A look at a few of the top games released this past month.
The dry spell of PC game releases has finally come to an end as publishers ramp up for the holiday retail season. Gone are the months where you'd be lucky to see one decent game released, now we're getting slammed by them in waves. The first major wave of the season hit around September 20th, and for about a week we got hit with a lot of high-quality games with a lot of media buzz. Being a game addict with no serious expenses aside from rent and utilities to speak of, of course I blew a LOT of cash picking up a bunch of titles. Only a few of these did I borrow from friends or take their impressions of. If you're looking for a game to pick up, hopefully this article will give you a few ideas....
1) Myst V - End of Ages
I've written many times in the past how I'm a Myst fan from the very early days of the series, so of course I had to get the last title in the series. End of Ages is the final step in the Myst saga that started oh so many years ago on Myst Island as you worked to free the mysterious Atreus and discover how he became trapped in the first place and who those two people in the Red and Blue books were. Over the next 5 games, we learned more about Atreus' family, his foes, and his dream to rebuild the lost D'ni civilization. This final chapter deals with his daughter, Yeesha, many years after Atreus' death, and the failure that was the D'ni Reconstruction Project (See the game Uru and it's expansion for details). The series is known for it's photo-realistic visuals, outstanding sound effects, engrossing story, and mind-numbingly difficult puzzles. This game is no different in that respect, but technology has finally allowed the slide-show visuals of the older games to be matched to the fully realized 3d worlds we enjoy in most other games. The result is a freely explorable 3d world generated in amazing detail. Also gone are the FMV super-imposed over the game scenes, put in place of that are completely rendered characters with fully mapped and articulated faces (they rival the facial expressions in Half Life 2).
I'm only about half way through the game at this point, and it's just as beautiful, rewarding and frustrating as any of the predecessors. The voice acting and story so far are superb and it definitely feels like a worthy addition to one of the greatest series in gaming. If you're at all into adventure games and like solving obscure puzzles and experiencing richly detailed worlds, I suggest grabbing Myst V. Runs on both PC and Mac.
2) Fable: The Lost Chapters
One of the top XBox RPGs currently out, Fable comes from the brain of game industry legend Peter Molyneux and takes a significant interest in the idea of how alignment affects the game world. You start as a child running around trying to earn money to buy your sister a birthday present, given the option of either doing good or bad deeds to scrounge up the cash. As soon as you have the present for your sister though, all hell breaks loose and your little peaceful town is raided and burned practically to the ground. Your family is killed or has gone missing, you are one of the only survivors. To your rescue comes Maize, leader of the Guild of Heroes, an academy of sorts for training great warriors/wizards/archers/thieves. They give you the skills, you choose how to use them. After some training and a few years, you are let loose upon the world and left to determine what sort of person you want to be; Savior of the Masses, or Scourge of Humanity... you can choose to be either, or anything in between. As your alignment changes, so does your appearance, and so does how people react to you. Be evil and you'll grow horns, have glowy red eyes, black vericose veins etc... Be good and you'll radiate light, have a halo, have weird blue/white eyes and so on.
The PC version differs from the XBox version in that it runs at a higher resolution, has vastly improved textures and was given a fair bit of extra content in quests, story lines, items and NPCs. Despite the content additions, if you've played the XBox version, you're not missing out on a whole lot as the core story remains largely unchanged. But if you haven't played it on the console yet and are looking for a fun, well-made RPG with some amusing dialogue and a liberal amount of british humor, go grab this one. You'll probably get 15-20hrs of playtime out of it depending on how many side quests you want to do.
3) Warhammer 40k Dawn of War: Winter Assault
Relic, the developers behind the Homeworld series last year released their Warhammer 40k RTS, Dawn of War. In it you played as either the Eldar, The Space Marines, The Orks or Chaos as you all vied for control of a great relic on a war-torn planet. The story was meager, the campaign overly short, but the gameplay was compelling, the visuals outstanding, and multiplayer had a tension and pace that you don't associate with strategy games. One of the biggest complaints fans had was the lack of a decent campaign, and they wanted to play the Imperial Guard, a faction that only made cameo appearances throughout the singleplayer campaign. In response Relic made Winter Assault, an expansion pack that has a brand new campaign, and adds a fully fleshed out Imperial Guard faction that you play in one of the two campaigns.
The gameplay is just as solid, if not more refined, in the expansion, the visuals are still outstanding and it's a lot of fun to play the Imperial Guard who rely on armored vehicles and turtling tactics over frontal assaults. However the campaign is even more disappiontingly short this time around. In reality, this expansion is a patch to gameplay, plus a new faction. I wouldn't buy it for the singleplayer aspects. While I really enjoyed the game, I was able to clear the campaign in just a few hours. If you are pressed for cash and are debating between this and another game. Wait until this hits the bargain bin. While the additions are nice, they aren't enough to justify the $30 price tag.
4) Ultimate Spider Man
Imagine playing a comic book, where the gameplay, the scenes, the characters look like they're drawn panels on a page and you'd be talking about Ultimate Spider Man (USM). From Treyarch, developers of Spider Man 1 and 2 for the consoles comes an interesting take on the Spider Man mythos. This game is set in the Ultimate comic series storyline, focusing on Peter Parker as a teenager still in high school, coping with his super powers while trying to hold down a job and keep up his grades. It's a different setting from what most of us who know Spidey are used to... but it lends itself well enough to a game.
The visuals are all cell-shaded, which looks just superb. The style of this game just oozes from the screen and it's fun to just watch. Sadly though, this is a console port of a very short game. What this means is, for a PC gamer, you either suffer through using the keyboard and mouse to control the action, which is horribly awkward and difficult, or you go out and buy a USB gamepad controller... at which point you might as well have gotten the console version. The other problem aside from the controls is the length of the game. It's short. Really short. The only thing that makes the game last more than a few hours are the insanely frustrating chase sequences where you have to chase some bad guy throughout the city as they jump over rooftops and throw obstacles in your way. Get too far from them and the mission is lost and you have to start over. You start over a lot on some of them. If feels like they added the sequences to make the game seem longer.
It's a very fun, short game that is interrupted by insanely frustrating missions here and there. My honest suggestion is wait for it to hit the bargain bin, and get it for the console, the PC version aint worth it, you don't get anything special over the xbox.
Other games I haven't had a chance to pick up or play, but came out recently that are worth looking at:
* Indigo Prophecy
A cinematic adventure game from developer Quantic Dreams. I played the demo and was very impressed. It's a game I'm saving for after Christmas when releases die out again.
*Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard
An RTS set in the Eberron campaign setting for D&D. I played the beta and was only sorta impressed. I'll get this once it hits bargain
That's it for my summary for the end of September. In a few weeks I'll be posting another one with the wash of games coming out in the next few weeks. Quake 4, Black & White 2, F.E.A.R, Call of Duty 2, Civilization 4 and more!
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