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Aug 30, 2007 at 19:20 o\clock

Crashday

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Download, game, racing

Publisher: ValuSoft
Developer: Replay Studios
Genre: Racing
Release Date: Dec 20, 2006
ESRB Descriptors: Alcohol Reference, Violence, Lyrics
Connectivity: Online, Local Area Network
Customization: Editing Tools
Online Modes: Competitive
Number of Players: 1-4

If you were to smoosh together the FlatOut series of demolition racing games and Nadeo's TrackMania stunt-racing franchise, then systematically vacuum out all of the most appealing aspects of both titles, you'd have the basic equivalent of Crashday. It's not that the game is terrible, but so little of it feels genuine or original; it's more of a cheap, hacked-together clone of the aforementioned titles. And what's more, it isn't even a particularly good clone. The game's race modes lack coherency--let alone excitement--and the stunt and combat modes fall flat.

There's supposed to be a premise to Crashday, but it's anyone's guess as to what it is exactly. Booting up the game's career mode simply drops you right into the middle of a backstory that features up-and-coming racers in some cockamamie imaginary racing league. But the text doesn't explain much, and the guy doing the voice acting is practically indecipherable. Imagine, if you will, a game developer tracking down the man with the thickest British accent in the world, plopping him down in front of a series of bad New York mafia movies, handing him a script, and demanding he talk exactly like the gangsters portrayed onscreen. That's how awful the voice acting is in Crashday.

Once you realize the premise is best ignored and actually jump into the game, you'll find gameplay that's just as clumsy as the voice acting. Racing in Crashday is exceedingly frustrating. Cars are a floaty, slippery mess, sliding out and crashing into random objects on a regular basis. This is an arcade racer, so no one's asking for a devout dedication to realism. But arcade or not, these cars are not fun to drive, nor do they handle well. Of course, the trick is that you have to drive especially fast because the other racers have a preternatural ability to use their speed boosts at all the right moments and will always blaze past you if you screw up. So what you end up having to do is memorize every nook and cranny of each race track just so you can figure out where to use your boost and where not to use it. Another weird thing is that the game's sense of speed isn't all that good. You definitely get the sense that your car is about to go flying out of control at any second, but the visceral thrill of high-speed racing is basically absent.

Only the stunt and combat races are slightly better than the sense of speed. Stunt modes include tracks filled with ramps, jumps, and loops, but there's a highly limited scope to the stunt track designs. The game lacks the sort of "look at how completely insane these tracks are" vibe that such games as TrackMania have all but perfected. They're not kooky or bizarre; they're just a bunch of ramps and loops. And they're not even laid out well. The bonus is that the game does include a track editor, but even its scope is limited, allowing for a few bizarre twists but not much more.

The combat modes come in a couple of forms. There are straight-up demolition races where the goal is to just slam into opponent cars over and over again until everyone has exploded but you. Then there are weapon-based modes that give you a Gatling gun and a missile launcher so you can go nuts. These are, by far, the most entertaining modes in the game because, in stark contrast to the driving physics, the game's crash physics aren't half bad. Cars break apart pretty nicely, and the weapons aren't hard to aim or use, which makes wanton destruction a fairly painless process. The main issue here is the limited array of tracks and weapons. It would be nice if there were more variety to the destruction at hand. But sadly there isn't, and after a few plays against the computer, the action does get a bit tiresome.

Multiplayer would theoretically remedy that issue, but even the multiplayer isn't without problems. The primary problem is that there's nobody online to play against. Sure, the servers list lots of games being played, but they're all being played across the pond by players in Europe. And the European version of the game isn't compatible with the US version for some reason. So you won't be able to play against any of them until Moonbyte patches one version or the other. We spent a considerable amount of time trying to find a US-based opponent but only found one playable online match during that entire span. To make matters worse, lag practically wrecked the experience. Trying to play a crash race while cars skip and jump all over the track is just about the most obnoxious thing you'll ever experience.

Apart from the awful voice acting, the remainder of Crashday's production value is bit more laudable. As mentioned previously, the crash effects are done quite nicely, and the cars deform and explode about as well as you would hope. The car models aren't exactly impressive, but considering you're just thrashing them over and over again, they don't need to look pristine. The tracks are easily the weakest point of the visuals. The background environments are extremely generic, dressed up with bland-looking towns and set pieces, as well as unattractive textures. They're not hideous, but they're definitely not pleasing to the eye.

Of course, someone could try to justify the plain-Jane gameplay and total lack of originality found in Crashday by simply mentioning that it's only a $20 game. Do you want to know how much a new copy of FlatOut 2 costs on the PC? Yes, that's right, $20. And a copy of TrackMania: Sunrise? It's the same price. Do yourself a favor and go right to the sources of Crashday's inspiration rather than pay for a bargain-basement, bush-league version of the same basic gameplay concepts.

By Alex Navarro, GameSpot

Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium IV 1 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 256 MB
Video Memory: 64 MB
Hard Drive Space: 1500 MB

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Aug 29, 2007 at 06:36 o\clock

Monster Madness Battle for Suburbia

by: freepcgame   Keywords: game, Download, shooting, Action

Publisher: SouthPeak Interactive
Developer: Artificial Studios
Genre: Shoot-'Em-Up
Release Date: Jun 12, 2007 (more)
ESRB: TEEN
ESRB Descriptors: Blood, Mild Language, Tobacco Reference, Violence, Mild Suggestive Themes
Connectivity: Online
Number of Players: 1 Player
Number of Online Players: 16 Online

Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia really wishes it was born in the '80s. It's got its heart in the right place, aiming to capture the kitschy vibe of such zombie-murdering classics as Zombies Ate My Neighbors and creating a gameplay design that feels like a 3D mash-up of Gauntlet or Ikari Warriors. When you throw in four-player co-op play, a bunch of goofy competitive multiplayer modes, a lengthy campaign, and a ridiculous number of monsters to kill, the recipe for some good old-fashioned fun would seem to be in place. But Monster Madness botches the execution. This includes a counterintuitive control scheme, oddly balanced difficulty, obnoxiously repetitive combat, and a nearly useless camera in co-op mode. Eventually such problems become too numerous and too annoying to tolerate, turning what could have been a simple monster-killing romp into a scattered, clumsy mess.

Monster Madness revolves around a quartet of teenage stereotypes (the geek, the bro, the goth chick, the cheerleader) who find themselves in the midst of an invasion from a greatest-hits collection of the monster world. For some reason, ghouls, ghosts, goblins, skeletons, mummies, werewolves, gremlins, vampires, martians, UFOs, harpies, banshees, leprechauns, jack-o-lanterns, chupacabras, evil trees, demons, medusas, imps, evil clowns, spiders, gargoyles, swamp monsters, the grim reaper, zombies, zombie dogs, zombie pirates, zombie samurais, zombie Indians, zombie grannies, zombie tanks, and exploding zombies, among others, are attacking suburbia. And the four hapless kids are the only ones around to do anything about it. Armed with melee weapons, such as axes or plungers, they dive headfirst into this monster-killing adventure, cracking bad jokes and pining for one another all along the way.

The story is more of an excuse to get you killing monsters than anything else, though it's also an excuse to insert as much awful comedy as possible into the proceedings. Occasionally, the game elicits a chuckle or snicker, but for the most part, the script isn't all that funny. Part of this has to do with the jokes, which often rely too heavily on slightly obscure and rather lame pop- and nerd-culture references. The other part has to do with the voice acting, which is largely flat and unremarkable. Even in the rare instances where enthusiasm is mustered for a line or two, none of the actors seem to have much in the way of comic timing. The game often has characters repeating the same tired lines again and again, as well.

Monster Madness comes encumbered with a gameplay design that is best described as cluttered. You begin the game with just a simple melee weapon, but over time, you can buy and build a whole mess of new weapons with the help of a friendly mechanic named Larry Tools, who pops up in various level areas. Your weapons include everything from nail guns, shot guns, and tazers to rocket launchers, CD launchers, and laser cannons. As nice as the weapon variety is, you actually need very few of the weapons, save for very specific situations. You'll often find that it's more useful to upgrade a few key weapons as opposed to buying everything that comes your way, especially because you'll often need to switch between certain weapons quickly. If you've got a bunch of useless junk cluttering up your inventory, it makes the scrolling process much more difficult. Fortunately, you can hotkey a few weapons if necessary.

Combat might have been enjoyable if the controls were not so wonky. The control scheme on the PC is manageable only because you can configure it as needed. On the Xbox 360, you have no such luck. Attack buttons are mapped to the triggers, weapon scrolling is mapped to the bumpers, and to jump--of all things--you have to click in the right stick. Considering how much time you spend with your thumb on the right stick, that might sound like a good idea, but the stick button often seems unresponsive. That becomes a spectacular frustration during the few bouts of platforming the game tosses at you, which is made even more insane by the fact that the A and B buttons are just redundant weapon scrolling options. Melee attacks are easy enough because all you have to do is hammer on the attack button while enemies happen to be near you, but if you're still using melee attacks past the third or fourth stage, you're doing something wrong. Weapons combat is OK, except that aiming tends to be a bit of a chore. There's no target-locking feature, and moving the aiming reticle seems a bit slow (and there's no mouse sensitivity adjuster in the PC version). It's not that big of a deal when you're just blasting away at big groupings of larger baddies, but any time you've got quick, nimble enemies in front of you, hitting them is a severe pain.

Scratch that; the whole game is just a severe pain, especially if you're one of the unlucky folk who happens to play the game all by your lonesome. This is one of those games that thinks being really hard equates to being really fun. On the default difficulty level, the game becomes frustrating only a few stages in because the number of enemies you're fending off happens to be massive and because the game's checkpoint system is abysmal. You'll have to do multiple sequences all in one line without getting killed, or you'll have to do them all over again. These are five-to-10-minute chunks of the game too, and you'll be doing them several times each because of one crazy onslaught of enemies or another. Boss fights are even more infuriating. If you set the game to the easiest difficulty, it's more playable. It might be a little too easy, but you can get through it without wanting to take a sledgehammer to the game.

What makes that aspect even more frustrating is that the game encourages you to explore the levels as much as possible to find hidden parts for weapons. Larry uses these parts to build your upgraded weapons, and there are tons of them scattered throughout the game. That's all well and good in theory, but if you're being forced to replay big chunks of each level again and again because of the stupid checkpoint system, why would you want to waste your time going back to explore the same areas again only to lose all the items you just picked up? After a while, you'll stop picking up any items you can't just grab easily along your normal path.

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Aug 28, 2007 at 18:19 o\clock

Xpand Rally Xtreme

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Download, game, racing, rally

Publisher: Techland
Developer: Techland
Genre: Rally / Offroad Racing
Release Date: TBA (EU)

Xpand Rally Xtreme is a totally "xtreme" variation of the Xpand Rally racer. Apart from rally cars, gamers will find super-fast GT vehicles, DTR buggies, off-road 4x4 vehicles and Monster Trucks. The game features approximately 40 tracks in typical SS contests, off-road cross-country rides, and racing track races against challenging opponents. Like the original Xpand Rally, the game contains career mode, single races and multiplayer.

I am starting to believe that developers are intentionally avoiding the rally racing genre even though it is unpopulated and ignored in favor of track racing games. After all, fans have the long running Colin McRae (CMR) series for their arcade racing desires and the one and only simulation Richard Burns Rally (RBR), each with a large and dedicated following. That is why Techland are being really brave, as with XRX they are trying to challenge both at the same time, and while it is certainly not the ultimate rally racing package it has enough to compete with the current favorites.

What initially attracted me the most were the two racing modes, arcade and simulation, or more specifically how they played. Overall, I found the arcade mode a bit more demanding than CMR, and the sim mode a bit more forgiving than RBR. Xpand is literally the game which addressed the biggest issues I had with those games, which I thoroughly enjoyed in every aspect minus the physics. Not being particularly fond of hardcore simulations, I mostly struggled with RBR, yet I wasn’t that uncaring to ignore the unnatural and weird way cars behaved in CMR. Best of all is that both modes offer a challenge and in a way represent two difficulty modes, each requiring a certain amount of skill and concentration.

I believe this works so well largely thanks to the track design. In most simulations, for the better part of the race you are fighting with the vehicle, trying to keep in under control around the bends. In Xpand, you are fighting the road and your vehicle in equal well-balanced parts and, unless you are traveling on asphalt, the ground is never flat or leveled. A bump here, a rock there, trees or houses around you, water on the sides or a cement wall, grass and plants obscuring your vision, alternating road surfaces having real impact on handling, and everything becomes deadlier when you add speed, rain, or night conditions. The good thing is that few of these obstacles completely stop you, so damage and losing speed or direction are the usual penalties.

All of this, of course, remains challenging even on arcade mode where the vehicle is quick and maneuverable and it’s easy to get carried away and trick oneself into being careless. Both game modes require constant input from players, especially when tracks consist of turns after turns which need to be negotiated with care. Mistakes are allowed, however, and thankfully this isn’t one of those cases where you need days of practice and outstanding skill; if you drive well you’ll be rewarded and do well – you don’t have to be meticulous to advance in the championship.

Min. Requirements:
• Win 2000/XP
• P4/AMD Athlon 1,8GHz
• 256MB RAM
• DX 9.0 compatible (Geforce 5700 or ATI Radeon 9600) video card
• DX 8.0 compatible sound card
• DirectX 9.0c

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Aug 27, 2007 at 17:22 o\clock

TomClancy's RainbowSix : Lockdown

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Action, Download, game, shooter

Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Red Storm Ent.
Genre: Modern Tactical Shooter
Release Date: Feb 16, 2006
ESRB: MATURE
ESRB Descriptors: Blood, Violence, Language
Number of Players: 1-16

The newest game in the Rainbow Six shooter series, Lockdown, has finally arrived on the PC. What you won't find in this version of the game are elements of a straight console port. The game's environments are as large and detailed as you'd expect from a PC shooter, while extraneous elements from the console versions, like the hokey cutscenes and hidden briefcases scattered around the levels, have been toned down or removed entirely. Most importantly, the game feels like a PC shooter, with all the precision in aiming and movement that mouse and keyboard control can afford. While the developers have done a great job in ensuring Lockdown for the PC didn't end up just being a sloppy port, it bears mentioning that the game has definite arcade underpinnings. Lockdown is still a lot of fun, though.

As in all the other Rainbow Six games, you play the squad leader of an elite counterterrorist force called Rainbow. You'll start each of the game's 16 single-player missions at a nicely presented briefing screen where you get the lowdown on the situation, some maps of your objectives, and an equipment setup screen for your four-man team. Lockdown includes a great variety of assault rifles, submachine guns, combat shotguns, and pistols to choose from, many of which are based on real-life guns such as Kalashnikovs, MP-5s, and Desert Eagles. You'll also be able to outfit each operative with frag or flash grenades and entry tools like hammers and breaching charges. The best part is that each gun can be outfitted with one accessory, ranging from red-dot sights and scopes to silencers and high-capacity magazines. There's a noticeable difference in feel and utility between the various weapons, so choosing the right tools for the job is not just a cosmetic feature in Lockdown. What's missing from the mission-prep screen is the tactical planning portion that used to be such a staple of Rainbow Six games on the PC. However, with the ability to direct your team to do room-entry maneuvers in-game, there's less need for a planning phase.

The missions in Lockdown for PC are based on the same missions in the console versions of the game for the most part, but the mission order has been jumbled around a bit. You'll see a variety of different environments, including desert towns in the Middle East, the Parisian catacombs, the Scottish Parliament building, and a French ferry ship. You'll also ply through lots of underground terrorist bases. (Anarchists hate sunlight, apparently.) All of these areas are similar in layout to the ones on console, but in many cases, the levels are much more expansive and intricately detailed, with sharp-looking environment textures. But you won't participate in any shooting-gallery sniper sequences, which played a big role in the console versions. In many of the terrorist base levels you'll find lots of interconnected rooms to clear out and more than one pathway to get from one side to the other. There are also a lot of knickknacks and debris that can get knocked over by gunfire. In one level featuring a shootout in a police station, we were actually able to shoot boxes and other obstacles off a desk in order to get a clearer shot at the terrorist hiding behind it.

Some levels require hostage rescue and escort or bomb defusing, but in every case you're going to be taking out terrorists, and lots of them. Even on the normal difficultly level you'll be taking out upwards of 100 or more terrorists on a single mission. Most weapons you carry come with just under 500 rounds of ammunition. Do the math, and realize that if you're not relying much on your teammates to do the shooting, you better be thrifty with the number of rounds you're expending. You could easily find yourself down to your pistol at the end of a long mission. You and your teammates can survive several glancing shots before dying, but it's very possible in Lockdown to go down in a single hail of gunfire if you get careless.

The threat of immediate death adds to the tactical nature of the game and encourages you to go at a slower, more measured pace. Aside from your quicksave and quickload keys, you'll rely a lot on your motion tracker in Lockdown, which lets you see behind walls. You can also use your tactical commands to have your teammates peek around corners or stack up on doors for dynamic entry. Your teammates can open doors in a variety of ways, ranging from simply opening an unlocked door to placing an explosive and blowing it open, or using a shotgun to blow off the hinges. They will then toss in a frag or flash grenade before going in to clear the room. In most cases this works well, but from time to time you'll see your squadmates screw up a dynamic entry. We've seen team members muff a grenade throw and blow up the whole squad. We've also seen teammates take more damage than they should when entering a hostile room. Flashbangs and violent entry don't seem to have the stun duration and stun radius that you'd expect either, so you can't rely on these measures entirely. The enemy artificial intelligence in the game is pretty decent, seeking cover when possible and peeking from around corners. They'll pop smoke grenades to obscure their positions, or even throw frag grenades. They're not always very perceptive at detecting you if you peer around a corner, though, so it's possible to get quite a few cheap headshots on unsuspecting bad guys.

Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium 4 1.5GHz or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 64 MB
Hard Drive Space: 7000 MB

Recommended System Requirements
System: Pentium 4 2.0GHz or equivalent
RAM: 1024 MB
Video Memory: 128 MB
Hard Drive Space: 7000 MB

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Aug 26, 2007 at 15:40 o\clock

BattleField 1942

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Action, Download, game, shooter

Publisher: EA Games
Developer: Digital Illusions
Genre: Historic First-Person Shooter
Release Date: Sep 10, 2002
ESRB: TEEN
ESRB Descriptors: Blood, Violence
Connectivity: Online, Local Area Network
Number of Players: 1-16
Number of Online Players: 64 Online

It started as a buzz and grew to a roar. When Digital Illusions' Battlefield 1942 was first announced, it looked pretty much like just another in a seemingly endless supply of World War II-based games. But thanks to leaked and official demos, Battlefield 1942 soon became one of the most highly anticipated games of the year. That's hardly surprising, given its ambitious design. Here's a game where dozens of players can fight online together on expansive World War II-inspired battlefields while controlling planes, tanks, and even aircraft carriers with ease. Other than some frustrating technical problems and bugs that should have been fixed before the game shipped, Battlefield 1942 is one of those games that actually lives up to most of the hype surrounding it.

Battlefield 1942 can be a lot of fun things to a lot of people, but first it's important to tell you what it's not: The game definitely isn't a realistic WWII combat simulator. This is a pick-up-and-play action extravaganza, a comic book version of WWII. The fact that any player can casually hop into a tank, drive around, hop out and pick off an enemy soldier with a sniper rifle, hop into a plane, parachute out, and then call in artillery fire (within the span of a few minutes) should tell you a lot about the game--and a lot about what makes it so much fun.


In Battlefield 1942, you can fight offline with decent but unspectacular computer-controlled bots. Online, you can play in four different game modes against up to 64 players at a time. Realistically, you'll usually find servers capable of handling only 32 players, at most. Even with that reduced number, and even if you have the game's first patch installed, have a cable Internet connection, and get a ping in the 50s or 60s, there's a good chance you'll experience some lag or choppiness. Trying to shoot bazookas at tanks, which will suddenly appear elsewhere because of lag, isn't exactly enjoyable.

But when you manage to make a good connection to a powerful server, Battlefield 1942 has lots to offer. For instance, the game's popular conquest mode, where each team tries to capture and hold various control points on the map, can be great fun. The control points are set at strategic locations, like ruined villages or outposts with bunkers or heavy machine-gun positions, making them a challenge to occupy.

Bodies will quickly start filling the fields and streets, which leads to one of Battlefield 1942's more interesting features. Each team is allotted a certain number of tickets at the beginning of the match. You can respawn within a few seconds of dying (the exact time varies) to reinforce your team, but for every death, your team loses tickets. When the enemy holds a certain number of control points at once, your team will also start losing tickets. When your team runs out of tickets, you lose the battle. This system is a welcome compromise between some of the other death-and-respawn systems found in other shooters. In Battlefield 1942, you don't have to sit out around and twiddle your thumbs when you're "dead," yet you're still usually penalized by a brief wait, and because of the ticket system, every death ultimately affects the outcome of the battle.

Every time you enter the battlefield, you get to pick your respawn location. At the minimum, you'll usually get a main base that always remains under your team's control, but you can also respawn at control points that currently belong to your team. Each time you respawn, you also get to choose from five character classes, each with a number of distinctive weapons and abilities. The scout gets a sniper rifle and can help direct long-range fire from the big guns with his binoculars. The assault class gets a powerful light machine gun or assault rifle. The antitank class gets a Panzerschreck or a bazooka. The medic wields a submachine gun and can heal himself and his comrades. The engineer can lay mines and explosives and repair vehicles and stationary weapons.

Overall, these classes complement each other well and provide just enough diversity without bogging you down with too many choices. And while the engineer and antitank classes sometimes tend to be unduly favored because of their relation to the vehicles, don't underestimate the power of a few good assault and medic troops working together, particularly in dense terrain where tanks are at a disadvantage.

But one thing you'll quickly notice is that Battlefield 1942's small arms seem pretty inaccurate, lag or not, which can be frustrating. The fact that some maps offer little cover other than some slight slopes can take even more of the fun out of fighting on foot. Overall, infantry combat in the game is rather weak compared to many online shooters. Hopefully a future patch will tweak the weapons to put more life into them.

 

Minimum System Requirements
System: PIII 500 or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 1200 MB

 

Aug 25, 2007 at 05:56 o\clock

Premier Manager 08

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Download, football, game, manager, soccer

Publisher: Zoo Digital Publishing
Developer: Zoo Digital Pub
Genre: Soccer Management
Release Date: Aug 17, 2007 (EU)

Forget Madden and all its heavily armoured, deathly dull memory games. If you want real sports management, you want to manage a lowly team of journeymen to the top of the English Premier League - if you don't then you're in the wrong place - and you can pick up your helmet, padding and EPO down the hall.With the beautiful game firmly in my mind and soul, I took a trip across to Sheffield to sit down with Zoo Digital Publishing and take a look at Premier Manager 08.For those not familiar with the Premier Manager series, it's the charming, smiley brother in the family of the most quintessentially English of all games genres: football management. If Championship Manager and Football Manager are impenetrable pre-Lord of the Rings Tolkein, then Premier Manager is Harry Potter. Fun, accessible and kid-friendly.

Jon SeymourInstead of a complex interface that hurts your eyes as you try to understand it, Premier Manager has a user-friendly hub that's never more than two clicks away. Instead of reams of figures hitting you on a daily basis, you'll find the progressor, an accessible daily update with your staff on hand to give you updates. Instead of dense text giving you information on your players skills, you'll find a new RPG-style graphical interface.In short, Premier Manager is set up as the friendly Saturday afternoon kick about to other footy management games' brutal Sunday league.I could go on, but instead I'm going to turn you over to Jon Seymour, the Producer of PM, and Andy Gray, Zoo's PR and marketing manager, to talk us through what this season has to offer.

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Aug 24, 2007 at 19:15 o\clock

Hacker Evolution

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Download, game, Real, Time, Strategy, strategy

Publisher: exoSyphen Studios
Developer: exoSyphen Studios
Genre: Real-Time Strategy
Release Date: May 07, 2007 (EU)
Number of Players: 1 Player

We recently got the opportunity on a full copy of Hacker Evolution (from Giveaway of the Day [which I will talk about more later]), a new game about hacking for the PC.
The game has a lot of themes that remind me of the Matrix/that movie that had that computer named HAL. You play as Brian Spencer who is a former Intelligence Agent (AI backwards, pretty tricky) for the US. Set in the future, a new kind of internet connection has been made that allows files to be set at the speed of light. So that it messes with the Time-Space continuum and allows files to be sent before they are even requested. The game describes it as a Time warp digitally. When it was made, there was an AI put in place to make sure the internet technology never screwed up. And guess what? It screwed up.
It all starts when the NYC Stock Exchange got hacked (or at least that’s what the government thinks) and you have to figure out who did it. The game features a very very very helpful tutorial and is pretty realistic (with the exception of the crack and decrypt commands, it’s never that easy).

After going about the game, I find that it’s music is really helpful to keep the game fun (else you might go insane trying to hack the idiot who logged in to the exchange’s site right before the attack). Remember the game is extremely hard. Sometimes you have to guess (other times you have to cheat, which gets annoying). Money is also a problem in the game. Beware of high trace percentiles.

Hacker Evolution is a unique twist on the puzzle genre, as the puzzle this time around is figuring out the correct way to hack into a series of computers and servers to complete each mission. The story goes that by 2010, a new way to send information has been discovered that moves at the speed of light. Unfortunately, it starts to become sentient, and instead of destroying humanity as such a program might in science-fiction movies, it begins to cause chaos in an attempt to evolve and survive. Playing as a hacker, it's up to you to help set things right and restore order to the world's information superhighways.

For those who haven't played around in DOS before, there's a tutorial to help you get started in the game, but even with that tutorial, it's not an easy time. I did get stuck on one occasion and had to start over. The game looks good, though there isn't a whole lot to look at, and the controls are mostly keyboard-based, but if you get lost, they're just a help command away. All in all, Hacker Evolution is frustrating at first, but in the end, turns out to be a pretty decent game.

System requirements
Windows ME/XP/2000/2003 or Vista
Microsoft DirectX 8.0
Pentium® 1 GHz processor or faster,
512Mb RAM,
200Mb free disk space
16Mb DirectX 8.0
compatible videocard Microsoft compatible keyboard and mouse

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Aug 24, 2007 at 06:18 o\clock

Dragon Throne : The Battle of the Red Cliffs

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Download, game, Historic, Real, Time, Strategy, strategy

Publisher: Strategy First
Developer: Object
Genre: Historic Real-Time Strategy
Release Date: Mar 26, 2002
ESRB: TEEN
ESRB Descriptors: Blood, Violence
Number of Players: 1-8

Object Software's Dragon Throne: Battle of Red Cliffs is the sequel to Fate of the Dragon. Both are real-time strategy games that take place during the legendary Three Kingdoms era in ancient China. Like Fate of the Dragon before it, Dragon Throne is a strategy game that uses somewhat simple 2D graphics and has full speech in Chinese. And like Fate of the Dragon, Dragon Throne is a decent enough game, but there are better real-time strategy games that you can spend your time and money on.

 

As you might have already guessed, Dragon Throne also sounds pretty much the same as Fate of the Dragon. The original Fate of the Dragon had two language options for audio speech: English and Chinese. Dragon Throne has only Chinese speech, though you can choose English subtitles. The game's voice acting is quite good, but unless you're fluent in Chinese (or attempting to learn the language), you'll probably end up ignoring it entirely. As with Fate of the Dragon, Dragon Throne's synth-instrumental soundtracks combine traditional Chinese folk music with more upbeat rhythms. The music is well suited to the game, though it isn't particularly memorable.

Does Dragon Throne also play the same as Fate of the Dragon? Yes, it does. In both games, as with most other real-time strategy games, you must recruit peasants to build a base of operations, then create an army to crush your enemies. And Dragon Throne more or less has the same base building and combat as the previous game. You recruit peasants to build houses to increase your population limit, farms to grow food, barracks to create soldiers, and mechanical workshops to build siege engines--it's all quite similar to other real-time strategy games you may have played. As in Fate of the Dragon, your infantry comes from training peasants at a barracks. The one interesting new feature that the sequel has is that soldiers can revert back to peasants in times of peace. In other words, instead of having soldiers standing about idly in times of peace, you can assign them peasant work. This occasionally comes in handy during longer campaigns, in which your armies have to travel long distances to fight and will gradually run low on strength (provided by food and wine, which your peasants can produce or carry in slow-moving supply wagons). So, the new feature simply allows you to build a new base of operations so you don't have to walk all the way back home to replenish your strength.

 

Minimum System Requirements
System: PII 266 or equivalent
RAM: 64 MB
Video Memory: 8 MB
Hard Drive Space: 240 MB

Recommended System Requirements
System: PIII 800 or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 300 MB

 

Aug 23, 2007 at 10:56 o\clock

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by: freepcgame

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Aug 23, 2007 at 03:09 o\clock

Starwars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Action, Adventure, Download, game

Publisher: LucasArts
Developer: Raven Software
Genre: Sci-Fi First-Person Shooter
Release Date: Sep 17, 2003 (more)
ESRB: TEEN
ESRB Descriptors: Violence

Connectivity: Online, Local Area Network
Online Modes: Competitive, Team Oriented
Number of Players: 1-16
There are dozens of Star Wars games on the market, but none captures the excitement of lightsaber combat as well as the Jedi Knight games. Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy is the third game in the series, or, technically, the fourth if you count 1995's Dark Forces, which didn't bear the Jedi Knight name (and didn't let you use lightsabers or Force powers, either). It is not a revolutionary product--as it uses the same Quake III engine and gameplay elements as last year's well-received Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. It manages to take all the fun parts from its predecessor and greatly expands them to create an engaging, new action game in its own right.
You play as Jaden, the new protagonist in Jedi Academy. You previously played as Kyle Katarn, a strong yet reluctant Jedi, in the previous Jedi Knight games. Kyle has since joined Luke Skywalker as a teacher at the Jedi Academy and is looking for new students. You can actually customize Jaden's character. You can be male or female, choose from one of several different races, and wear different outfits. In any event, you also happen to be the most promising student in the new class. Apparently, you've even built your own lightsaber, which is highly abnormal as lightsabers are usually built during training.

If Jaden is considered an unusual student, then your training is anything but common. Jaden's transport ship is attacked when it arrives at the Academy. Then it crashes into the ground. You and another student, Rosh, are the only survivors. He becomes your friend, yet he seems to become jealous of your abilities and his own slow progression. You don't have time to worry about Rosh, though. The storyline revolves around solving several questions related to your attack at the start of the game. Why did a female twi'lek steal information from Luke's chambers when the students were away rescuing the downed ship? What role does the Imperial remnant fill in this attack, and is it related to the mysterious Cult of Ragnos that is appearing in the galaxy? After a short training mission, you immediately set out to help Luke and Kyle obtain answers to these questions. The game's story doesn't get in the way of the action but serves to tie the numerous missions together.

Jaden travels all over the galaxy in the game. The missions are surprisingly varied, and that is one of the most pleasant aspects of the game. One mission has you fighting stormtroopers on a refinery, while another mission has you stranded on a desert planet until you can find pieces to repair your ship. Like its predecessor, Jedi Academy takes you to familiar locations, such as Tatooine and Coruscant. Some missions can last over an hour while others take five minutes, so you never quite know what to expect. Jedi Academy has an overall linear path, but you can mix this up to a certain degree. You start out with a set of five missions to choose from. Once you complete four missions, you can either return to the academy to gain new skills and advance the story, or you can play the fifth mission. There isn't a reward for doing so, but you may find yourself doing so just because the missions are diverse and entertaining. After returning to the academy and completing a plot-critical mission, you are offered a new set of five missions. This repeats three times until you complete the game, adding up to about 15 to 20 hours' worth of solid single-player action, depending on what missions you choose and what skills you utilize.

Jedi Academy does an excellent job of balancing its missions. Your first set of missions puts you on reconnaissance or rescue missions where you'll face mercenaries, poorly equipped stormtroopers, and the occasional dark Jedi. This is by no means boring. Let's face it: It's very satisfying to completely dominate your enemies, hacking through them with your lightsaber as they desperately try to shoot you down. By the last set of missions, you'll constantly be fighting dark Jedi and stormtroopers in power armor. The game justifies this by explaining that new students take easier missions and then progress to more challenging ones as their training continues. You also drive a variety of vehicles throughout your journey. You get to take speeders out for spins, and you get to control an AT-ST while attempting to ravage Imperial remnant bases from within. While not a crucial part of the game, vehicles are a welcome addition to the normal gameplay.

Perhaps the best improvement in Jedi Academy over Jedi Knight II is that it grants you your lightsaber and Force powers at the very start of the game. You spent the first portion of Jedi Outcast without your abilities, and it made those sections rather tedious by contrast. The weapons were interesting enough, but people play these games for the Jedi combat. So this time around, the developer's decision to focus the gameplay on these Jedi abilities is a major boost for the game. That's not to say that conventional weapons are useless. While it's possible to finish the game without ever putting down your lightsaber, sometimes rocket launchers, sniper rifles, and grenades help dispatch some pesky foes.
Jedi Academy also changes how you progress your Force abilities. You start out with eight core Force abilities: pull, push, speed, sense, jump, saber offense, saber defense, and saber throw. Your abilities are limited at first, but you automatically become more advanced in these areas every time you return to the academy. There are eight advanced Force powers to choose from: four on the light side of the Force and four on the dark side. The light side abilities are absorb, protection, heal, and Jedi mind trick. The dark side powers are comprised of life steal, lightning, grab, and Force rage. You receive a point when you complete a mission, and you can distribute it in any of these eight powers at the start of the next mission. Each power has three levels of improvement. For example, one point in Force heal allows you to heal while standing still. A second point lets you heal while moving around, and a third point improves the healing ability altogether. The point system works well to represent the fact that you are slowly learning from your master, Kyle. There aren't enough points in the game to become a master in all categories, so you can either specialize or choose a little bit of everything.
Minimum System Requirements
System: 450 MHz CPU or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB

Recommended System Requirements
System: 600 Mhz CPU or equivalent
RAM: 256 MB

Aug 22, 2007 at 17:46 o\clock

Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Download, game, Real, Time, Strategy, strategy

Publisher: EA Games
Developer: Dreamworks Games
Genre: Real-Time Strategy
Release Date: Sep 22, 2003
ESRB: TEEN
ESRB Descriptors: Violence                   
                                                                
It's only been eight months since the release of Command & Conquer: Generals, the latest installment in this extremely popular real-time strategy series. Though Generals was the first C&C that did not bear the name of Westwood Studios (the series' original developer), it was still every bit as action-packed and fast-paced as the series has ever been. It represented a great combination of the over-the-top pyrotechnics the series is known for, along with some of the gameplay elements perfected by Blizzard's competing RTS franchises. However, the game clearly left some room for additional content, so, while it's no surprise that Generals went on to get its own expansion pack--as pretty much every Command & Conquer game gets at least one--the newly released Zero Hour was put together surprisingly quickly. You wouldn't know it just from playing this fully featured expansion pack, since it makes plenty of meaningful and interesting changes to the original game. Additionally, it packs in a lot of great tweaks and improvements to those aspects of Generals that could have used more polish. The result is a great expansion that's a must for anyone who enjoyed Generals. It fundamentally improves the core game, it and should ensure that C&C Generals continues to be popular well into the next year.
                                         
Zero Hour does what any good real-time strategy expansion pack should do: it adds appreciable amounts of content and depth to the original product. It introduces various new units, technologies, and "generals powers" to each of the three factions from Generals--the high-tech USA military, the powerful forces of China, and the terrorist conglomerate called the GLA. It also introduces a completely new single-player mode: the generals challenge. Zero Hour also features follow-up campaigns for each of the factions, consisting of five good-sized missions apiece. The core game, too, has undergone a number of little tweaks and enhancements that make it play a bit better overall. These tweaks and enhancements address issues that players may have encountered in the original, either through its interface or its multiplayer. However, perhaps the most interesting addition to Zero Hour is the inclusion of nine new subfactions.

These subfactions are referred to by their respective commanders, lending Zero Hour a refreshing bit of personality that was curiously absent from Generals. These commanders include the likes of General Malcolm "Ace" Granger, a specialist with the USA's air force; General "Anvil" Shin Fai, a Chinese infantry leader; and Prince Hassad, a GLA master of camouflage. Just as it could be said that C&C Generals was influenced by some of Blizzard Entertainment's real-time strategy games, so too can it be said that Zero Hour is influenced by the real-time strategy games of Ensemble Studios, like last year's Age of Mythology or Age of Empires II. That's because Zero Hour's subfactions, while not completely different from the core factions they're based on, do play quite differently from one another, do have a few unique units and technologies, and do give the game considerably more variety than what the three core factions offer alone. So, as with the different civilizations in Age of Empires II, the new subfactions in Zero Hour differ enough from one other to offer a distinctive playing experience. Furthermore, since these subfactions are inspired by popular playing styles, chances are, at least a couple of these are going to naturally appeal to you.
                                                      
Essentially, Zero Hour contains a total of 12 different playable factions, up from just three. In skirmish and multiplayer modes, you may choose to play as either the "vanilla" factions from C&C Generals (though with their new units and upgrades), or you may choose to play as one of the specialist general's armies. Since the specialized armies have disadvantages that offset their relative strengths, you intuitively have a sense of what your opponent is going to throw at you in a multiplayer match. This is particularly true if, say, he chooses General Ta Hun Kwai, the Chinese tank commander, rather than just picking the standard Chinese army. Fortunately, in the skirmish and multiplayer modes, if the opponent chooses a random faction, you won't know which of the 12 different armies you're up against until you do some early-game recon.

These character-driven subfactions are also the focus of the new generals challenge mode. Actually, it's structured a lot like Mortal Kombat or other fighting games. You choose your character--one of the nine specialist generals featured in Zero Hour--and then you proceed to fight against each of the other generals on his or her own turf. These can be some pretty tough battles, especially since the default level of difficulty in Zero Hour, thankfully, provides a much more significant challenge than the cakewalk that was Generals' default difficulty. Since you take on these rival generals in environments that specifically benefit their unique abilities, you have a tough time overcoming their defenses. In so doing, you either learn or practice some key strategies that can help make you more competitive online. One very nice touch in the generals challenge is that each general has his or her own voice, and you'll hear these characters gabbing at you during the course of a match. While they do repeat their lines occasionally, they have lots of contextual dialogue. For example, they might chastise you for doing an inadequate job of countering their armies, or they may curse when you knock out one of their key facilities. Not only is this dialogue pretty amusing, but it can provide some helpful hints. The generals' propensities toward giving you fair warnings before attacks tend to be their undoing.
                                                     
Minimum System Requirements
System: 800 MHz Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 1400 MB
Other: • A retail copy of Command & Conquer (tm) Generals already installed on your PC

Recommended System Requirements
System: 1.8 GHz or faster Intel Pentium IV or AMD Athlon processor or equivalent
RAM: 256 MB
                                                    
                                                             

Aug 21, 2007 at 15:23 o\clock

Max Payne

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Action, Download, game, shooter

Publisher: Gathering
Developer: Remedy Ent.
Genre: Modern Shooter
Release Date: Jul 23, 2001
ESRB: MATURE
ESRB Descriptors: Blood, Violence
Number of Players: 1 Player

Created by Finnish developer Remedy Entertainment, Max Payne has been in production for a very long time. It's a gritty third-person shooter that's clearly inspired by the stylish cinematography and choreography of the Hong Kong action movie genre, particularly the work of director John Woo. Like many of Woo's films, Max Payne is rife with gunplay that's almost indescribably beautiful to watch--and yet actually playing it is even better. Max Payne does have a few weaknesses, most notably in that it isn't very long and lacks any multiplayer features--but these things are hardly detrimental. After all, it's not often you get an outstanding and original action game that's not just different from all other shooters to date, but also in many ways superior.

You play as the title character throughout the game. Max is a modern-day New York undercover cop whose wife and baby daughter were brutally murdered and who has since been framed for a heinous crime. Thus begins his blood-soaked battle to find the truth--and to get revenge. The game has many superlative qualities, but one of the best things about it is how it actually plays. It's very easy to get into, as the control is smooth, simple, and responsive. You use the keyboard to make Max run in any direction and use the mouse to aim your weapons. The game's third-person camera perspective trails closely behind Max and gives a good sense of your surroundings, which is important since you'll need to move carefully through the game's enemy-infested environments. By default, the left mouse button fires your equipped weapons as rapidly as possible, while the right mouse button triggers Max's "bullet time" special ability, which temporarily puts everything in slow motion, as in a John Woo movie or the 1999 sci-fi hit, The Matrix.

Bullet time is spectacular. The sounds of gunfire become muted and distant, and you hear a rush of air and then the pounding of Max's heart--and you'll invariably hold your own breath as all this happens, because the effect is so well done. Bullet time isn't just for show--it effectively gives Max superhuman reflexes, as while all the action in the game is slowed, you can still aim as quickly as you can move your mouse. Hence, bullet time lets you perform incredible feats of marksmanship--and, in combination with the movement keys, deadly acrobatic leaps in any direction. This particular technique, called a "shootdodge," is the key to surviving most of the game's gunfights. As you launch yourself through the air, you'll actually see the enemy's bullets (or shotgun pellets) zing past you, even as you keep your weapons trained and firing on the enemy as you sail by. Bullet time is a serious advantage, but you're limited to using it in small increments and thus can't afford to use it unless you really need it. Not only does this make the game seem very well balanced--especially since taking out bad guys is how you replenish your bullet time--but it also keeps the effect from feeling too overused.

Max will brandish an impressive variety of highly authentic real-world weapons throughout the game, including pistols, submachine guns, shotguns, sniper rifles, grenades, Molotov cocktails, and more. He can carry as many weapons as he can get his hands on, though you'll have to keep track of your ammunition reserves. There will always be plenty of bad guys around to soak up all your lead, so you'll have to use your different weapons as strategically and as conservatively as possible. Besides, Max is rather vulnerable--a bullet in the head, let alone a grenade, can kill him. But he can unflinchingly withstand relatively minor wounds. You can then completely recover the damage he's sustained by using painkillers, which you'll find scattered about in desks and bathrooms and such.

These sorts of design decisions--the fact that you can carry an entire arsenal and keep on shootdodging even if you've been shot, as well as the fact that painkillers cure lead poisoning--stand in sharp contrast with the game's incredibly realistic appearance. But these aspects of the game are what help make it so much fun. Max Payne isn't about fumbling for clips and putting tourniquets on wounds; it's about finesse, style, and fast pacing. Because of how it plays and how well the settings of the game are laid out, Max Payne's pacing is relentless (it really helps that the game's loading times during missions are almost instantaneous). Because of how it looks, its sense of style is extraordinary. And because of how it controls, it's all about finesse. It's a game of pure, intense action.

The game's story is almost as well done as the action itself--and that's saying a lot to its credit. The story unfolds partly through noninteractive sequences in the actual game engine, but mostly by using still images that look like they came straight out of a graphic novel. These great-looking comic-book-style cutscenes--which you can tell use stylized photographs to depict the various characters in the game--detail an over-the-top crime story that's as confounding as it is engaging. Though you'll see comic book captions on all the stills, all the dialogue is spoken as well. Max also speaks quite a bit during the game itself. You might initially be taken aback by the rather forced performances of all the actors, but in time, you'll find that the style is well suited to the theme of the game and that Max's deadpan yet melodramatic delivery is particularly affecting. The distinct look of the graphic novel imagery, the hammy voice acting, and the heavy-handed dialogue actually all fit well together, and the story sequences are interspersed frequently and consistently enough throughout the game that the story always remains important and intact. The story of Max Payne has several noteworthy highlights and generally just twists and turns so much or just looks so good that you'll no doubt enjoy the ride.

Minimum System Requirements
System: PII 450 or equivalent
RAM: 96 MB
Video Memory: 16 MB
Hard Drive Space: 600 MB

Recommended System Requirements
System: PIII 700 or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 800 MB

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Credit by lmred2004

Aug 21, 2007 at 06:23 o\clock

Rush for Berlin Gold

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Download, game, Historic, Real, Time, Strategy, strategy

Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Developer: Stormregion
Genre: Historic Real-Time Strategy
Release Date: Jun 12, 2006
ESRB: TEEN
ESRB Descriptors: Blood, Violence
Online Modes: Competitive, Cooperative, Team Oriented
Number of Players: 1 Player
Number of Online Players: 6 Online
Getting into a World War II real-time strategy game is a challenge these days. So many have shown up on our doorstep the past couple of years that newcomers can only get the Nazi-weary public's attention by doing one thing wildly differently or everything incredibly well. You can put Rush for Berlin in the latter category. While this by-the-books effort from Codename: Panzers developer Stormregion is a rehash of WWII RTS conventions, the entire game is so well designed that you don't much care that you've seen it all before. If you can stand to liberate Stalingrad in a computer game one more time, you should sign up for a tour of duty here.

Just don't expect anything new. All of the standard WWII RTS conventions are respected so much here that you won't need to even glance at the manual to get the lay of the land. Four separate campaigns that begin with the final push into Germany let you wage war as the Western Allies (which only seems to comprise the US and UK--sorry, Canada), Russians, Germans, and French. A total of 25 solo missions (figure on 25 to 30 hours of play) take you through well-worn WWII hotspots such as Bastogne, Stalingrad, and bombed-out downtown Berlin.
Game structure in Rush for Berlin follows the usual recipe, too. Units include golden oldies such as GIs, mortar teams, medics, Sherman tanks, Panzer tanks, recon vehicles, supply trucks, and so on. As with most other WWII RTS games, Rush for Berlin's focus is firmly on tactics. There is no base building or resource collection, although you are often required to capture enemy factories or headquarters to use for such things as tank and troop production, as well as resupply.

Stormregion does do a pretty admirable job of livening up these familiar surroundings. Missions take place on huge maps that are packed with detail. The 3D engine does a fantastic job of rendering all sorts of little touches that add atmosphere to every setting, and almost every building, tree, and bunker can be blown up, knocked down, or rolled over with an armor column. At times, though, too much detail is crammed onto the screen. Muddy trenches, blocks of ravaged apartments, and weather effects such as heavy snowflakes always look great, but they can cause serious slowdown when accompanied by a lot of moving units. Larger-scale battles, particularly in the Western campaign, really get bogged down at times. Thankfully, outstanding sound effects during these massive battles make up for the occasional visual issues. Every shot, explosion, and round fired by a Panzer booms out of the speakers so forcefully that it feels like you're playing a Medal of Honor-style WWII shooter, not an RTS.

Scenario design is geared to put you into the boots of the soldiers on the ground. Objectives move freely between big military goals such as conquering Nazi headquarter buildings and blowing up German 88s to squad-level maneuvers such as chasing down and killing a tank commander hopping from one Panzer to another, stopping German engineers from wrecking Russian foundries, and even using a control panel to solve a puzzle presented by moving walkways. You won't mistake this game for something like Commandos or Silent Storm, but the inclusion of these hands-on sequences does give Rush for Berlin a more varied personality than the usual cataclysmic, big-picture RTS.

Also, there are a lot of glimpses of real history to give the game historical heft. The Bastogne mission, for example, takes place in the middle of a blinding snowstorm, which conveys how alone the real American troops must have felt on that New Year's Eve in 1944. The Russian seizure of the Brandenburg Gate is set in the cratered landscape of Berlin, emphasizing the utter ruin that Hitler's war brought upon Germany. Even the German campaign, which moves the game into an alternate history where Hitler died in the Stauffenberg bomb plot of 1944 and his successors fought to achieve a more noble peace (with high-tech weapons such as the Me-262 jet fighter, no less), rings true because it is a credible look at what might have been.

Officer hero units also add historical flavor. While they unfortunately aren't given individual names, they do have specialties that adeptly evoke some of their national character. The Russians, for instance, feature a political officer with the special ability to dole out double rations of vodka to fire up troops for limited periods of time and attack troops with explosive-placing dogs, while the Allies boast the likes of an SAS officer who can call in paratroopers.

Artificial intelligence is generally up to the challenge of bringing WWII battlefields to life. Troops in Rush for Berlin are quite smart in certain situations when it comes to attacking and defending, so you don't have to do any micromanagement. Infantry troops, for instance, know enough to automatically approach enemy tanks and then wipe them out with magnetic mines. Fully computer-controlled allies aren't as bright, however, a fact that gets somewhat aggravating when playing missions where you have to support them. One Allied mission that centered on repairing computer-controlled tanks was particularly frustrating, because these tanks frequently refused to attack the enemy in a sensible and prompt fashion. Pathfinding is another problem, especially when dealing with armor and mobile guns on maps with a lot of city streets. These units will frequently get jumbled up, bump into one another, and end up taking the long way to destinations.

Enemy forces are more astute than your buddies, too. This provides a fair bit of challenge in most missions (meaning that you need to make frequent use of the save anywhere feature), as the enemy seems to always focus fire on your most vulnerable or most useful units. Still, there are times when the computer's ability to readily target and take out your finest troops seems like a cheat. One moment you're marching along nicely with a sizable army, the next you're reaching for the reload button because unseen snipers in the trees have just taken out your invaluable medics with a couple of shots or curiously perfectly placed guns in a bombed-out courtyard have turned your tanks into scrap metal. Levels feel like deathtrap puzzles a bit too often.
Multiplayer introduces two new modes of play to the usual deathmatch and domination games. RUSH (Relentlessly Utilized Score Hunt) and RISK (Race-Intensive Strategic Kombat) aren't quite as memorable as games as they are for their names, though. The former is sort of neat in that players are given between one and three random tasks to accomplish, although they involve nothing but old-school victory conditions such as destroying all enemy units on the map, defeating an enemy team, or collecting supplies. But the latter is pretty much the same style of game as that in the solo campaigns, albeit with two or more players rushing to seize the same objectives. At any rate, multiplayer is a bit moot at present. Few people are playing online, at least with the full retail version of the game. Only demo matches seem to be up and running on a regular basis, but they aren't compatible with the out-of-the-box game.

Basically, Rush for Berlin is a very good representation of the WWII RTS formula by pros who really know their way around the Battle of the Bulge. If any game is capable of convincing genre veterans of shivering their way through the Battle of the Bulge one more time, it's this one.

By Brett Todd, GameSpot
Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium 4 1.7 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 4000 MB
Other: DirectX 9.0c compatible 3D graphics card

Recommended System Requirements
System: Pentium 4 2.7 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 1024 MB
Video Memory: 128 MB
Hard Drive Space: 4000 MB
Other: DirectX 9.0c compatible 3D graphics card

Aug 20, 2007 at 05:51 o\clock

Ship Simulator 2008

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Download, game, Naval, Sim, simmulation

Publisher: Lighthouse Interactive
Developer: VSTEP
Genre: Naval Sim
Release Date: September 2007
ESRB: EVERYONE
I always feel that ships tend to lose out in the transport wars of gaming. I mean, you get great flight-based games and so many excellent car-orientated games, from arcade racers to simulations and driving-based free roaming titles, that there are too many examples to list. In terms of simulations, these days you can find a game that simulates almost anything from managing a zoo or a railroad empire to simulated people, piñatas and spaceships. Of course, when it comes to simulation, the one title that comes to mind is Microsoft Flight Simulator, which has sold millions of copies over the years - but can the same exposure be generated by the simulation of ships? Possibly, as the popularity of pirate scenarios in both gaming and film may well get fans interested in such nautical naughtiness. Don't don your eye patch just yet however, as there are no pirates or looting to be done in Ship Simulator 2008.

When Ship Simulator 2008 rose from the seas and planted itself onto my desk like a jellyfish that has been washed up onto Blackpool beach, I must admit that I wasn't overly excited about the prospect of playing it. It's the second instalment of the series by Lighthouse Interactive, the first being Ship Simulator 2006, so the original must have sold enough copies to warrant this sequel. At installation you need to register a license key, to receive patches and updates such as extra ships and missions, which at least shows that the developers want the game to succeed and not sink without a trace (I wonder how many more nautical themed jokes I can think up!)
Ship Simulator 2008 starts off with a simple yet pleasant main menu accompanied by some atmospheric music, a lot like the CDs that are meant to relax your mood with dolphin and whale sounds. Further investigation showed that I could try my hands at a variety of missions or choose the Free-Roaming approach. You can create your own profile, which saves your progress as you complete the missions, although unless you are a ship enthusiast I can't see many people wanting to complete them all.

There are various missions available, ranging from saving stranded captains to using tugboats to move items from one harbour to another. In general they can be grouped into five distinct mission types, with the first type concerning itself with placing your boat in a particular area. Another mission type is rescuing random people who have fallen from their vessels (the game never states how they ended up there, must be mutiny on a major scale!) The monotonous mooring, towing and anchoring missions are by far the most boring, while the missions that I enjoyed the most tended to be the ones that required me with my speedboat/water taxi to hit some ramps at breakneck speeds. The final mission type is the time-consuming 'Taxi' mode.
The Free-Roaming aspect is pleasant enough; each time I played it, my ship would appear in a different place due to the random generated nature of this feature. However, I suspect that only sea captains and my marine sailor mate Dave will enjoy this beyond the first half an hour of playing. Microsoft Flight Simulator offers a wide variety of places to fly to, which is not the case here, with only a small number of cities or ports on offer. These ports/cities/harbours include New York, Marseille, San Francisco and even the Solent, which separates mainland Britain from the Isle of Wight. There are also several open water environments to try your seafaring hand at.
The graphics in the game are above average; the various weather effects and sunsets are nice to look at, but the ships don't seem very real. The speedboat for example isn't particularly awe-inspiring; it seems to be lacking something when compared to the other vessels in the game, such as the VLCC Latitude or the Vermass. I expected my speedboat to be by far the sexiest vessel on the seas, so it was a little disappointing that it wasn't. The Titanic makes an appearance, but it would have been a fantastic inclusion to have designed a mission where I could have saved it from its meeting with Mr. Iceberg. The various ports do look like some time has been put in to ensure they look lifelike; if you've ever been to New York, which I'm lucky enough to have visited, or any of the other environments depicted in the game, then you will certainly appreciate the little details that have been included.

To be fair, there isn't an awful lot of time spent on ship control as you play, so I found myself gazing at beaches and the other scenery. There are thirteen vessels available, all of which can be viewed in first person as you walk around them. This is a very thoughtful inclusion but again it's really only going to be of the ship-spotters. One aspect I'm unimpressed with are the poorly designed people who you save from Davy Jones' locker; they look stick-like and when you pick them up they just disappear from the water, and you're told they've been brought on board. It wouldn't have taken long to develop a little set-piece where you could throw a life-preserver into the water and the person in distress could have grabbed hold and then climbed aboard.
The sound is nothing special; the engine noises begin to grate after a while, although the ambience of seagulls calling and the splashing of waves is relaxing. I would have loved to hear some of my crew telling me that I was going too fast or that I was going to hit that beach. You can take pictures, which is a bonus, and the pictures do look fairly picturesque. If the developers had modeled the ship systems in a little more depth and simulated other aspects, such as currents, then I would have got a much better idea of what it takes to be a captain on a modern merchant ship and thus would have become more immersed within the game. I know for a fact that working on the sea is a far more demanding occupation than this game suggests, so in this way it fails to truly simulate the experience.

None of the ships seem to sink even if they have 100% damage, and the actual damage on show is poorly represented. The damage characteristics also seem a fair bit out; hitting a mountain at 6 knots gave me 1% damage, whilst the mountain itself still looked the same. There are a few technical issues that need a mention, such as when I was halfway through one mission and suddenly ended up in another. Also, only some parts of a ship are accessible, where others can't be explored. Some missions may take a couple of hours to complete too, although that doesn't mean that they are enjoyable.

A lot needs to be added before the next installment if the developers want Ship Simulator to become a success. More ships and allowing full access within their interiors would be a good idea for starters. The missions could also include real-life scenarios, like fishing for King Crabs in torrential weather on a small fishing boat, whaling, hunting for sharks, entering the speedboat into races or stopping a massive oil carrier from sinking and losing its cargo. There are a fair few options available to the developers that can be added to improve the game. There's no save feature available within missions either, which is definitely needed.

Ship Simulator 2008 will only appeal to ship afficianados, but even they may find the lack of features a turn-off after a while. It's a pleasant enough game to kill a couple of hours on a rainy evening, but there are many more games out there that are either more relaxing or more fun to play. Hopefully the developers will take note of this and have some of these ideas included in the 2009 version, because at the moment you're likely to jump ship and swim for different gaming shores sooner rather than later.
Reviewed by Christopher McNally for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).
Windows XP or Vista
2.4 Ghz Intel Pentium IV or AMD Athlon processor
1 GB RAM
4x CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive
Approx. 500 MB free hard disk space
128 MB 3D accelerated video card with support for Vertex and Pixel shader 1.1
(Nvidia GeForce 5900, ATI Radeon 9800 or comparable)

Aug 19, 2007 at 19:21 o\clock

Age Of Empires

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Download, Games, Historic, Real, Time, Strategy, strategy

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Developer: Ensemble Studios
Genre: Historic Real-Time Strategy
Release Date: Oct 26, 1997
ESRB Descriptors: Animated Violence, Animated Blood
Number of Players: 1-8

When you first play Age of Empires, a warm feeling develops in your gut. Warcraft meets Civilization! Real-time empire-building! And does it ever look sharp and feel right.
But an uneasy feeling builds as you get deeper into it, a sense that all is not quite right. This is not quite the game you hoped for. Even worse, it has some definite problems. The pitfall when you review a game as anticipated and debated as this one is to make sure you criticize it for what it is, not for what you wish it was. I wish that Age of Empires was what it claimed to be - Civilization with a Warcraft twist. Instead, it is Warcraft with a hint of Civilization. That's all well and good, but it places it firmly in the action-oriented real-time combat camp, rather than in the high-minded empire-building of Civilization. The result is Warcraft in togas, with slightly more depth but a familiar feel.

Age of Empires places you on a map in an unexplored world, provides a few starting units, and lets you begin building an empire. Each game unfolds the same way. You begin with a town center and some villagers. The villagers are the basic laborers, and the town center enables you to build more of them and expand your settlement. The villagers are central to AOE: they gather resources, build structures, and repair units and buildings. Resources come in four forms: wood, food, stone, and gold. A certain amount of each is consumed to build various units and buildings, research new technology, and advance a civ to the next age.

There is no complex resource management or intricate economic model at work here. What you have is the same old real-time resource-gathering in period garb, with four resources instead of one or two. As your civ advances, you develop greater needs for these resources, but the way in which they are gathered and used becomes only marginally more complex (certain research can cause faster harvesting or more production). It appears on the surface to be a complex evocation of the way early civs gathered and used materials, but beneath the hood is the same old "mine tiberium, buy more stuff than the other guys" model. It is the first hint that AOE is a simple combat game rather than a glorious empire-builder.

There's no denying the thrill the first time a villager chucks a spear at an antelope and spends several minutes hacking meat from its flank with a stone tool. This is the level of detail that brings an empire-building game to life. If only those villagers would grow and develop over the course of the game, it would make it so much more interesting. If only they would trade in their loincloths for some britches and maybe some orange camouflage, and switch from spears to arrows and rifles. Yes, that's another game, but it could easily have been done in AOE, and why it wasn't is a mystery.

The overall impression of AOE dips further with the prickly issue of unit control and AI. As you expand your city with new and improved buildings, you develop the ability to produce new and better military units. These fall into several categories: Infantry (Clubman, Axeman, Short Swordsman, Broad Swordsman, Long Swordsman, Legion, Hoplite, Phalanx, and Centurion), Archers (Bowman, Improved Bowman, Composite Bowman, Chariot Archer, Elephant Archer, Horse Archer, and Heavy Horse Archer), Cavalry (Scout, Chariot, Cavalry, Heavy Cavalry, Cataphract, and War Elephant), and Siege Weapons (Stone Thrower, Catapult, Heavy Catapult, Ballista, and Helepolis). With the completion of a temple, a priest becomes available that can heal friendly units and convert enemy units. Naval units come in the form of fishing, trade, transport, and war.

The problem is that while enemy AI is savvy and aggressive (it can afford to be since it appears to cheat with resources), your units are bone-stupid. Path-finding is appallingly botched, with units easily getting lost or stuck. There is a waypoint system, but that hardly makes up for the fact that your units have trouble moving from point A to point B if you don't utilize it. Military units will stand idly by while someone a millimeter away is hacked to pieces. They respond not at all to enemy incursion in a village and wander aimlessly in the midst of battle. Was this deliberate so that the gamer needed to spend more time in unit management? If so, it was a poor idea, since there is simply too much going on midgame to worry about whether your military is allowing itself to be butchered in one corner of the map while you are aggressively tending to a battle in another portion. There is no excusing this flaw, and it seriously diminishes AOE's enjoyability. Finally, there is the fifty unit limit that is irritating many players, but in light of the game's already troublesome play balance, it was a solid decision to force users to build units more selectively.

AOE obviously is sticking close to an early-empire motif, and there's nothing at all wrong with that. Stone, Tool, Bronze, and Iron are the four ages, and with each come new structures and military units. You don't earn these advanced ages - you buy them with resources. Advancement is a simple matter of hoarding and spending food and gold. The overall welfare of your state is irrelevant as long as it survives: happiness is not measured, trade is barely modeled, and the state exists merely to produce a military machine to crush everyone else on the map. Naval power has a woefully unbalancing effect upon gameplay, with a strong navy able to shred the competition at the expense of reality.

Micromanagement is the name of the game in AOE. There is no unit queue, and to build five villagers, you need to build one, wait, build another, and so on. With units acting so stupidly, you should be able to set their level of aggression and the manner in which they attack (a la Dark Reign), but that is also not an option. Diplomacy is relegated to tribute and nothing more, and alliances are hard to form. You can be allied, neutral, or at war with other civs, but if the radio button is still set to "allied" when an opponent starts firing on your units, your units will not fire back, defend themselves, or even flee. They will just be destroyed. Cues as to exactly what's happening on the map are obscure; the duty has been relegated to unrelated sound effects. Does that bugle call mean my building is finished being built, or my units are under attack? How about some help, people? Victory conditions can also be irritating. There are several campaigns that require that specific goals be met, and these quickly grow tiresome. Thankfully, there is an excellent custom generator that lets you set map size, starting tech, resources, and other features. This is the saving grace of AOE, and what kept me coming back again and again. The main reason is that it let me change some of the insane default victory requirements, such as when the victor is the first to build a "wonder" (through another massive consumption of resources) that stands for 2000 years. These 2000 years can pass in about twenty minutes of game time. That means that as soon as an opponent builds a wonder, you create a whacking huge navy to go over and blow it up. Not a very subtle way to maintain an empire. In fact, there is no strategic nuance: It is merely a brawny muscle contest. For all its historical trappings and pretensions to recreate the early progress of civilization, in the final analysis it does not even have the depth of a pure combat game like Dark Reign or Total Annihilation.

If all these judgments seem harsh, it is only because Age of Empires looked, and pretends, to be so very much more. It still has tons of potential and a fundamental gameplay that remains entertaining enough to overcome the flaws and merit a fair rating. The system can go very far with some fine-tuning, but as it stands it seems downright schizo. Is it a simplified Civilization or a modestly beefed up Warcraft? It's almost as if the designers started out to create one game and ended up with another. With such beautiful production and the fundamentals of a vastly entertaining game, it's sad that it fell short of the mark. The disappointment is not merely with what AOE is, but with what it failed to be.

By T. Liam McDonald, GameSpot

Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium-90 or equivalent
RAM: 16 MB
Video Memory: 1 MB
Hard Drive Space: 130 MB

Screen Shots

Download

Aug 19, 2007 at 14:21 o\clock

Faces of War

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Download, Games, Historic, Real, Time, Strategy, strategy

Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Best Way
Genre: Historic Real-Time Strategy
Release Date: Sep 12, 2006 (more)
ESRB: MATURE
Offline Modes: Competitive, Cooperative, Team Oriented
Online Modes: Competitive, Cooperative, Team Oriented
Number of Players: 1 Player
Number of Online Players: 16 Online
It's surprising that developers are still finding ways to screw up World War II real-time strategy games. Games like the fantastic Company of Heroes should be the rule by this point, not the exception, seeing as developers have stacks of games to pick apart to see what works and what doesn't. Unfortunately, as Faces of War proves, this isn't the case. Many RTS versions of the noble crusade remain packed with flaws, including dull, derivative missions and control problems, and this game is no exception. Even though developer Best Way has already produced the well-regarded Soldiers: Heroes of WWII, here the company has made a primer on how not to make a WWII RTS. Faces of War hits all of the potholes that have wrecked similar games in the recent past, and it's driven into a few new ones.
By now, you probably know the drill when it comes to World War II-themed strategy games. The solo part of the game features the usual three campaigns (there is no skirmish option), so once more you get to tear up Europe with the Germans, Allies, and Soviets. There are no surprises here, although the developer has thrown something of a curveball by picking up the war after the midway point of 1944. You come on board for the final stages of the conflict, so, for a change, there isn't a focus on the standard WWII-game headline battles like D-Day (which is represented in a bonus mission outside of the formal Allied campaign) and Stalingrad (which isn't featured here at all). Chances are that you've liberated Omaha Beach and blasted that infamous Russian city to rubble a few dozen times in other games already, though, so the (partial) absence of these engagements is refreshing.

That's about all that is refreshing about Faces of War, though. Everything else has been scooped out of the big bag of WWII RTS game clichés with both hands. Gameplay is something of a cross between Commandos and a typical larger-scale WWII RTS. You take charge of a small squad of troops and don't have to deal with resource management or even minor management tasks such as ordering up reinforcements, but you do have to deal with large numbers of enemies. Overall, the designers have sort of hit the sweet spot between solving level puzzles and blowing the hell out of everything that moves.

Still, missions all deal with tired, bog-standard objectives like blowing up radio stations, rescuing generals, detonating bridges, and stealing secret plans. There are lots of vehicles, gun emplacements, and tanks to hop into, plus loads of buildings to enter and use to set up shooting positions, but the end goals are still very, very familiar. You can choose to play assignments by either tactics or arcade rules, but both feel like a Sgt. Rock comic brought to life, with your squad going up against insane odds and stacking bodies like cordwood. Best Way seems to have compensated for the lack of unique settings by swamping every level with foes. Combat is fast and busy in such a never-let-up style that the incessant action soon begins to wear on you.
Levels have also been overdeveloped to the point where you have no real freedom. They aren't as rigid or as puzzle-heavy as those you would find in one of the Commandos games, although there is typically just one way to complete objectives and usually just a single way to get there. You need to do everything in perfect order to activate a trigger spawning backups (like a column of tank reinforcements) or setting up the condition needed to take out the battalion of enemies that attack you at the end of each mission. A lot of levels feature extremely dissatisfying endgames that you don't control, where the cavalry shows up out of the blue like a deus ex machina, for example, or you suddenly win the day just because you managed to stay alive against withering enemy fire for a long-enough period of time. Often, these victory conditions aren't spelled out, so you're left mindlessly killing enemies in the hope that the level will eventually end.

Also, if you don't follow the moves "suggested" in midmission officer voiceovers to the letter, you have no hope of winning battles. You don't even have a choice when it comes to taking on secondary objectives, as you always have to complete them ASAP or get shredded by hidden mortars, blown away by a King Tiger tank, or overwhelmed by enemies who often pour out of buildings like clowns out of a funny car. This is one extremely linear game in which everything feels scripted.
Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium IV 2.0 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 64 MB
Hard Drive Space: 2500 MB

Recommended System Requirements
System: Pentium IV 3.0 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 1024 MB
Video Memory: 128 MB

Aug 18, 2007 at 15:26 o\clock

Playboy The Mansion

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Business, Strategy, Download, Games, sexual

Publisher: Arush Entertainment
Developer: Cyberlore Studios
Genre: Business Strategy
Release Date: Jan 25, 2005 (more)
ESRB: MATURE
ESRB Descriptors: Nudity, Strong Sexual Content, Use of Alcohol

The life of Hugh M. Hefner, the man whose lifestyle Playboy almost seems named after, is the stuff of dreams. Or, as it might seem in Cyberlore's Playboy: The Mansion, the stuff of good PR. You'll take control of a virtual Hef to try to build the Playboy empire while rubbing elbows with celebrities, frolicking with Playboy Bunnies and Playmates alike, and throwing a seemingly endless string of parties along the way. Oh, and you'll publish a magazine or two. Yet despite the bacchanalian context, this Sims-style strategy game comes off as cold and mechanical, capturing none of the devil-may-care attitude you'd expect and casting Hef's idyllic lifestyle as a hollow grind established purely for the sake of selling more magazines.
The idea is that as a young, vital Hugh Hefner, you take the magazine from the first issue and build it up from there. However, in the game's mission mode, you'll get a good head start by having already acquired the famous Playboy Mansion. The game breaks down into three easy pieces. Of course, your primary concern is publishing your magazine, which demands that you acquire a set number of pieces of content: one cover shot, one centerfold, one article, one interview, one essay, and one pictorial. You'll need to hire a small staff of journalists and photographers to produce most of the content, as well as a new Playmate each month, but for the cover shots, essays, and interviews, you'll need celebrities.

To get connected to celebrities, you'll need to throw some parties...a lot of parties, actually. By inviting prominent figures from the worlds of politics, sports, and just about every arm of the entertainment industry to your get-togethers, you'll be able to strike up conversations with them. And after you've gotten to know them, you can ask them to contribute to the magazine. Social networking plays a big role in Playboy: The Mansion, though its execution is extremely shallow, making it easy to go from perfect strangers to best friends, to business partners, to intimate partners with a few clicks of the dialogue menu.

Successful parties will increase your overall fame, which helps sell magazines. To throw a successful party, you'll need to make sure you've invited a group of compatible people, in addition to hiring Playboy Bunny hostesses to keep the rooms alive and providing plenty of other activities to keep your guests happy. To keep the Mansion as fabulous as possible, you'll have to take some of your magazine money and reinvest it in the grounds. There's an extensive amount of customization available, letting you determine the floor plan of the mansion as well as the furniture and various decorative pieces that are housed inside.

It seems like there's a lot to juggle in the Mansion, but in reality it only requires as much tending as you feel compelled to invest. Time seems kind of nebulous, and you have no hard deadlines for when you need to have each month's issue finalized, allowing you to collect the content you'll need at your own leisure. Similarly, if you don't want to obsess over the interior design of the Mansion, you can simply do the bare minimum to keep guests happy and be done with it, since Hef's own personal satisfaction isn't a factor at all. In fact, rather than being harrowing, which might even be preferable, Playboy: The Mansion is just dull. Your goals and your means to them are laid out pretty plainly, and the obstacles between you and success are numbered.

The game gives you the option of playing in mission or free-form mode. The mission mode provides you with additional goals to meet as you publish magazines, throw parties, and expand the Mansion, while the free-form mode stays true to its name by letting you play however you feel fit. Though the PC version's mouse-based controls feel a bit more natural, especially given the heavy influence of The Sims, experiences with the PS2 and Xbox versions aren't too different from each other, both in terms of navigation and overall presentation.

The most compelling bit of content inside Playboy: The Mansion involves the unlockable extras, which include classic Playboy covers, centerfolds, and interviews with celebrities ranging from Snoop Dogg to Jimmy Carter. The dozens of photos from across Playboy's history provide an interesting retrospective on the magazine, and to a certain extent, American pop culture at large. The interviews hold up without any nostalgic assistance and simply represent good reads. Ironically, the articles might just be the best reason to subscribe to Playboy: The Mansion.

The game plays an awful lot like The Sims, and its presentation similarities to Maxis' suburban lifestyle simulation are many as well. The game is mostly played from a three-quarters overhead perspective, though you can spin the camera around and zoom in and out at will. The people in the game all have a pleasantly nondescript look to them, à la The Sims, and after interacting with dozens of unique celebrities and staffers, they'll all start blending together.
Similarly, the girls who pose for the cover and centerfold shoots, despite having different hairstyles, skin tones, and bra sizes, are otherwise indistinguishable. Combine this with the limited animation routines the girls go through during the photo shoots, and over the course of publishing a year's worth of Playboy magazines, it'll start seeming like you're just taking pictures of the same girl in a different wig...which, if you think about it, is kind of creepy. The overall look is mildly playful and a little chunky, and despite a bevy of topless models galavanting around the grounds, the game never even proffers a close brush with titillation. It makes some effort, but the bland, somewhat mechanical look of the game keeps it from being anything more than just slightly bawdy.
Buying sound systems for the Mansion can provide you with some good background music that covers a pretty broad range of tunes, from fairly stock rock, hip-hop, and techno stations to more-unusual options, such as an industrial station, a flamenco station, and a jazz station. More curious than the eclectic nature of the soundtrack in Playboy: The Mansion is the rampant censoring. Having already earned a firm M-rating with its healthy attitude toward toplessness (both digital and otherwise), Playboy: The Mansion's self-censorship seems almost hypocritical. Though Hef and everyone else who visits the Mansion speaks in some house-brand version of simlish, the gibberish language spoken by sims in The Sims, you have a handful of assistants and executives that will regularly dole out useful information in plain English. Their utility far outstrips the chops of the voice actors, whose reading of the expositional dialogue is often stilted and unnatural. The music is the most prominent element in the game's sound design, and it does inject a little personality into the proceedings. However, the game still can't help but feel kind of dry.

Beyond simply not being a particularly compelling game, Playboy: The Mansion really seems to balk at presenting the swinging spirit of the Playboy name, and it openly treats both Hefner and the Playboy reader like a commodity. Like Hef himself, who has gradually shifted from outspoken cultural icon to caricatured corporate mascot, there's not a lot of Playboy left in The Mansion.

By Ryan Davis, GameSpot
Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium(r) III 800 or 100% compatible or equivalent
RAM: 256 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 1500 MB
Other: Windows Media 9 Player or later

Aug 18, 2007 at 02:55 o\clock

Zeus : Master of Olympus

by: freepcgame   Keywords: strategy, Games, Download

Publisher: Sierra Entertainment
Developer: Impressions Games
Genre: Strategy
Release Date: Sep 30, 2001 (more)
ESRB: EVERYONE
Number of Players: 1 Player

Zeus: Master of Olympus follows in the same tradition as Impressions' other real-time city-building games, including Pharaoh and the Caesar series. These games combine the urban-management elements of Maxis' SimCity along with the colonial and imperial objectives of Blue Byte's Settlers games. Yet although Zeus is similar to its predecessors, it offers numerous enhancements and improvements that make it a much better game. These include features and options reminiscent of Ensemble's Age of Empires real-time strategy games as well as MicroProse's classic Civilization series. As a result, Zeus plays like a best-of-all-worlds combination of some of the greatest strategy games ever.

As the title implies, Zeus is set in ancient Greece. However, the setting doesn't have too much of an impact on gameplay. For the most part, Zeus plays exactly like Caesar and Pharaoh. The only surface differences are the products your people produce and the food your people eat. Just as in the previous games, your goal is to manage every aspect of an ancient city. From agriculture and housing to employment and military, everything is under your control. You must make sure that you have enough jobs for your people and enough people for your jobs. You also need enough food to feed your people and enough profit from exporting goods to cover the high cost of importing the goods you aren't able to produce. It's a high-wire act and becomes even trickier as your city grows in size.

As you get into the game, you'll notice there are actually some key differences in the way that Zeus plays compared with its predecessors. Impressions has made some significant changes to the mission structure so that - while the basic gameplay is still the same - it's now much more fun to play. A typical campaign, called an "adventure," works as follows. You begin with a tract of empty land. You build your city from scratch, as you aim for some preset, easily achievable goals. Once your city is functioning smoothly, the mission ends. The next mission will put you in charge of the same city, but your goals will be a bit more complex. Usually, these will involve having to attract a legendary hero, like Hercules or Perseus, to your city to perform some task. Once that's done, it's on to the next mission. Eventually, you'll choose a site to colonize and begin again from scratch. Then it's back to the parent city, this time with all the benefits of having a colony, including increased trade and a yearly tribute of money or goods. By this time, some of your neighboring countries will probably have been offended or will have become jealous, and so it'll be time to start invading or defending. The final mission will end with your having to accomplish some larger goals that ensure that your city is thriving and free from rivals.

While some of these ideas were implemented in Cleopatra, the expansion to Pharaoh, they are fully realized in Zeus. Specifically, your city remains exactly as you left it from mission to mission. Adventures range from five to eight missions and typically take quite a while to finish. There are seven in all, and they get increasingly difficult. Moreover, they each focus on one particular aspect of Greek history or mythology; one will have you aiding Jason through his tasks, while another is about the Trojan War. The only problem with the adventures is that the integration of the mythology occasionally seems like an afterthought. For instance, in an episode called Hercules' Labors, Hercules himself only plays a small role. But overall, the mission design is first-rate.
Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium-166 or equivalent
RAM: 32 MB
Video Memory: 2 MB
Hard Drive Space: 550 MB

Recommended System Requirements
System: PII 266 or equivalent
RAM: 64 MB
Video Memory: 4 MB
Hard Drive Space: 650 MB

Aug 17, 2007 at 18:18 o\clock

Company of Heroes

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Historic, Real, Time, Strategy, Strategy

Publisher: THQ
Developer: Relic
Genre: Historic Real-Time Strategy
Release Date: Sep 13, 2006 (more)
ESRB: MATURE

Offline Modes: Competitive, Team Oriented
Online Modes: Competitive, Team Oriented
Number of Players: 1-8
Number of Online Players: 8 Online
Company of Heroes is a visually stunning real-time strategy game that depicts all the violent chaos of World War II with uncommon intensity. Set during the invasion of Normandy toward the end of the war, Company of Heroes takes its cues from Saving Private Ryan, by portraying both the sheer brutality of the war as well as the humanity of its combatants. Many other recent WWII games have also drawn influence from Steven Spielberg's landmark film, but Company of Heroes is even more graphic. This and the game's highly authentic-looking presentation are its distinguishing features, and it boasts some frantic, well-designed strategic and tactical combat to match. Company of Heroes trades a wide breadth of content for an extremely detailed look at WWII-era ground combat, and its action is so fast paced that it's best suited for the reflexes of an experienced RTS player. So if you're unfazed by any of that, you'll find that this latest real-time strategy game from the developers of Homeworld and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is one of the best, most dramatic and exciting examples in years.
Provided you have a powerful-enough system and graphics card to fully appreciate the visuals in Company of Heroes, you'll quickly be struck by the level of detail depicted in the game. Infantry move in teams, darting from cover to cover. They may be ordered to occupy any building on the map, and you'll see them shutter the doors and take aim out the windows. Vehicles are shown to scale, so tanks and other armored vehicles look big and imposing, and, indeed, they are. Infantry seem almost helpless against tanks, and you'll hear the men screaming as tank shells explode around them, sending bodies flying, while lucky survivors dive out of the way. Yet by attacking a tank's vulnerable sides and rear armor with explosives, it's possible to turn the tables on these lumbering threats...turning one of the most basic confrontations in Company of Heroes into a thrilling cat-and-mouse game, much more than a typical clash between a couple of RTS units. What's more, the battlefields themselves have at least as much character to them as the various infantry squads and vehicles as your disposal. The quaint French towns that are the set pieces of many of the game's skirmishes truly look as if a war was waged there once the battle is done, since buildings will catch fire and collapse, telephone lines will topple, blackened craters will appear in the wake of artillery blasts, and more. These changes aren't just cosmetic, either. Those blast craters provide cover for your infantry, while the ruined husks of blown-up tanks might interfere with a machine gunner's line of fire.

The game focuses on the Allies' invasion of German-occupied Normandy in 1944, specifically on close-quarters skirmishes between infantry and armor. Company of Heroes presents a number of novel twists to real-time strategy conventions, but at heart this game works like other RTS games do, by putting you in charge of base construction, resource gathering, and tactical command of various military forces in an effort to defeat the opposition. The game includes a good-sized single-player campaign spanning more than a dozen missions, in which Able Company lands on Omaha Beach on D-Day, liberates a number of key towns and strategic points, disrupts German supply lines and secret weapons, and finally helps crush the remnants of the Nazi war machine in France. It's an exciting campaign, tied together with cutscenes and mission briefings coming from a variety of voices, which creates a few threads that help tie the missions together. In addition to the campaign, you can play skirmish matches with up to seven computer-controlled players on a series of different maps, and you can also jump online into the proprietary Relic Online service to challenge other players in ranked and unranked matches. The Relic Online service is a cut above most similar offerings, and lets you easily find a ranked match against players of similar skill or host a match with your own custom settings.
Because of its limited scope of the Second World War, Company of Heroes has only the two playable factions, which it calls the Allies and the Axis--but really they're the Americans and the Germans. In the campaign, you always play as forces from Able Company and you're always fighting the Germans. There isn't a separate campaign from the German perspective, though the Axis faction is fully playable in skirmish matches and online, and turns out to be fairly different from the Allies despite the basic similarities between the two sides' weaponry. In fact, in a strange departure from similar games, Company of Heroes always forces you to play Allies versus Axis, even in multiplayer matches. Matches with more than two players are always team-based, with one side as the Allies and the other as the Axis, and so forth. While the game's units and battlefields are unusually detailed, it's hard not to wish for additional playable factions and a greater variety of settings, especially given how well Company of Heroes handles the American and German sides.

The gameplay in Company of Heroes is all about frontline combat, and forces you to quickly explore the map. You typically start out with a headquarters and a squad of engineers, who can build structures and setup defenses. Maps are divided up into territories that all have a resource point in them, and the resources you'll need are manpower, munitions, and fuel. Infantry may capture neutral or enemy resource points, causing them to indefinitely contribute a flow of the given resource to your military efforts while also increasing the total number of units you can have in your army. However, all your territories must be connected for the resource flow to continue unabated; if an enemy takes a key territory, this may cut off your supply lines. All resources are used for building more-advanced structures and vehicles, but you only need manpower for basic infantry, who may use special abilities like hand grenades or armor-piercing machine gun rounds for a one-time cost of munitions. Munitions may also be spent to upgrade individual squads with special weapons, like recoilless rifles useful against enemy armor, or Browning automatic rifles that can suppress opposing squads. Your infantry squads are highly resourceful, acting as single units that can be effective down to the last man. They'll last much longer when attacking from behind cover, such as a row of sandbags or the bell tower of an abandoned church.
If you've played Relic's last real-time strategy game, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, you'll note that many of these conventions were derived and extended from that game. However, Company of Heroes still plays quite differently from Dawn of War because of the nature of its densely packed battlefields and its even greater focus on unit tactics. You have some very interesting options to consider, such as how, when faced with an antitank gun manned by a squad of three, you may attempt to destroy the thing altogether with heavy weapons, or flank the gun and kill its squad, taking the artillery piece for your own. Heavy machine guns and other special weapons work much the same way. One of the great things about Company of Heroes is that, in spite of its somewhat glamorized portrayal of World War II, the game looks and behaves realistically, in how the sorts of tactical maneuvers that are central to the gameplay feel intuitive in practice. For example, you'll naturally want to avoid making your infantry rush a machine gun nest head-on, especially since the withering fire from a German MG42 will force your squad to drop prone, pinned down.
Minimum System Requirements
System: 2.0GHz Intel Pentium IV or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 64 MB
Hard Drive Space: 6500 MB

Recommended System Requirements
System: 3.0GHz Intel Pentium or equivalent
RAM: 1024 MB
Video Memory: 256 MB
Hard Drive Space: 6500 MB

Aug 17, 2007 at 03:03 o\clock

Freight Tycoon Inc

by: freepcgame   Keywords: Tycoon, Business, Strategy

Publisher: 1C
Developer: Nikita
Genre: Business Strategy
Release Date: TBA 2007

Freight Tycoon Inc. is an economic simulation game which challenges players' management skills. It puts one into the shoes of an owner of a cargo transportation company. One has to evaluate the profitability of contracts, contact customers, and appoint drivers to deliver goods.Office development is also an essential part of success in business. Employing and dismissing workers, buying new vehicles and keeping technical records competently. But one should be aware of rivals which are interested in forcing out your company out of the market.The game is set in a fully 3D world with various landscapes and season changes. The appearance of buildings, vehicles and headquarters change interactively, so one can see the results.Freight Tycoon Inc. gives you a unique opportunity to extend the world of Freight Tycoon and create your own cargo transportation empire.

Minimal configuration:
OS MS Windows 2000XP DirectX MS
DirectX 9.0c
CPU Intel Pentium IV or AMD Athlon 1,5 GHz
RAM min. 512 MB
Disc space required for the game 1,5 GB
Disc free space 2,5 GB
Video adapter MS Direct3D-compatible graphic accelerator with GForce 3 support
Sound card MS Windows-compatible sound card
Mouse MS Windows-compatible mouse

Recommended configuration:
OS MS Windows XP
DirectX MS DirectX 9.0c or higher
CPU Intel Pentium IV or AMD Athlon 2,8 GHz
RAM 1024
Disc space required for the game 2,5 GB
Disc free space 1 GB
Video adapter MS Direct3D-compatible graphic accelerator of GForce 6600 class
Sound card MS Windows-compatible sound card
Mouse MS Windows-compatible mouse

Screen Shots

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