Aramation Games

Sam & Max’s reincarnation as a series of episodic games was well received last year, and TellTale Games is back with the second season. The new season is an improvement on almost every front, and it is strongly recommended to the few who still enjoy adventure games, and for those new to the genre who like sharply written dialogs in their games.

Episode 1: Ice Station Santa
Sam and Max must travel to the North Pole and discover why Christmas presents are attacking, and why Santa is acting all strange.

Episode 2: Moai Better Blues
The freelance detectives gets sucked into a renegade Bermuda triangle and travel to the tropics, in order to stop the volcano from erupting.

Episode 3: Night of the Raving Dead
Zombies are on the attack and Sam and Max must travel to the Zombie Factory to stop an incredibly emo vampire from unleashing his undead army, and his Monster.

Episode 4: Chariots of the Dogs
Bosco vanishes and Sam and Max must travel through time to figure out what’s been causing all the disturbances, and restore universe into the right time stream.

Episode 5: What’s New, Beelzebub?
Bosco’s soul is sent to hell, and it’s up to the detective duo to free him and their friends from eternal hell, while making sure corporate takeover of Hell by Satan is carried out without a hitch.

The games are on the short side when it comes to length, but they make up for them with plenty of sharp humor and dialogs that slyly (and not so subtly sometimes) refer to pop culture. Improvements this season over last include an addition of tutorial, and a help system that will get you out of complex situation. Thankfully the help system can be toned down, or turned off all together, for a more pure puzzle solving experience.

In the marketplace there aren’t too many quality adventure games, and Sam & Max season 2 will be a perfect fix for your traditional point and click adventure craving.

Rating: 80%

Grand Theft Auto IV (PS3, X360)
First GTA game to appear on non-Sony console, GTA IV promises its trademark open-world gameplay with updated visuals and a robust multiplayer.

Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
Latest incarnation of Mario Kart for the Wii includes motion-sensitive controls and, for the first time in the series, bikes.

Other releases:

• Brain Voyage (DS)
• Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor (PC)
• Great War Nations: The Spartans (PC)
• Iron Man (X360, PSP, PS3, DS, Wii)
• PixelJunk Monsters Encore (PS3)
• SNK Arcade Classics Volume 1 (PSP)
• Toy Shop (DS)
• Warhawk - Operation: Broken Mirror (PS3)

John Woo presents Stranglehold, sequel to the movie Hard Boiled in a game format. Starring Chow Yun Fat as inspector Tequila, the game chronicles his adventures trying to save his kidnapped wife and daughter. To do so, he must kill many and destroy everything he can using different guns, which is a typical John Woo movie. At least the game gets the feeling right: it is a John Woo movie in a game form. Tequila automatically slide over obstacles, time slows down to a crawl as you leap, you can go up/down ledges, hang from chandelier to kill enemies and even lie on top of a rolling cart to bring destruction and mayhem.

What the game needed was more time for polish. The visuals are just ok, and some of the textures are downright ugly (especially buildings), water effects are incredibly mediocre and enemy AI is, simply put, stupid. Oftentimes, they’ll get stuck and it’ll be up to you to go to them and put them out of their misery. As an incredibly resilient police detective, you can get stuck in scenery as well and navigating tight areas will show you bad camera angles unlike in the movies. Time slowing down, and incredible amount of destruction, were already done in Max Payne games, and this seems to be a cheap homage.

The single player’s incredibly short length doesn’t help much: at least it prevents you from getting tired of time slowing down every time you jump, or you spot an enemy. After you spend a few hours blasting enemies and environment, you’ll quickly realize that the concept is great, but the execution incredibly shallow.

Rating: 50%

The biggest feat of Bioshock is creating a brand new world that doesn’t have demons (that came through some open portal to some other dimension), robots (set in the distant future) or Nazis. The unique setting of Rapture is what gives an edge to this shooter to make it one of the best ever created. Continue reading for full review:

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• Battle of the Bands (Wii)
• Chameleon (PSP)
• Dream Pinball 3D (Wii, DS)
• NBA Ballers: Chosen One (PS3, X360)
• Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness (DS)
• Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time (DS)
• River King: Mystic Valley (DS)
• Target: Terror (Wii)
• Turok (PC)
• Wild Earth: African Safari (Wii)
• The World Ends With You (DS)

Blue Dragon, produced by the creators of Final Fantasy series, is a typical JRPG featuring a diverse cast of lovable tykes in a plot to save the world through turn-based combat. Spanning 3 DVDs, this game is lengthy - marching through the game will easily take over 30 hours, close to 60 hours if you stop and do all the side quests - with plenty of battles and cut scenes. Beginning of the game suffers from the frequency of cut scenes as you move a few steps and trigger new cinematic: what’s the point of giving you control if you’ll take it away just a few seconds later?

The story starts with Shu, Kluke and Jiro who battle monsters they call Land Sharks that have been terrorizing their village for years. Then they discover this super-villain Nene who uses powerful magic and ancient machines in order to take over the world. Shu, Kluke and Jiro are soon joined by Marumaro and Zola as they follow Nene to prevent him from destroying the world. The plot is pretty simplistic and typical of the JRPG, but where this game shines is in the game mechanics.

It still features turn-based combat, but there is no random encounters. Instead, in the overworld map, you choose which enemies to fight. Fighting is done by your shadows and they can be of certain class. There’s the typical magic class and melee class. You can even mix and match skills by leveling up different shadows and combining their skill set. For example, you may wish to obtain black mage’s regenerate MP while walking skill for your white mage. There are also accessories to equip in order to give you beneficial stat boosts, or prevent status changing attacks.

Visuals are pretty good as long as you can stand all the overty cutesy characters. Playing through the game, you can’t help but notice how similar they are to Dragon Ball Z anime characters as they were designed by the same person. On a technical standpoint, the game does slow down in some battle sequences with many effects and enemies, but since this is a turn-based combat game, it doesn’t affect the game too much.

Sound effects and music are superb, especially the soundtrack contains many catchy tunes. The boss battle music which sounds very much like a 80’s heavy metal hair band song will grow on you but hearing the same song over and over did get annoying after a few hours in. If you’re looking for a traditional JRPG experience on your Xbox 360, you can’t go wrong with Blue Dragon even if it doesn’t do anything revolutionary.

Rating: 75%

PS3 Firmware 2.30 brings to life the newly redesigned PSN Store, which is miles ahead of the crap that existed before on Sony’s console. Another new feature is DTS-HD Master Audio support, if you care about that sort of things.

It is really tough to call flOw a puzzle game as there are no set challenges, objectives or game mechanic. Think of it as a more tranquil version of snake, as you "play" as a sea organism bent on gobbling up everything in its path. Each stage has a set number of smaller geometric organisms that you eat to increase your size. You can also go above one level, or below one level for other organisms to eat. As you go deeper, organisms bigger than you will try to eat you. Not that it matters as the game doesn’t track any score whatsoever so there is no penalty for, well, anything.

As a game, flOw fails miserably. As an interactive screensaver, it is gorgeous to look at as the animation is very fluid. Compared the PS3 version, this PSP port suffers from a little slowdown (especially in multiplayer). If you’ve never experienced flOw, you can do no wrong with PSP version… however I strongly recommend you skip this little overglorified piece of screensaver and opt for something meatier. After all, you will get bored of looking at blue sea populated by white geometric shapes really fast.

Rating: 10%

Nintendo’s little white console that could is finally launch in South Korea on April 26, 2008. Priced at 220,000 won (around $220), it will launch with first and third-party titles as well as its own version of Virtual Console featuring games from NES, SNES and Nintendo 64. Virtual Console pricing was also announced and it is cheaper than what’s available in North America: 400 Wii points for NES, 600 for SNES and 800 for N64 games.

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue (PS3)
Gran Turismo 5 is such a big game that they’re releasing a shortened version to tide you over until the full real release comes out.

Okami (Wii)
One of the best PS2 games that was severely overlooked comes to Nintendo Wii.

Other releases:

• Emergency Mayhem (Wii)
• Europa Universalis: Rome (PC)
• Final Fantasy XI: Vana’diel Collection 2008 (PC)
• High School Musical 2: Work This Out! (DS)
• Jack Keane (PC)
• Major League Baseball 2K8 Fantasy All Stars (DS)
• Rondo of Swords (DS)
• Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis (PC)
• The Sims 2: Kitchen & Bath Interior Design Stuff (PC)
• Summer Sports: Paradise Island (Wii)
• Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys! (DS)
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (PC)
• Turok (PC)