Johnny Atom Productions and Play Indie have released a new trailer for their tank action game, Steel Armor: Blaze of War, which is now available on the Windows PC platform.
Archive - 2011
Since the novel first hit in 1990, I have been absolutely enraptured with the world of Michael Crighton’s Jurassic Park. Since the first release of the book, Jurrassic Park has seen four movies, another novel, ten series of comic books, a theme park ride, and numerous video games. Even though many feel that the entire premise of a dinosaur theme park had been driven into the ground, Telltale Games has decided to resurrect the Jurassic Park corpse and (attempt to) breath some life into the franchise with their latest release, Jurassic Park: The Game. Has Telltale Games done what was originally done in the novel and brought back to life an ancient lifeform that is worthy of praise, or is this game better left as a buried fossil, never to be seen again? Let’s take a look with my full review of Jurassic Park: The Game for the PC.
Story:
The story of Jurassic Park: The Game runs parallel with the original novel. You play as various other park inhabitants that are stuck on Isla Nublar. The characters are all new creations for the game and have never been mentioned in the novel nor the original movie. The characters are thrust into the actions the night that Dennis Nedry tries to escape with the shaving cream can of embryos and it all goes downhill from there, as the dinosaurs are released into the park.
You never interact with any of the characters from the original storyline. All of the new characters are truly forgettable creations and are very one dimensional – from the mercenary paid to get the embryos from Nedry, to the gruff military man that InGen sends in as a rescue team. The voice acting is bland and annoying, which really hurt me because TellTale Games have always been known for their outstanding attention to characterization and voice detail.
Jurassic Park: The Game is a story of survival above all else, and it tells it through mediocre voice acting and bland characters that I just don’t care about. The original story had so many interesting characters that a reader would truly care if any one of them lived or died. Jurassic Park: The Game, unfortunately, could not pull of the same writing and characterization that the original novel could. Ultimately, the story of Jurassic Park: The Game did not bring anything new to the table for the Jurassic Park franchise to work with.
Gameplay:
TellTale Games is well-known for their point and click adventure games. Not hearing anything about Jurassic Park: The Game before it hit my inbox, I was expecting the solid tried and true game play that I have come to know from TellTale Games. What I got was a rude surprise.
Jurassic Park: The Game’s whole game play is based on quick time events. You are playing an interactive movie to where you get to press a certain key to avoid danger. I was absolutely floored when I played the first chapter and all I did was press the key that the game asked me to press. I cannot believe that some one at TellTale Games decided to make an entire game based on the absolute worse game play mechanic ever created, the quick time event. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the story and the characters were at least interesting to follow and watch, but with the mediocre storyline that the game is telling, the quick time event game play just bored me to tears.
There is some minimal investigation that needs to be done to solve problems, like looking for a way for the character to steal passes in order to enter the park. But these sections of investigation ultimately lead to quick time events that serve as the bulk of the game. What this game truly needed was much more investigation sequences and far, far fewer quick time events. I could understand the events for moments of dodging velociraptors, but using the quick time events to use a machete to cut a path through the jungle is just unforgivable.
Aesthetics:
I have already touched on the voice acting earlier in this review, so let’s go ahead and finish up that discussion. The acting isn’t horrible, just not all that great. It serves the purpose for telling the story, but that’s about it. I feel that the actors just didn’t really get into their parts at all and this was such a shame, since I had always equated TellTale Games with great voice acting, such as in the Sam and Max series and as recently as the Hector games.
Jurassic Park: The Game in a pure graphics sense is looks bare and unimpressive. The motions of the characters are quite clunky and the environments don’t have a lot of detail to them. The actual character models do look nice and make up for some of the downfalls, but for a Jurassic Park game, I felt that the environment needed to shine and be stunning to look at.
Final Thoughts:
Overall, Jurassic Park: The Game is an unremarkable and easily-forgettable experience. With quick time events being the prevalent game play mechanic, the player will find no need at all to think about anything while playing the game, just hit the button the game tells you to and watch the action unfold. The action, however, is also unremarkable as the storyline tells a similar story that the original novel told, but with far less interesting characters. The graphics are bare and sparse looking, thought the character models do look nice and the voice acting works for the job at hand. Even as a fan of the original novel, I was hoping for something more here, but Jurassic Park: The Game ultimately fails at the one thing that is most important in any video game, it just isn’t any fun to play.
Antec has released a line of specially-designed cleaning solutions and tools to keep your electronics clean. The cleaning system comes in the form of a spray cleaner, deep-cleaning gel, and cleaning wipes. You can get the full details of the product line below.
100% Natural cleaning solution
The cleaning solution cleans and protects devices with an ecologically-friendly formula. The wipes and 60mL spray are TSA-compliant and portable, perfect for on-the-go travelers. 100% Natural cleaning solution comes in the following SKUS:
• 240mL and 60mL combo pack with one 30×30 microfiber cloth- $18.99
• 60mL with one 30×30 microfiber cloth- $12.99
• individually wrapped product wipes in a 20 count box- $6.99
• individually wrapped product wipes in a 100 count box- $24.99
3X Strength cleaning solution
The cleaning solution has triple cleaning power that cleans, disinfects and protects devices with one formula. Another key feature is its non-drip formula that keeps the spray from running down your screen when applied. The wipes and 60mL spray are also TSA-compliant and perfect for portability for the on-the-go traveler. 3X Strength cleaning solution comes in the following SKUS:
• 240mL and 60mL combo pack with one 30×30 microfiber cloth- $18.99
• 60mL with one 30×30 microfiber cloth- $12.99
• individually wrapped product wipes in a 20 count box- $6.99
• individually wrapped product wipes in a 100 count box- $24.99
Deep Cleaning Gel solution
The gel solution offers maximum cleaning strength to effectively clean even the dirtiest of surfaces. The product is gel-based which allows it to get into small crevices to keep your products clean. Deep Cleaning Gel solution comes in the following SKU:
• 30 mL gel pack with a 20×20 microfiber cloth- $13.99
“We are expanding the horizon of what Antec can do in the electronics industry,” said Stavros Conom, Product Manager for Antec Advance. “With the increase in popularity of touch interface devices and other personal electronics, sanitation and maintenance are significant concerns. These cleaning products bring Antec’s expertise into this often overlooked area.”
Product Application Suggestions:
• Touchscreens: cell phones/smartphones, e-readers/tablets, GPS systems,
• Screens: notebooks, netbooks, laptops, TVs (plasma, LCD, LED)
• Controllers: video game controllers, remotes, mice, handheld projectors
• Kitchen Appliances: blenders, mixers, microwaves, slow cookers
• Wearables: sunglasses, eyeglasses, jewelry
Available:
Antec Advance Cleaning Kits are available at Fry’s, New Egg and J&R.
I learned a long time ago that I have a face made for radio. Back in college, I studied being both behind and in-front of the camera and realized my place was “in the rear with the gear”. So, being there I got to know the gear pretty well – from taped together scripts rolling through a prompter which was little more than a rigged overhead projector to state-of-the-art, programmed HD equipment. When I heard a PC game had come along that had green screen clipping capabilities I got really excited. Commercial keying gear costs a fortune and is one of the harder expenses a start up television station has to invest in so if we could get the keying to clip well on our PCs then home workshops could be realistic at a fraction of the cost. Yoostar was the name of the game and it claimed to make people actually look like they were in the movie. Before I had an opportunity to pick it up however I heard there were major software and keying issues so I let is slide by thinking maybe I would try somewhere down the line.
Well down the line came in the form of Yoostar 2: In The Movies and so once again I told myself I would pick it up eventually – this time waiting on the money to pick up a Kinect for the Xbox 360, the new platform for the game. So more time passed and I found myself in a conference room at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, eating a sandwich and watching Snoop Dogg through a glass window as he gestured to the press who had made it into his viewing room with him. The sandwich was tasty, so was a cookie or two but we couldn’t hear a single word Snoop said. He came out, said a quick “Hi” to the folks who had been watching him like an animal in a glass enclosure at the zoo, then left quickly as did a bunch of grumbling journalists. I finished my sandwich, confirmed my appointment time and thought this may not be the best start to what I already considered the next step in party gaming. You can see my shoulder in the image below, right at the edge of the window with the beige strap on my shoulder, it was when I got my sandwich.
I arrived promptly for my appointment later that day and the mood in the room did not seemed to have improved, if anything they looked deflated. The story was all about Yoostar On MTV and their partnership with such individuals as Snoop Dogg and Lady Gaga as well as having clips from pretty much every MTV reality show including the infamous “Jersey Shore.”
The tech op who took me in for the demonstration was showing some tiredness from the long day as well as rumors that the Snoop Dogg interview hadn’t gone so well. When I immediately started talking clipping and the “halo” or white area around him in the clip he said they were working on it but he personally thought it was fine. With assurances that it would have a much less obvious halo, I wrote it up then gave it little thought until I picked up my own Kinect and, with it, Yoostar 2. It is hard to truly appreciate the fun of Yoostar until you do it in your own home with someone else. Acting out the scenes, messing with props, changing the dialogue, with Yoostar 2 I could see this game might be the next evolution of party gaming to take the place of the music karaoke games. The greatest part is that there is no setup. Step in front of your Kinect and away you play!
You first choose a clip then you will be asked to frame yourself into an outline, once you are matched up with your location in the shot you can start performing.
(ed. note: I love the picture)
This one of the first ones I did, yep I am pretty comfortable being an idiot if it brings people a good laugh and as you can see I gave it a run with this “300” clip. My actual profile will be linked at the bottom of this article so you can see all the wonderful videos I have done so far. This was really a fun game and I could see it working in conjunction with games like RockBand but people tend to want to sing more than act so both would probably need to be set up. That was when I started looking forward to Yoostar On MTV coming out because not only would party goers be able to act along with the reality shows they could also sing along with their favorite songs and get keyed into them. So when the game arrived I was so excited to get it going, I figured a few test runs and I would be ready to have guests over.
It was at this point that I realized much like I had with Yoostar 2 there was a halo around me and though they had settings to try to help minimize it the only true saving grace is all about lighting. You need lots of good light, the closer to neutral colored bulb the better. In some it was just a couple spots like above, in others whole sections of clothing would go missing or the halo would turn into spikes.
Or on a few occasions the camera would place you in a certain location and the scene wouldn’t quite match up, you might look tiny compared to the others in the clip.
Or in others you might seem absolutely gigantic and terrifying to small kids.
Much like the music games you can play them for a score or freeplay and there is even a Challenge Mode that is pretty much the same as Career Challenge on music instrument games. The great part about this is you get stuck into the official videos. I would say my biggest concern with the game is that it came with over 80 possible scenes and only 10 of them were music videos. I guess I am more of the old generation but on a Music Television game I would hop that more than 1/8 of the scenes would be music. Since a good deal of their programming though is now reality shows it does make sense to pick its clips according to what MTV viewers are used to and let’s face it, some of the most notable popular culture characters are on those shows it is still pretty fun to act like The Situation and Snookie or somebody weeping on Road Rules Challenge.
Yoostar also has an excellent online community of like minded people having fun and being foolish plus they can vote on your videos and Yoostar 2 and Yoostar On MTV both interact through the same site so whichever game you upload from it puts them all on the same account.
Last Call
Let’s face it, you don’t need a clean “key” and perfect lighting to have fun with the Yoostar games, but it helps. All you really need is a fun group of people, a good collection of clips, which between the two games will give you over 150 to work with and a willingness to lose your inhibitions and be silly or serious depending on what seems like the bigger blast. These games are fun, they just need a bit more music in them to balance all their tv and movie scenes. I plan to take the games to the next party I go with that I know has a Kinect in the place! As promised here is a link to my account!
Afterfall: inSanity is the a “what if” story that takes a moment in time where things really could have taken a different turn and changes everything we know today. During World War 2, right before the Nazis are at the point of defeat, Hitler gets his Wunderwaffe and the Germans finish the atomic bomb race first. He launches a V-2 rocket armed with a nuclear warhead at the Soviet Army poised on the Polish-German border. Peace talks commence with German dominance developing in Europe and American presence being reduced to covert operations and support. While the Soviets and Americans are perfecting their nuclear capabilities, Germany has moved on to greater weapons, weapons on a scale so massive their designers don’t even know their full scope. Called Entropy, the bomb is dropped over the La Manche Channel and as a result all the nuclear weapons start flying. World War III begins in 2012, survivors are driven underground and by the time the “Insanity” breaks out in 2035 there is a whole generation who has never seen the surface of the world. Believed at first to be a strain of isolation sickness which arises in the underground shelters, “Insanity” soon proves itself to be a new nightmare all together.
"Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not killer!"
You play a psychiatrist sent to one of the lower levels to check on the behavior of some workers which have been behaving in an unusual manner. “Unusual” if you consider screaming, charging and beating the living snot out of anyone in sight not to be the norm, that is! Once down there, you don’t ask “what is causing these extreme feelings of anxiety?” Instead, you end up bashing their heads in then literally off their bodies in a bloody and gore-filled rage. Soon, you are shooting everything that moves as you pacify aggressive behavior. You are also better at it then dozens of armed security troopers who have trained their whole lives for the same task, as a matter of fact you are tasked with taking said lives. Once the action kicks in, the only head shrinking you seem to do is by breaking it into little pieces. There is one concession to him being a doctor and that is when things break or look scary you can get “fearlock” which results in your accuracy being worse but your damage and reaction time being better because you are scared. If you don’t look too deep into the story, it is an interesting and fun setting for a gory romp through levels of various nasties. The story is original but the action isn’t – it has the feel of Dead Space, Mass Effect, and other games down the third-person shooter line where a heroic figure steps forward to take care of business in horrific times. Not that there is nothing wrong with that!
Grim Beauty
The scene is not a pretty one, but the graphics and details are so good that there is a certain beauty to this torn and destroyed world. It is a grim atmosphere and the graphics and audio really bring that home. Thanks to its gameplay and atmosphere, it is really easy to get lost in this game and have hours pass without realizing it. There was love put into this game, so much so that items littering the ground from broken pipes, table legs and rebar to dropped firearms and tools can be picked up and used against your enemies. Additionally, there is great amount of detail in your enemies, enough so that you can have two that look very similar but you noticed one has a slightly lighter color clothing or skin and they will even attack in a different manner. The music is very well done, creating a tense atmosphere during the fights and being very quiet or even absent during the other times as you pass clunking pipes, dripping vents, or creaking catwalks and you listen for the slightest hint of danger. Atmosphere, especially if you play it at night in the dark can actually pull you in and have you jumping at what goes bump in the shadows.
Playing The Game
At first the melee combat, which is how you start the game, felt a little clumsy. My first thought was that the this clumsiness was due to bad game mechanics. Before long, however, I found myself doing more melee than shooting. Not that there is anything wrong with the shooting aspect, the shooting performs like most third person shooters and is without issue. There is just a certain satisfaction received from picking up just about anything in sight and beating an enemy to a pulp with it. The gore is great both ways but, if you fight just right, your melee ends with a dramatic rage-filled bashing in of your enemy’s head in a short cinematic. When it comes to fighting, this game is a blast and using WASD during melee you can make different combos.
There is one other aspect to the action and that is puzzle solving. These can be kinda tightly-timed and, until you fully understand what you are supposed to do, they can be a bit frustrating. After you figure them out though you can breeze by them pretty easily and it is back to smashing in skulls.
Last Call
This game started off as a fanmade project and became a professionally-polished third-person shooter you can purchase today. The storyline is different and interesting but when it gets right down to it is a horror/survival third person shooter with mostly the same action you would see in another game of the same genre. There is nothing wrong with that, mind you – give a person who likes the genre a good story, fun gameplay, and plenty of gore then drop it in a great environment and you will have happy players and I am definitely among them! This is a fun game I might play through a few times, simply because of the variety of weapons. I wonder how far I could get wielding a table leg…
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7sixty Games and Firefly Studios have announced the release of a new patch for their castle-building and defense game, Stronghold 3. This new patch adds a new “free build” mode to the game where players can fully-test out their kingdoms by way of what the developer is calling an “experimentation panel”.
“Although Stronghold 3 wasn’t designed with a skirmish mode in mind,” said Simon Bradbury, lead designer, “we have listened to what the fans have been saying, so beefed up the Free Build mode to give players lots more flexibility and the ability to have increasingly powerful invasions attack their castle.”
The new panel gives players all sorts of methods to test their kingdoms out, such as activating usually-random events, disasters, etc.
Wargaming.net has announced that the boxed edition of their popular online tank action game, World of Tanks, is now available in the UK, Italy, Scandinavia, Benelux, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and France. World of Tanks retail version from Wargaming.net and its partner Deep Silver available for EUR 9.99 comes with EUR 20 worth of bonus content. Apart from in-game gold and several days of premium account, the box edition contains the premium German tank PzKpfw 38H735 (f). The box also features the Newcomer’s guide that will help to master the essentials of World of Tanks.
Screenshots of the Premium Tank
Electronic Arts has announced that it has acquired social RPG-maker, KlickNation, and has re-branded it as BioWare Sacramento. That’s not the end of the branding, however, as BioWare Sacramento and BioWare San Francisco will be brought together as “BioWare Social”. BioWare Social will focus on RPG games for social platforms like Facebook.
“KlickNation’s expertise in building innovative and compelling RPGs for social platforms makes them a seamless tuck-in with the BioWare team at EA,” said Dr. Ray Muzyka, Senior Vice President and General Manager of EA’s BioWare label. “We share the same creative values. The new BioWare Social unit will bring BioWare and EA franchises to the growing audience of core gamers who are looking for high quality, rich gameplay experiences on social platforms.”
Paradox Interactive has released another live action trailer for their upcoming strategy-RPG, Crusader Kings II.
Trailer
Focus Home Interactive has released some new screenshots form their upcoming Wargame: European Escalation, which is due out in early 2012 on Windows PCs.
