Don't tell me you never wanted to drive away with 300 kilometres an hour from the police in a Bugatti Veyron. Okay might be a bit dangerous to do it in your city without causing a terrible accident, hell most of us can't even pay the insurance for such a car, forget about having one. The closest we can get is Need for speed : Hot persuit ( NFS:HP from now on ). The older version of this game with the same name was for the PS2, it has been my personal favourite Need for speed game, until this one. This game has so much to offer, looks so good, and plays very smoothly on my somewhat old pc.
If you don't know what NFS:HP is about you suck have been living in a cave since the beginning of the internet, in those historical times with no Yahoo or Google around ( can you even think about that? ). In NFS:HP you are the driver of either a police car or a very well tuned streetracer car. The game has two big modes, driving away from the police, and be the police. In the first mode you have to race against other people or manage to set a time on a course while the police tries to stop you. They have numerous ways of stopping you, for example they might use spike strips or a helicopter, to counter them the race cars have turbo boosts or you might be better of using a EMP to neutralize the polices' communications. All very fun but not very realistic at times. The second mode you are the cop and you try to stop racers before the time runs out and they get away. The driving itself can be unrealistic, especially the drifting, you are able to drift by just hitting the brake for a micro sec and to stay in the drift is very unrealistic to say the least. ( -2% ) Other than that the driving is very satisfying, it really gives you the feeling that you are driving fast and that you need to keep your focus at a 100% else you might crash into incoming traffic or end up in the lake!
The music really adds to the feeling of being a streetracer, as always EA delivered a very good fitting soundtrack. The grapics are great, the scenery you get by driving downhill is amazing and all with very smooth frames per second.
The most disappointing part of the game is that it lacks a good story, when you win races you earn points and you rank up, that is the story. The game would be really cool if it had amazing cutscenes with crashes and you speeding away from the police. Just ranks, if you win enough you can get new cars thats it! ( -2%) I only gave -2% there because in most racing games there is no story, yet in NFS:Most Wanted there was. Not the best story ever created but atleast something, now the games felt a little bit boring at times, there was no motivation to keep racing to unlock that next cutscene or because I wanted to know how a certain story played out.
All in all this an amazing game I really recommend you to pick up if you like racing games.
Test Drive Unlimited 2, the perfect driving simulator? Well, not really. The game has a lot to offer, maybe a bit to much. After playing this game for quite a while I am still not sure what kind of genre I am playing. Is this a racing game, is this a first person sims or an online showoff contest? Yes there is a lot to do in this game but the game doesn't really focus on anything and is a big mix of the genres I just mentioned, all of these features are okish, but far from well done ( -1%) .
The game starts out on your birthday, you seem to be a spoiled child that receives a good looking car for his/her birthday, after a small not so unlimited test drive you appeared to be dreaming. In fact you are a valet driving in a car of someone else. All very fun but not really interesting, the waking up from a dream has been done so many times in so many games/movies. Now you would expect the main story to kick in, well, it doesn't. In fact there is no story in the game. (-2%) All you do in this game is driving around, beating opponents in races which are redicilously easy, no challenge what so ever. ( -2%) After several wins a cutscene kicks in and your main rival asks you for a duel, if you win, you will win their car, again this has been done so many times over and over, not really creative. The races are so easy that they become really really boring, and after a while you are just doing the races so you can buy a better car, finishing the races felt like a grind, no fun for me. ( -3% ) Apart from the driving, which isn't even that bad itself ( and a nice cockpit view in all cars! ), there is this wannabe sims mode, where you can change your house and redecorate it. Well I couldn't care less how my house looks especially with the extreme prices for simple decoration, I rather have a pagani zonda in my garage than that nice looking wooden floor! But not only your house is up for decoration, also your face, yes your face. Plastic surgery is no problem and and you will have a brand new face in 24hours. As expected you can also dress your character, buying new cloths in shops all around the island. The whole sims idea adds to the experience that this games tries to create ( living the good life, with awesome cars and expensive houses/clothings ), personally I didn't quite like it.
I felt like the developers spend so much time on this whole sims mode that they forget to make an interesting driving game. The game modes are plain boring and very unlimited. ( -4%) You can race others, do a time attack, drive through gates with max speed and a knockout race ( where the last driver drops out of the race every lap ). The online features are a bit better, with a lot more different race modes, I wonder why these modes are not in single player?
The last thing that really bothered me were the random events. From time to time somewhere on the island a random event pops up, if you go there in time you get an extra mission. I think there are around 90 random events if I'm not mistaken, in my experience they were not so random, in fact most of them were the exact same, with the same voice actor telling me the exact same thing I heard 20 minutes ago. To make it worse some of these events are really unrealistic, it goes something like this :
Random person : Hey stranger! Come over here!
You : What can I do for you?
Random person : Drive my car ( a fucking Ferrari ) to the other end of the island!
Like what? This never happens to me in real life, never had a stranger asking me to drive his expensive car to the other end of town. ( -5% )
Fifa 11 is a football ( soccer ) game, a game that advertise with a 360 degrees ball control system, realistic passing and personality+ ( make the players react like they would in real life ). Can this game deliver all these great promises and is this the flawless game that we look for? We will see in this review.
So is this game really better than other football games ( I didn't play PES ) ? To be honest I think it is personal taste, some people prefer a lot of options and a realistic ( therefore harder ) football experience while others just want to play a game or 2 against a friend then do something else. Fifa11 does not have a lot of options in my opinion, or atleast not a lot of different game modes, especially at its release. A few months after the release EA Sports added a feature called Ultimate Team to the game. Ultimate team is all about making your own squad and take on other teams, how much fun as this sounds it can be really annoying from time to time especially because this mode had a lot of glitches in the start. Which means your opponents are running around with Messi's, Ronaldo's, Xavi's etc, while you are still playing with your nations third league players. Have fun losing 8-0. Next to Ultimate Team there are a few other game modes, like show match, which is just 1 game you can play without worrying to much about all kind of settings ( the mode you play against friends ). Then there is career mode which includes a player career, a player manager career and a manager career. All kind of fun but they become really really boring after 2 seasons. One of the things I hate the most is the fact when you play in player career and you are kind of successful ( as a player ) you HAVE to play EVERY match. Even if that means you have no energy left what so ever, there won't be any rest for you, you have to play and play. Because of all this playing you can not even perform a decent sprint or dribble like you would when you have full energy. ( -1% ) All in all the game modes are not really that fun and won't last you that long. ( -3% )
To save the day EA Sports imported some extra features, like Play as the Goalie, seems fun, is not fun. Making 4 saves while waiting the other 85 minutes just doesn't do it for me. One of the most interesting features is Virtual Pro, Virtual Pro means you can import your own face on the EA website and put it on a player, then you can play with that player in whatever team you want and see him grow throughout the season. Making a lot of goals will make him a better shooter or completing passes will make him better at that. All really fun, but there is one huge problem. Importing my face is the hardest thing I ever had to do in a video game. It all went fine at the website, it generated a nice ( realistic looking ) 3d model of my head and I was ready to import it in my game. Now here is where the problem starts, on the website it looks great, nothing wrong with it, in the game however it looked like I had a pancake face. After several ( 10+ ) tries I finally managed to get my face in that didn't look full white, way too red, or full blue ( I'm not Na'vi! ) ( -2%). Fun feature, bugged as hell.
So is this game as realistic as the developers say it is? Yes and no, sometimes passing can be really realistic so is the shooting at goal and the players do look like how they look in real life. The problem is however, from time to time something really weird happens which can totally screw you over, for example, if you try to pass from player A to player B and player C is in between then player C doesn't even realise what is going on and just stands there, hitting the ball and maybe give away possession to the opponent. I can give your numerous examples of gameplay that is really weird and can make you lose a game. ( -6% )
The last feature I want to talk about is the online gaming. You can choose to play a 11vs11 with virtual pro's, worst idea ever. The game is full of lag, disconnects you in the middle of it and people run around like headless chickens. I tried to play a 11vs11 about 5 times now, I never managed to get to half time without disconnecting ( my internet is good enough to handle it ) ( -1% ). Then there is the 1vs1 mode, same problem, the lag. EA sports can't really do anything about this lag so we just have to live with it and hope you don't get opponents with bad internet!
Personal playtime : Lets say I got the hidden achievement! ( +50 hours on the pitch )
Ooooh Minecraft... I spend countless hours playing this game and I must say I love it. It is definitely not the first time I spend a lot of hours on a game, but the fact that Minecraft doesn't really have a goal to it makes it different from your normal game. If you haven't heard of Minecraft in the last months you have been living in a cave ( looking for diamonds? ).
If you are that one person that hasn't heard of Minecraft before here is a small explanation of what Minecraft is all about. You are all alone, you wake up on an island where no other human beings are present, it is you versus nature, you must survive all by yourself, you must survive all the horrors that come out at night, you are the only one that is able to shape the world around you, you must manipulate your surroundings so that you come out on top of the food-chain.
So how do you survive? By chopping down trees you gain wood, which you use to craft tools like an axe, a pickaxe, a hoe, a shovel and a sword. With the tools you acquired you can start digging down in the search of caves, in which you can find coal, iron, gold and even diamond. Maybe you enjoy shovelling the beach away so you get yourself some sand. Maybe you are hungry and you start yourself a farm, finding seeds with the hoe and harvest your own wheat. At night all the monsters come out and you want to be safe. With all the materials you collected during the day you can build yourself a nice little house to keep the monsters outside.
As you can see on the screenshot the world of Minecraft is very "blocky". Almost any block can be removed and can be replaced at a different spot, or you can change the block into another one, by heating it. For example you can make bricks out of clay, and dye wool in all sort of colours. The possibilities are endless.
Being successful in Minecraft is really hard to define, one could say making great complicated structures is an amazing feat, while other prefer to make small cosy houses.
As you know I rate the other way around, I do not focus on the good points but on the bad points of a game ( Minecraft is far from finished and still in beta so +5% ) so here is what I don't like about Minecraft. Minecraft is different than your usual game, so it can be hard for new players to understand what is going on. Suddenly you are in this world with no clear idea why you are there, and if you don't hurry up you are surrounded by monsters and you will die a painful death. You may walk around and get yourself some materials but without any pre-knowledge of the game you will never ever be able to make yourself the most basic tools needed to enjoy the game to the fullest. Making tools by -1. Chopping down a tree 2. Convert tree chunks into wood 3. Placing wood in a square in your inventory 4. Make sticks and put them in a shape of a pickaxe on your workbench- is just not the first thing you would think of, therefore it can be really hard for a new player to understand what to do, this game needs some sort of tutorial to help new players. ( -4% ) I understand one of the praised features of the game is the unknown, and that figuring out stuff yourself is one of the key concepts, still I feel like coming up yourself on how to make tools is just a little bit to hard for the average person.
How exciting building is, there will be a point where you feel bored and don't know what to do anymore. There is no interesting story that keeps you with the game, when you feel like you have done everything, then your done. ( -1% ) Some people might be bored pretty quick and give up on the game after building their third house, or maybe some people just don't know that there is so much more to do than what they figured out themselves ( again a tutorial would be nice, maybe something basic for new players and something more advanced like redstone wiring for people who are ready for a new challenge ). The lack of content and "your inspiration is the limit" is the biggest flaw of this game. Luckily Minecraft has an awesome community with amazing builders which can inspire you to make the most amazing buildings/mobtraps/cactusfarms etc, stuff you would probably not come up with yourself, looking up on the internet how to keep your interest in the game isn't a good point. ( -4% ) Just search on Youtube for Minecraft related videos, maybe check out some Lets Play's, or maybe even my own waterslide video!
You won't hear me complaining about the 'crappy' graphics of the game, I think the blocky world is THE Minecraft trademark and won't be forgotten for a very long time. Minecraft has some interesting music which really adds to the feeling of being all alone on some random island. Multiplayer is really fun but sadly very bugged from time to time ( -1%) ( I know, still in beta, already gave you plus 5 percent for that! ), which can really kill the fun.
Personal playtime : A long time, probably more than 40 hours
Final score : 95%
Stay tuned for more Minecraft related tutorials!
Next up : After certain requests on Youtube, written Arcane Mage Guide
The latest instalment in the Dragon Age series is Dragon Age II, Bioware ( those guys from Mass Effect! ) promised us a great RPG but did they deliver?
The game starts with a small tutorial explaining how certain skills work and how to play a basic combat situation. Being way overpowered compared to my enemies gave me that great feeling of being superior, being a strong important character in the tale that Dragon Age II tells us, a feeling that didn't return in the rest of the game. ( ok ok, I know this is a tutorial and you are supposed to be way better than your enemies so you don't actually die and can learn how to play ).
After completing the tutorial we see Varric talking to a woman, telling her how things went a long time ago, making the whole game a flashback, giving me the feeling the future is already set, that I couldn't control what was going on around me and so losing the whole point of a RPG where I am supposed to make decisions that affect my surroundings. Since I had only one playthrough I assume the story that Varric tells will vary on your own decisions, still I don't really like the idea of playing in a flashback while I am the one that should create the story. ( -1% )
Being a bit disappointed I moved on to the character creation screen, which some may praise, I don't. Being a male myself I tried to make a male character that looked a bit like me, IMPOSSIBLE, whatever I tried I never got him to look like me but instead making him look like an absolute wimp. ( I hear you thinking that I probably look like a wimp in real life, oh well... ). Then I tried to edit some of the other presets, surprisingly you can't even edit all the features of some of the presets, I mean why not? Do some of the presets have special features that only belong to them and are impossible to add in the creation screen to other characters, to the one that I wanted to look like me? The default main character looked the most like me without that beard and skin complexity, but I wasn't even able to edit ANY feature on him? Is he unique? Does he has features that are unavailable in the creation screen? Feels like the creation screen is really really limited now, despite all the options they have. Yet these options are kind of expected these days, eye colour, cheekbones, jaw placement, overbite or not etc. ( -1% ) I ended up creating a cute female character that looked decent. Always liked the idea of a small cute girl beating up the monsters ( Probably seen too much Buffy The Vampire Slayer ).
My very own miss Hawke
Character made, ready to rock. A few more battles, a bit more role playing and you end up in Kirkwall, the main city of the game, or should I say the only city in the game? For me Kirkwall is the biggest flaw in the game. The city itself is is divided in some parts, the rich part, the poor part, the docks etc. Now the biggest problem is the fact that 95% of what happens in the game is in Kirkwall. ( -5% ) I expected some nice scenery but got disappointed, I expected to look down ( literally ) on the whole city from the rich part ( Hightown ) but instead I only saw water and some mountains, not that great overview of a city that you experience in assassins creed on one of the many lookout towers. Another problem is the fact I have seen the same fucking guy with the exact same clothes multiples times in 20 seconds of play. He either found a way to clone himself into 10 different persons or Bioware failed badly in making different NPC models. Same goes with the sewer system of the city, every sewer is exactly the same. I went into different ones to complete different quests yet I always found myself in the same one. Same thing with the caves, every cave in this game is the same. Doesn't matter where you go, you will always find yourself in that same cave again. ( -1% ) Bioware closed down some parts of the cave in some quests so you don't go through the exact same thing all the time but I feel it is lazy designing ( not enough time? ) . To make it worse the city of Kirkwall has a day and night feature. Different quests, different time of the day,but still the same goddamn city. I played for over 25 hours now, and the only different places I have been to is a mountain, an underground tomb and a coast, which are all kind of small. Another weird thing is how the citizens of Kirkwall respond on stuff that happens in the city ( or how they don't respond ) , if you have a big bloody battle in the middle of the city they just don't give a fuck. They do not move, do not run away, just stand there like nothing is happening at all. After the battle they still stand there talking to their clones, doing absolutely nothing but standing still. That is another issue with Kirkwall, the city doesn't seem to be alive, okay there are some merchants and some people standing around doing nothing. The merchants are just waiting until the end of time until you come along and buy something, there isn't much interaction between the NPC's except for some dialogue between some of them, but no real action. ( -3% )
The rest of the game is really well done, a great variety of spells / abilities and some really hilarious dialogue between your companions. Personally I didn't quite like the ending but that is more personal taste. All in all it is an epic experience throughout the world of Dragon Age II Kirkwall!
