by Andrew Hayward
War World seemed poised for release last fall, but it curiously faded from view after that -- I actually played a few minutes of it at E3 2007, and while my brief dalliance with a demo was hardly enough to form a worthwhile opinion on the title, it struck me as a fairly mediocre mech shooter in desperate need of a hook. What's changed in the last year-plus, now that it's finally seeing release? I'd say very little, if anything.
Adapted from a 2005 PC release of the same name, War World drops the mech-customization options of its predecessor, leaving only a bare-bones deathmatch shooter that lacks flair and originality. More distressingly, War World drops the ball in regards to offering a believable simulation of piloting a giant, weaponized robot. The environments simply don't react to your movements and attacks, whether you're firing off rockets, machine guns, or mines, while the mechs themselves lack tangible or visual heft -- you hop around and fall from great distances without any noticeable effect. Multiton robots shouldn't have to worry about getting stuck between a fence and a tree, but sure enough, it happened to me during a match.
Podcast Beyond, Episode 62
by IGN Staff
LittleBigBeta talk and detailed discussions galore.
Three Red Lights Podcast, Episode 44
by IGN Staff
A wizard bequeaths Erik a magical pen that gives every game a 6.8.
To Catch an Editor Video Podcast, Episode 22
by IGN Staff
The history of Bozon.
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Review
by Rory Manion
A war story: While waiting around in the Blackbramble Hollow war camp for a player-versus-player scenario (structured instances where teams compete over an objective) to queue up, my party and I received a message: "The lord of Mandred's Hold is under attack!" Typically, this autonotification just means that an ignorant enemy player wandered too close to the keep's A.I. defenders -- a fly in the zapper, to swipe my friend's apt analogy. With nothing urgent to take care of and the keep only a few seconds to the south, my crew and I decided to do a little police action of the area and scrape up any remaining assailants.
Unfortunately for us, the lone fly turned out to be a hornet's nest. A full Destruction war party had organized and decided to wrest the keep (and the valuable trainers and merchants within) from Order's control. We ran back to camp to rally supporters and purchase some equalizers: cannons and oil cauldrons to fend off the surging puddle of red names. For a while, it worked. Our Hellblazer cannons, positioned on predetermined emplacement points on the keep walls, scattered their healers and casters while the oil finished off anyone foolish enough to approach the keep door. But the enemy quickly regrouped and slapped down some of their own siege engines, which demolished our relatively unsupported war machine. With our weapons crumbled and the keep door buckling, we started planning our tactical withdrawal...until a full Order war band charged around the side of the keep, split the enemy force in half, and caused a rout on par with something straight out of the Total War series.
Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked Review
by Michael Grimm
The formerly portable-only Lost in Blue exploration/survival franchise finally makes its Wii debut with Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked. As per usual, your character survives a nautical accident and awakens on the shore of a nearby island, where it's up to the player to forage for food, build shelter, and somehow find a way back home. Soon enough, you find another survivor stranded on the island, who quickly becomes little more than dead weight, extra bag space, and an additional mouth to feed.
The game's new characters, Aidan and Lucy, are accompanied by their pets Hobo (a monkey) and Max (a dog), who aid gathering efforts by climbing and digging, respectively. As in previous Lost in Blue games, your characters have three gauges -- hunger, thirst, and endurance -- that you must monitor as they constantly tick down to zero. The core gameplay revolves around scavenging for enough food and water to stay alive while simultaneously hunting for additional resources to build tools and shelter in your effort to escape. Those expecting a leisurely tropical vacation may be surprised, though.
Despite its simplistic graphics and generally kid-friendly look, Shipwrecked is an incredibly difficult game. While the novel health gauges certainly add a sense of suspense -- especially when venturing deep into the island -- they deplete at a rather astonishing rate. The amount of resources required to simply keep your characters alive is absurd. I imagine eight coconuts and two mangoes would fill the belly of any real-life 16-year-old...but not so in Shipwrecked, where your character can eat an entire wild boar and fill only a third of his hunger meter.
Peggle Nights Review
by Andrew Hayward
Like many of you out there, my Peggle addiction came swiftly and spectacularly. Just last week, I downloaded the original Peggle demo after holding out for nearly a year and a half, and now here I am, splitting my gaming time between Peggle Deluxe for Mac, Peggle on iPod, and the recently released Peggle Nights for PC. I realize my story is hardly unique, whether among the general gaming populace or within the 1UP ranks -- after all, we voted Peggle the best casual game of 2007 -- but it's a testament to the quality of the core experience that a man could be driven to install very similar versions of a game to separate partitions -- Mac OSX and Windows -- of his hard drive (and his iPod).
Click the image above to check out all Peggle Nights screens.
Warhammer: Battle March Review
by Anthony Gallegos
Anyone who's heard me on Legendary Thread or the late GFW Radio knows that I'm a huge Warhammer fan. I'm not talking about the recently released Warhammer Online, though - I mean, the tabletop war game. I've spent hours upon hours reading various army codices, painting miniatures, and constructing armies that I'll never even play with. My friends and I regularly sit around discussing the basics of Dwarf army strategies and engaging in verbal pissing matches where we emphasize how our respective dice rolls will trump anything we can throw at one another.
Warhammer: Mark of Chaos - Battle March, Namco Bandai's second PC real-time strategy game and an expansion of Warhammer: Mark of Chaos, takes away the dice rolls and turn-based combat while maintaining much of what makes tabletop Warhammer great. You create an army prior to each battle -- you can't create or bring in additional units after the skirmish begins -- and deploy your troops before the action starts. Most importantly (again, just like the board game), maneuvering is what matters most. Smashing a ton of troops into an opposing force can work, but paying close attention to how you maneuver and attack -- or protect -- flanks and rears of units makes all of the difference in the amount of casualties you sustain or inflict. Battle March, just like Mark of Chaos before it, manages to balance the complexity of the tabletop experience while keeping it manageable for a human playing in real time.
Command Prompt Podcast, Episode 19
by IGN Staff
Call this the RPG epsiode, as we spend a lot of time on Warhammer Online and Fallout 3.
Warriors Orochi 2 Review
by Anthony Gallegos
Every gamer I know has played Koei's Warriors franchise at some point. Heck, like me, they might've even enjoyed themselves the first few times; mindless hack-n-slash action can be good fun, after all. But the novelty of the Warriors formula's worn off for me, making the new games feel lazy and uninspired.
Warriors Orochi 2, just like every other Warriors game, places you in control of outrageously powerful fighters (complete with special abilities that allow them to execute superhero-like energy attacks) and tosses you into a number of battlefields to fight waves upon waves of troops who pose very little threat. The yawn-inducing combat consists of simply mashing one button (or a combination of two), with the occasional special attack thrown in. I'm not joking when I say that plenty of times, you could just close your eyes and press a button. And the battlefields are expansive, but they -- like the thousands of lifeless soldiers who practically throw themselves at your weapons -- are mostly identical throughout. In spite of how bland and outdated the game looks, it stutters frequently, playing like a slideshow that might trick you into thinking you're playing some sort of slow-mo mode.
Air Traffic Chaos Review
by Kyle Stallock
"Geez Louise," reads the text bubble next to the angry flight attendant's face, "you failed another!" Two planes have just collided while attempting to take off, a few hundred lives have been lost, and it's all my fault. Thankfully, this is just a videogame.
In Air Traffic Chaos, a self-described "career-based" strategy game, players take on the role of an air-traffic controller directing incoming and outgoing flights at five different Japanese airports (which serve as the stages). Everything from confirming a plane's route to deciding when a plane gets to land -- and on which runway -- is decided upon by the player.
Players issue commands on the DS' bottom screen via either the buttons or a stylus, while the screen itself is divided into eight quadrants, each representing individual flights (four incoming, four outgoing). Half those flights are usually unoccupied on the rookie setting, while additional planes -- along with detrimental weather and varying degrees of headwind -- are added on novice and expert. Sure, it's stressful to simultaneously manage eight planes in the middle of a driving storm, but it's ultimately satisfying for challenge-seekers like myself. In fact, challenge is really the only motivation to progress: There's no leveling up, no plot, and certainly no princess that needs to be saved -- just the sole satisfaction of completing a difficult game.
Silent Hill: Homecoming Review
by Anthony Gallegos
Ever since my first encounter with Silent Hill 2, something about this survival-horror franchise really got to me. Not that running from zombies wasn't terrifying when I played the original Resident Evil -- it's just that Silent Hill's themes of sin, punishment, and forgiveness (not to mention the nightmarish abominations) drew me in on a deeper level. While I'll always associate earlier series games with clunky combat, hard-to-follow stories, crappy camera positions, and load times between every room, those imperfections became synonymous with the franchise for me -- even endearing. What can I say? We love games for their flaws and their strengths alike.
With Silent Hill: Homecoming, everything's changed. So many of my associations with the franchise simply aren't applicable anymore: The clunky controls are now streamlined, combat's much more intense (at times, a little too intense), and the storyline -- for once -- makes clear-cut sense. None of this is bad, just...different. Very different.
Nintendo Voice Chat Podcast, Episode 25
by IGN Staff
Our car insurance rates just went down.
Sonic Chronicles Review
by Ryan Scott
The idea of a Sonic the Hedgehog DS role-playing game from BioWare (Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic) sounds like one of EGM's elaborate April Fools' jokes. But it's real, it's here...and it's awesome.
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood takes the franchise in a new and welcome direction, uprooting the titular anthropomorphic hedgehog and friends from their action-packed comfort zone and dropping them into a traditional-with-snazzy-modern-action-elements RPG environment that closely resembles -- and, really, outright apes -- Super NES classic Super Mario RPG and its handheld sequels, to great success. If you're assuming this isn't a hardcore RPG, you're correct. The chapter-based story is predictably lightweight and cartoony; things kick off with Sonic scouring Green Hill Zone and the surrounding areas for his kidnapped compatriot Knuckles, only to learn that the Chaos Emeralds -- the series' signature MacGuffins -- have gone missing. Sonic meets up with various pals along the way, and before you know it, he's got a posse of furries ready to battle the ominous Dark Brotherhood. It's as silly as it sounds, though it's never bad. Just don't expect any groundbreaking, KOTOR-ish narrative here -- this is Sonic we're talking about.
Armored Core: For Answer Review
by Cesar Quintero
Its been over 10 years since Armored Core introduced a generation of gamers to the third-person giant-robot action genre; 10+ installments and two consoles later, the franchise's grown stagnant, and it receives no help from its latest and most incremental installation, Armored Core: For Answer. Developer From Software presents consumers with yet another marginally modified sequel, and it's the few things For Answer does right that only further magnify how stunted the core design is.
Picking up where Armored Core 4 left off, For Answer casts you as an elite Armored Core (AC) piloting mercenary, making money off of warring factions on a dystopian, barren Earth. The rest of humanity now exists in a more habitable environment among the clouds, leaving the postapocalyptic remains of cities and factory constructs as your personal battlegrounds. Like its PS3/360 predecessor, For Answer also offers an online battle arena where you can rank your skills among other mech pilots and show off your finely tuned, lovingly crafted AC.
Game Scoop! Podcast, Episode 94
by IGN Staff
Greg's beard is at critical mass.
Podcast Beyond, Episode 61
by IGN Staff
This Space looks pretty Dead. Chuck Beaver joins Beyond.
To Catch an Editor Video Podcast, Episode 21
by IGN Staff
Jessica Chobot reveals her origin story.
Command Prompt Podcast, Episode 18
by IGN Staff
The team is back and talking a lot about Warhammer.
Nintendo Voice Chat Podcast, Episode 24
by IGN Staff
Reviews of old-school and new-school platformers.
Game Scoop! Podcast, Episode 93
by IGN Staff
Soleus speaks.
To Catch an Editor Video Podcast, Episode 20
by IGN Staff
Relive the glory days of IGN with Chris Roper.
Podcast Beyond, Episode 60
by IGN Staff
Greg challenges WWE's Maria.
Three Red Lights Podcast, Episode 43
by IGN Staff
Nate comes crawling back, and we celebrate victory over our only remaining rival.
