponents before the time had elapsed.

So I played the F.E.A.R. 2 demo with high expectations, thinking that they would capitalize on what worked with the original and fix the things that didn’t.  The end result?  It worked!  The F.E.A.R. 2 demo is amazing and it truly looks like it will be head and shoulders above the original game.

The first things I noticed was the graphic upgrade.  Everything in this game looks better.  The backgrounds look real, the enemies are smooth and seemless, Alma (the creepy little girl) looks like an actual little girl-and creepy.  The shooting is spot on, the hit detection actually registered when you hit an enemy and the bullet time was stellar!

I am not completely sure on the plot line for this game aside from the fact that Alma is back and she is causing havok.  There were some very noticeably creepy parts in the demo, even one where I jumped from fright!  My kinda game.  Monolith does a great job making you feel like you are all alone in your environment, there are crazy things going on around you-lighting effects add such a scary mood.

I am very impressed with this demo and even more excited for the release of the game.  If you have not checked this game out yet you need to.  Be aware however that it is an M rated title.  There are lots of bloody moments and it can be pretty disturbing.

Thanks to the kind folks at Valve I was able to get my hands on Left4Dead a day early, which really wasn’t that early as it turned out that 2 others from our community had the game last night as well.  After a straight two hours of game play I can farely say that Left4Dead has fully exceeded my expectations.  My only recommendation thus far is if you play on any mode other than normal is it’s imperative that you have a full squad of 4 players to play with.  Read more after the jump…

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