March 2006 Issue

[rsstites]

The writers of the Gaming Chronicle will add their video game impressions, reviews, previews, and general opinion columns below this post.

(If you are interested in writing for the Chronicle, then click on the groups link in the header. Then chose the Chronicle usergroup, and then click join.)

[danny12]

PS2 Review: Fifa Street 2




My review is split into these sections.

Story
Gameplay
Graphics
Replayability
Faults
My Opinion
Final Score


Story: Basically the same as Fifa Street 1 you start off as a young man with a name of your choice and you are walking past the local basketball court with Rohnaldino and they are missing a member of the team.........

Gameplay: Fifa Street 2 has enhanced on its predeccesor in almost all ways. For one thing Rule The Street (The carrer mode) has been enhanced. Everyone will start off at Kick About mode where you build up things called Skill Bills used to upgrade the stats of your players. When you own made player is upgraded enough you are made a team captain with more matches unlocked. After more upgrading you unlock Undergroud where all the street teams play to finish off the street modes. After a last bit of upgrading you join the final mode International where you join an international team like Brazil or Argentina. The tricks book has been upgraded with new tricks included in the trick stick and random trick. The most noticable trick is Juggling where you can juggle the ball with your foot, knees, shoulders or head for skill bills. Gamebreakers are now changed. After filling the gamebreaker to the full after earning a certain amount of points go to the red circle in the middle of the field to start the Gamebreaker mode where you can shoot immediatly for 1 goal, beat trick 1 player for 1 goal for you and 1 taken off the rivals, 2 beats for 2 goals for you and 1 taken away from then or 3 beats which earns you an instant win. Also halfway through the game you own pitch must be made for progress to be made and the amount of diffrent choices makes this a nice touch. Lots of famous footballers are in the game with new features like if a player thinks he is too good for your team you either pay to keep him or let him go. The player that leaves will challenge you at a later point and you earn 15,000 points and a chance to keep the player again if you are successfull.


Graphics: Lucious graphics with excellent pitches, backgrounds and player detail.

Replayability: Being a football game there is infinite replay with Skill Matchs to complete, Rule The Street to complete, and two player options.

Faults: Get increasingly hard near the end of the game and can be repetitive.

My Opinion: Lots of new improvements from the last game but the games difficulty put me off.

Final Score: Fans of the first game will feel right at home here and people looking for a challenge will kill for this. 9/10

[danny12]

PS2 Review: Driver Parallel Lines





My review is split into these sections.

Story
Gameplay
Graphics
Replayability
Faults
My Opinion
Final Score



Story: Our story begins in 1978. You are an 18 year old who goes by the name of TK and you have moved to New York City in search of a more exciting life from the boring west. You're pretty good behind the wheel of a car, and you build up a reputation and eventually get introduced to a man called Ray the best driver and mechanic of his time. However Ray introduces him to Slink who is a criminal looking for fame and fortune. After doing a couple of jobs for him Slink introduces him to The Mexican and the story goes on from here.But, as these things normally go, stuff doesn't pan out quite so well for TK, and the gang of criminals he worked for at this point *you will meet these people later in the game*set him up and he gets locked up for 28 year. This takes us up to 2006 with TK being much older and out for revenge. This turns your perspective of the game right around with you suddenly having to get to grips with much faster cars, better weapons and a big change to New York City. Look at the picture below for a graphic view on how TK changes in jail. This story however is quite boring and isn't good enough to keep you hooked all the way through.



Gameplay: The area you play in Driver 4 puts you in New York City which is divided up by three large bridges. There are many diffrent types of side missions to be tackled in this game such as helping robbers escape from the police, checkpoint races and so on. The money can be spent on things like bullets for guns and car upgrades. Upgrading a car regrularly is very important because some of the harder races will need upgraded and faster cars than normal. A useful feature that all the garages have is a Store Veichle option where you can keep all the cars you find for free in the garage so if you left you car out in the middle of nowhere and you select the veichle in the garage you get it back instantly. Also New York is a very large city so the garages can be moved to four diffrent places one of which is your safe house. The story path by taking on a variety of missions. As you can expect from the title of the game the majoirty of the game is in a car but there are foot sections and guns will be used too. Missions are all GTA basic ripoffs like a mission where you steal a special police motor to use later in a jail break or driving at intense speeds to spook the gaurd in your car to give you info.The targeting system in this game is absoloutley terruible. You have to press L1 to target someone and more often than you would like it dosn't target the right person which is frustrating and takes a long time to change targets. Weapons can also be used in cars but with such an awful targeting system you will rarely use it unless you are chasing a target. The police in the game are very advanced. There are two diffrent types of cop alert you will recieve with one being the police chasing you for shooting or killing people and the other with them chasing your car because you are causing mayhem or killing bystanders which is a very advanced system to use and it often works well. Police also start to chase you for doing other things like ramming them, running away from them when you slightly touch their cars and the most advanced one is whenever they chase you for speeding OR going thorugh a red light. The car handling system is very bad in this game. Cars feel like they are gliding on the road rather than on the road and because of this makes it hard to drive. Also the crashes bring the car to a full stop almost every time. It brings a lump to your throat when your in a high speed chase with your car going at 130MPH thinking you have escaped laughing and BAM crash right into a post and its game over.

Graphics: Graphically this game surpasses its rival GTA in all ways. Cars look sweet with excellently rendered designs from real cars and awesome inside detail. The surroundings actually do resemble NYC and the time period you are playing in. For example in the early section of the game NYC is run down, darker and for some strange reason a lot of the buildings are brown in the poor part and silver in the middle part of the city. However whenever the game goes to the future the city is much, much brighter, a lot less dark and less run down and actually looks like a city from the future.

Replayability: For a game of this size and magnitude there is surprisingly little reason to replay the game over again. Other than doing the side missions, getting all the tokens and unlocking all the cheats there is no real incentive to play the game other than completing it on a harder difficulty.

Faults: Very bad targeting system and pathetic car handling brings the games enjoyability down severley. Also with the annoyance of the story not being interesting and amongst other things this lowers the games score badly.

My Opinion: Even though i have given the game a bad review it is good in parts and it is certainley better than its little brother Driv3r. This game's graphics for example are top notch with few games matching its excellence.

Final Score: The game isn't all bad but with all the bad points i made about it I would recommend you rent before you buy. 6/10

[rickjames]

PSP Review-Daxter



Story: Daxter, the sidekick of Jak, now has his own game and this time he’s the one saving people… from bugs. Daxter ends up in a town and meets an old man with pointy ears and the man gets Daxter to help him run his company, which exterminates bugs. Daxter agrees and is given a bug swatter. He ends up having to save Jak. The first job for Daxter is to exterminate the bugs at a hotel.

Gameplay: The gameplay is a mix between plat forming and fighting. The consists of you completing missions and getting new ones in a free-roam world. Even though there is only one new mission at a time, the game offers a free roam city in which you can back to previous missions. You collect two different collectables, one when you kill an enemy, metal bug gem, and another kind, which you collect by finding and using plat forming skills, precursor orb. It is not required to collect all of the gems in every level, because the levels consist of performing certain tasks, not just collecting.
The plat forming in this game is very good and fun, although not very challenging. A bug sprayer becomes available soon after the start of the game, which stuns the enemies. The bug sprayer gets upgrades such as the jet pack which can help you hover and fly through the air for a limited amount of time. Green orbs placed on the maps refills your bug spray, but it also helps you hover longer, helping you reach more of the red precursor orbs. There are also things like torches, which throw you in the air when you fly over it. All these obstacles and challenges make the plat forming fun and sometimes difficult for those who want to collect all the red gems in the levels, which is not required. Collecting these unlocks new ‘dream sequences’. These ‘dream sequences’ are Daxter’s dreams of being heroes like Neo in the Matrix and Braveheart. The ’dream sequences are timed button presses to kill enemies coming towards you. By completing the dream sequences more health can be added or Daxter can learn a new move. The ‘dream sequences’ entice the player to try to collect all the red orbs in the levels because collecting them is rewarding and fun.
The fighting in Daxter is where you get the other type of collectable, the yellow gem. There are many different types of bugs and Daxter is equipped with a bug swatter at the beginning to handle these. He also gets a bug sprayer which stuns the enemies and makes them immobile, helping Daxter defeat them. Even though Daxter swings the bug swatter with the press of the square button, fighting never gets old with the bug sprayer and the moves he learns. He also gets a flamethrower upgrade which can burn bugs and allows him to hover higher.
There are also bosses in the game that require you to learn the sequence of their moves and how to beat them. They are fun, even though not the most challenging.
To mix it up, the game has vehicle missions and a hovering scoter that you can ride. Even though this addition isn’t something very different, it does offer variety to the gameplay and the scoter allows you to reach places in the free-roam world, otherwise unreachable.
Daxter does have a few bad qualities about it, and one of them is the camera. You can move the camera with the L and R buttons, but that is very slow. The camera sometimes does weird things while you are playing, but overall it is good and does not interfere with fighting or plat forming.
Graphics: The graphics of Daxter is one of the best on the PSP. During the cut scenes, you can even see the hairs of Daxter’s fur. The graphics are colorful and very crisp.

Multiplayer: Daxter has a feature called Bug Combat in which you can pit your bugs against the computer or a real life person in a game that’s based on rock-paper-scissors gameplay. While playing the actual single player game of Daxter, you can collect bugs, tokens, and upgrades to that you can use during Bug Combat. During Bug Combat, you can pick your tokens and play them during gameplay, which puts a more strategic spin on the game. The bug combat is not a very fun addition to the game, but it does offer a multiplayer option and a way to collect more things during gameplay. It would have been better if they made it so you can actually fight in real time with the bugs.

Sound: The sound is decent for a PSP title, and the cut scenes are enjoyable to watch and sometimes funny, although Daxter gets a little annoying.

Controls: The controls are responsive and easy to learn and master. Even though the PSP has only one analogue stick, it’s not a problem.

Fun/ Replay Value: I had a hard time putting this game down, because it is so fun, and once you beat the game, you can go back and try to collect all of the gems and orbs and bugs. The Replay Value is very good.

Final Word: This is one of the best games on the PSP, even if you don’t like the genre of this game, you should pick it up because it’s the few and the proud on the PSP.

Score: 9.2/10

[rickjames]

"An 'Oblivion' of errors..."



Many are experiencing problems with the the newly released Elder scrolls, Oblivion. Read more about these bugs and discuss the problems here. http://forums.heroesofgaming.com/viewtopic.php?t=1985