Pure

Black Rock's new off-road racer catches crazy air.

By: Ryan Geddes

Rip around a tight corner covered with melted glacial Scree, I dig in, the nail nitrous boost and my pre-suspension bike at the top of a 45-degree jump. With a lurch, my ATV leaves the ground and launches into the air, floating hundreds of feet above the mountains of New Zealand before starting his sickeningly fast decent. Being the cool heads runner, I decide this is the perfect time to pull off a series of aerial tricks, including Flip Saddle, where I am on my quad bike seat and do a Backflip in Midair. The land that as a pro, some bank boost juice as a reward and speed off towards the next leap.

It 'a typical moment of pure, the new off-road ATV racing title from Black Rock Studio and Disney Interactive, but the game is anything but. The developers of Black Rock, even before the studio Climax was bought by Disney, are not strangers to the racing game scene, having worked on ATV Offroad series and other racing titles for years. But rather than go the simulation route to their most recent project, Black Rock decided to take things in a completely different direction by focusing on wild, over-the-top action. The result is an incredibly satisfying thrill ride that can provide edge of your seat action in a surprising, inviting package.


Pure is a runner with the soul of a game of extreme sports. There are times when you'll be Gunning for the goal above all else, focused only on hitting your racing line and digging in taking corners perfectly. But most of your time is spent doing things that should not be physically possible, and this is pure when it is at its best.

The time standard basic racing control system is here - right trigger accelerates, left trigger brakes and the left analog stick steers your race. Like many other off-road racing games, you can also pre-load "your suspension system before taking off from a jump by quickly flicking down and then left to get stick even bigger plane. Vehicle feel is extremely important in racing games, and it was pure law. Bicycles are fairly clunky weight without feeling you get when their aircraft, tires and digging in the ground properly when you are taking corners. Although there is no damage modeling, you can knock opponents off the track or on land the head of unfortunate effect during a race, so paying to stay out of the AI drivers' on.

But the trick intuitive system is what sets Pure beyond. When your quad is in the air, trying to pull off tricks by pressing one of three buttons and make a direction to the left stick. You will start each race with Level 1 only available tricks. Land enough of these and the Level 2 tricks will open, followed by Level 3. Each of these is related to the number of keys, or the A, B and Y buttons on the controller Xbox 360, which we used primarily in our test for the PC version of Pura.

As you exit your trick availability during a race, will also bank nitrous boost, as demonstrated a blue liquid wedge under your trick meter and controlled by the spacebar / X button. Depending on the type of race you're attending will be constantly balance doing tricks, that fills your boost meter, and use the momentum, which takes away his ability to pull out of the higher level tricks.



To discourage to get in a groove, every trick on the fly is classified as "cool", "Tame" or "install", depending on how many times you've recently landed. The fresh make-up, momentum and more points you get. You can also optimize every move on the fly by holding down the left or right bumper at the end of the trick, that gives you even greater flexibility. The controls are intuitive, the tricks are wild and fun, and the classification system goes to try new things. In short, the controls easy to make pure climb, but difficult to put down the Holy Grail of video game controls.

The main objective is purely on the World Tour, a single player career mode where you choose a runner, build your bike and of which 10 to complete the stages of increasing difficulty. World Tour is easy with a tutorial, throws a few challenges easier way slowly and ramps up in difficulty and length. There are three single-player event types: Sprint Race and Freestyle. Sprint is all about speed and handling, and the tracks were shorter and meaner, with very few jumps with which to pull tricks and gain momentum. Race as a balance between technical guidance and air crowds, and the tracks are set up to give ample opportunity for boosting more jumps to pull tricks, for the sole purpose of boosting banking juice accelerate your path to the final.

Whereas the Sprint Race and they are all about crossing the finish first, the third mode, Freestyle, which is pure shines brightest. In the Freestyle, there is no target - is fighting against time to rack the largest and best trick score, and the tracks are abundantly sprinkled with jumps to help you along the way. Most arcade-like of all the pure single player modes, the Freestyle power-up that racers battle to grab during the event. Stars give you an instant special Trick (good points for crazy if you can pull off), a 2X doubled the score for a limited time, and an icon fills your nitrous boost. Build your trick meter, pull sick tricks, chain together before the combo meter runs out, and you can stay alive. Once you know your tricks and become an expert at their nails, the sheer Freestyle mode is extremely satisfactory.

Apart from the World Tour mode, there are other fully formed single-player modes in pure. Is there a way to test that allows you to search the records on tracks you've unlocked without the intrusion of other pilots, and single event is just that - the events you've already played a World Tour presented an à la carte. There is no way to the tournament, head to head or other collateral that may have also done in a more profound experience. As a result, is a relatively short game, depending on your skill level. Hardcore racing game fans probably finish the game within hours, while more casual players familiar with the genre might have more of a challenge. The good news is that pure multiplayer on-line is fairly robust and includes all three individual events per player plus a further excellent on-line only race type called Freeride.



In Freeride, competitors race against the clock to score points in several areas. If you are interested in going faster jumps in, you can focus on getting faster lap times. If you love crowds racking trick combo, you can follow this path of glory. If the air is the craziest thing you can go to jump higher. Black Rock could have simply moved a couple of pure single player modes on-line and called it a day. Instead, they transported all over and added extra, which goes a long way to extend the life of the game. Up to 16 players can join online (with AI filling if necessary), and hosts a number of options for how we choose to set their races. From test sessions I played, all performed without a hitch on-line, and the epic landscapes on each track looked like recovering as they did in single-player mode.

In a game where you spend large amounts of time high above the Earth, you pay for having environments look stunning on, pure and does not disappoint in this department. There are 12 areas in pure air from the cemetery of Ocotillo Wells, California, for the tropical island of Phi Kosa in Thailand. Each are made with love terrain, foliage, buildings, and impressive details as hovering helicopters and rickety dependencies. Part of the fun of any racing game is to know the tracks in detail to achieve a competitive advantage, and pure environments awesome task of making such a joy.

But after 50 races in the World Tour, 12 areas (pretty as they are) can get a po 'stale after a while' time, mainly because they are almost always created equally. Some of the Sprint races have a reverse installation, and I found myself wishing for a while 'more varieties of environments as I progressed through the game. Despite the repetition, each track has multiple branching paths and shortcuts that you can boost cliffsides on the remote or descent is muddy gulches. That helps keep each track fresh and somewhat 'gives you incentive to try new things.

When you complete events, you're rewarded with new clothes for the characters and new parts for your ATVs (you can keep more slots for multiple platforms). The four are not licensed, but there are parties to license the game, and you'll be spending a considerable amount of time to build bicycles different applications (race, sprint, freestyle). And even if it is fun to build the first couple of bicycles, the addition of new parts as you upgrade may be somewhat 'cumbersome, as you have to go back in the garage, find the part you unlocked and fits each bike. There is a fast-building function that lets you build various types of bicycles automatically, but there's auto-update feature, which I was wishing the 40th race.

The only major difference I noticed between the PC version of pure and its console counterparts is that the PC version is surprisingly more load times. The question seemed worse on the two Vista-based gaming platforms we tested the game, but the wait has been long on our XP machine too. Once out of the long load screens, however, pure well. Graphics settings allow you to turn shadows on and off and to tweak the overall graphics performance.

Closing Comments
Pure offers an outrageous, arcadey off-road racing experience with style and slickness. The controls are intuitive, the songs are pure and Eye Candy tricks are so crazy and over-the-top that you will find yourself gasping with GLEE when you land the first Lazy Girl. Although it is an explosion of play, is not the deepest game out there, and we found ourselves wishing for a few other ways, tracks and options round out the experience. But overall, is just pure fun, and this is what it's all about.

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Ford Racing Off Road

It's Racing! Off-Road! With Fords! ISN'T THAT EXCITING!?!

By: Sam Bishop

You know, it is more difficult to justify for a racing game that offers only one brand of car (or in the case of Ford Racing Off Road, two, even if Land Rover was still under the control of Ford, when the game was in stage of development). With the most serious Sims now provide literally hundreds of cars, the charm of a handful of different brands of the same manufacturer has barely stronger.

Razorworks was friendly with Ford for years, so it is not altogether surprising that it is again with another game of Ford Racing, while taking things (literally) off the streets of the previous transplant games and things to deserts, mountains and beaches not provide the same sense of speed, the same variety or even the same kind of basic entertainment that previous games offered.

Much of it comes down to the overall lack of excitement. Sure, you're bounding around off-road climates, but that does not mean that the game is particularly rapid. Most of the vehicles, despite an apparently different treatment, the speed and acceleration characteristics for the most part, and the fact that you have to not only unlock but buy 18 cars in the game means that you can do a lot of the same stuff over and over again, only with a little 'different mechanic.

E 'this infinite amount of regurgitation and repurposing that has been done with the game of the tracks to help hasten the sensation of mind-numbing boredom. Sure, on paper, Elimination, Time Attack, damage control and Point to Point races seem different, but in practice are substantially similar, only to go before the other guys and stay - while the damage done to your car since it exercises on between races. I know that describes how every racing game ever made, but it's all very brain. Similarly, the Checkpoint, Slalom, Gold Rush and Seconds Out! Events have just run a pick-up or door as quickly as possible. None feel particularly attractive, once you've played them a couple of times, and literally dozens of events before the end of the career mode, all starting to drag on.

FROR the particular brand of physics is ... interesting to say the least. While the vehicles definitely feel heavy, and slidey only if you lay on the gas all the time, the odd leap has the potential to send the car spinning, which can be a major buzzkill when the voice in the final of a race. Things also tend to break down as the first car touch. There's really not correct model of collision, so cars will stick together, throwing a few sparks, but otherwise continues to their merry way. That avian influenza picks really just a path and drive through you rather than around or even with you is just as worrying.

It should be noted that Ford Racing Off Road do not look at least acceptable, but this is due more to Razorworks' core engine than anything else. There have been some very strange hardware choices, however. The PC version does not support FROR laptop / integrated graphics card, which is somewhat 'staggering into account is essentially the PS2 version brought straight over in a modern sense resolutions, texture and graphics feel of the game are pretty weak - and no real opportunity to improve things, what you see is what you get.

Unfortunately, while the vehicles look pretty decent, not always react as the real thing. The game has a very limited damage model (trucks and SUVs will be smoking if the damage meter is high enough, but not really banged up to any significant extent). I can understand if Ford does not want to get beaten when their vehicles run other companies' horses, but it is a pure Ford (and since-jettisoned mark Land Rover) offering, and to be off the road, there was extensive opportunity to paint the classic "takes a licking and keeps ticking" under a moving truck racing across the finish line when other cars would have fallen further.

Another missed opportunity: where are the sound effects? RC Cars seem little versions of the big boys, there is no real sounds of dirt or sliding and around different types of surfaces. These effects bring to the fore would also have helped drown the music frankly lame bit. The odd Wailing guitar solo or cookie cutter jazzy riff not really do anything to help set the tone phonetics of the game.

Closing Comments
Ford Racing Off Road was built on a solid foundation, however, the developers and clearly understand how a racing game and competent behind the engine, but no part of the game in fact, as we hear, also racing. Meander slowly around the same few songs with vehicles that does not express a sense of power or speed makes for a plate of boring experience, and is one you can pass without consequences.

© 2008-09-30, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved

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Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People: Episode One -- "Homestar Ruiner"

The surreal Flash cartoon goes interactive with a new episodic game series.

By: Dave 'Fargo' Kosak

Strong Bad reply e-mail! Help attract a girl Rosa Cartoon Girl! Attend a Montage! Casts a light switch rave! If none of these outlets at all sound familiar to you, then you're probably not one of the many millions of Internet enthusiasts who visit the website Homestar Runner each month. Flash cartoons were a test case for Internet years, with bizarre characters, surreal situations, and an unquenchable love of trashy pop culture anni'80.

But the real question fans want to know is: How Strong Bad types with boxing gloves on? (Erm.) Can a point-and-click adventure game captures the unbridled awesomeness of Strong Bad style? The answer is a surprising yes. Telltale Games, creators of Sam and Max episodic game series, made every effort not to deviate too far from the feel of Flash cartoons. The original creators, the infamous brothers cheek, has all the items and a piece of writing.

The result is that you really feel like you're playing through a Homestar Runner cartoon, but with 3D-rendered characters. This is certainly not revolutionary adventure title, and maybe you have not rolling on the floor with laughter, but it is a bite-sized fun romp through a cartoon world loved.


Games! Download? Eeeeeee-mail

The interface for the strong Bad's Cool Game for Interesting People, now known as the SBCGfAP easy to pronounce, is fully rationalized. Just click around the screen to move there or click on items to interact with them. You have a handful of items in your inventory that can be clicked and dragged on other items to use. When Strong Bad talks with other characters, you can choose from a series of icons to bring new arguments.

The dialogue is great, and this is one of the few games where you want to click around through all the options only to hear the characters speak. ( "I still do not understand why I can not come to your stupid party that I hate," Strong Bad growls at Marzipan.) Our only complaint here is that there is no indication when a train of dialogue is finished until not when the characters begin to repeat themselves, which can be annoying fast.

The original cartoon series revolves around often strange and bizarre circumstances not random sequitors. We were pleased to note that while the game keeps LOOPY feeling in the world, the puzzles are grounded in reality. The challenges Strong Bad runs as attempts to sabotage Free Country USA Tri-annual race at the end of the race can be overcome with the old logic. There are a couple of seats at stake that can not be opened until you find a particular piece of dialogue (be sure to ask about her Marzipan altered shrubs), but these frustrating roadblocks are relatively rare. For most SBCGfAP (go ahead and say out loud!) Remains on track with solid puzzle design.

As Sam & Max, SBCGfAP will be issued as a series of short episodes. You will perhaps five to six hours of play out of this. The game is available for both PC and Wii. The PC version is the easier of the two, running clean, with no loading times, but otherwise the games are identical.

The head Asplode

SBCGfAP is packed with little extras and mini-games, although none provide more than a few minutes of diversion. The real fun is discovering all the jokes in the series plastered all. You can explore every room in strong Bad home, buy stuff from bub's concession stand, outwit the Poopsmith, and participate in all the madness that gives the web site being such popularity. Players who are not fans of Homestar Runner does not get much of this, but if you like the work of the Brothers cheek and are looking for a couple of hours of primary-colored mayhem, you might want to the first episode a spin.

© 2008-09-30, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved

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Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

Mythic's MMO take on the Warhammer universe hits the ground running with an exceptional game built around social bonding and the joys of killing your friends.

By: Allen 'Delsyn' Rausch

Some time ago, the developers at Mythic Entertainment began working on a crazy dream. They would take the best portion of Dark Age of Camelot -- the realm vs. realm combat -- and marry it to the fantasy setting of a beloved tabletop game, Warhammer. They were gambling that a game that focused on one particular gameplay dynamic and built all of its systems around that dynamic would be a fun and exciting experience for millions of MMO gamers. Fast forward a few years through some rocky development woes (including numerous product delays and cut content) and the dream is finally a reality. And while there are certainly issues that need to be dealt with, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has hit the ground running with one of the best MMO experiences we've had in a long time.

War is Everywhere

There are individual elements of Warhammer Online that merit praise, but the game's greatest achievement is actually the integration of its PvP, RvR and PvE experiences into a consistent whole. The "meta-game" of Warhammer Online is the constant state of war between Order (Dwarfs, High Elves, Empire humans) and Destruction (Greenskins, Dark Elves, Chaos humans) to dominate enough of the game's landscape to open the enemy's capital city to looting and pillaging. Everything in the game from basic quests against NPC mobs to instanced PvP battles called "scenarios" to open-world RvR struggles over fortresses in the middle of the landscape all contribute in various ways to that struggle. Even better, players are involved in it from the first moment their level one character appears in the world until their level 40 character goes on their first city raid. Mythic has essentially dropped the early-game "leveling process" in favor of an MMO that's pretty much all "endgame."

In Warhammer Online this sense that "war is everywhere" comes through in myriad ways. The graphics do a great job bringing the world of Warhammer to life in ways both gross and subtle. The game's opening zones, for example, are filled with atmospheric details that throw you into the Warhammer mindset immediately. The Empire opening area takes place during a full-fledged Chaos assault on a small town filled with explosions and cannon fire. As the player works his or her way through the world, there's always something beyond just NPC mobs to indicate the war, whether it be as big as a burning windmill or the old bone fragments that litter the ground.

The frenzied and chaotic atmosphere is enhanced by some exceptional landscape design. The game's zones are a riot of broken terrain, unscalable ridges and dangerous drops. While the actual land area is fairly small as MMOs go, every inch of it is stuffed with mobs, towns, public quests, RvR zones, points of interest and visual obstructions that block line-of-sight. This makes travelling anyplace without getting attacked by mobs or other players very difficult and pulls players in a dozen different directions at once because there's always something interesting to do or somewhere interesting to explore. It also ensures that when players do fight, it's always on a landscape that adds to the excitement of the battle.

The World at WAR

Gameplay in Warhammer Online proceeds along two basic tracks -- the PvE and the PvP/RvR areas. Of the two, it's the PvE zone that initially comes off as the less impressive. When considered by itself, it doesn't beat the often-elaborate scenarios offered in a game like The Lord of the Rings Online, which is essentially built around a core of questing and storytelling. That, however, isn't the purpose of Warhammer Online's PvE content. The game's PvE is instead designed to weave in and out of the PvP content and offer compelling group-based experiences without the pressure of PvP combat. This it does exceptionally well.

The primary vehicle for this kind of experience are the public quests. PQs are geographically bounded multi-stage world events that everyone within its region can contribute to. Once the event is over, loot drops are rolled for with bonuses going to those who contributed the most. They're also a brilliant innovation, one that we wouldn't be surprised to see other MMOs copy in the near future. They offer all the challenge of a group-oriented dungeon and (in later stages) raid-level challenges in short 10- or 15-minute intervals without all the tedious looking for group or the huge time commitment such content usually entails. On Open RvR servers they become even more enjoyable. At least one competitive PQ in the Dwarf/Greenskin zone (where players compete to kill 100 NPCs from the other side) has become an insanely fun kill-zone that's now a must-stop as players level through the

As players progress through the game, a fascinating melding of PvE and PvP content begins to occur. Certain PvE quests will send players into PvP "lakes" to complete objectives that have nothing to do with fighting other players. Others will offer players in PvE zones opposing PQ objectives conveniently located right next to PvP areas where players can slip over and try to kill one another when taunting and interference aren't enough. In higher-level PvP zones, capturing objectives entails dealing with very powerful NPCs that require raid-level coordination to take down. City sieges -- the very goal of the game -- are the ultimate fusion of the two. Once a city siege begins, players will have to compete in PvP events to unlock a whole instanced capital loaded with PvE content ranging from low-level quests to loot and kill regular citizens to high-level dungeons and huge raid-level bosses that will take the resources of a guild to destroy.

The Enemy of My Enemy is my Enemy

It doesn't take much play time before the PvP heart of Warhammer Online becomes clear. Scenario-based PvP is available from the instant a player logs into the game. All a player has to do is click the "Join Scenario" button on the UI anywhere in the world and they queue up. When in a scenario, characters will be leveled to the tier mean. They won't be given any extra skills, which means that very low-level characters will still be at a slight disadvantage, but the field will be more or less even and everyone feels useful. Scenarios run the gamut from simple timed slaughterfests for points to take-and-hold actions to king-of-the-hill games to capture the flag. As players level, they'll be asked to take part in more elaborate scenarios that will require more coordination and planning but even the simplest (Tier One) scenarios in the game offer a huge variety of play styles and a host of ingenious play mechanics.

The other part of Warhammer Online's PvP system is the Realm vs. Realm combat. This consists of PvP "lakes" within larger PvE zones (one for each side) that surround it. In these areas are a series of objectives such as castles or points of interest that are guarded by NPCs that can be captured by players to control the zone. This is easily the game's biggest individual attraction. First, it offers a ton of balanced PvP combat confined to limited areas under specific rule sets and avoids the annoying "ganking" phenomenon (for those who want it, Mythic has created a number of "Open RvR" servers). Second, these RvR lakes are amazingly fun. In a couple of days' worth of battles we accumulated more stories of brilliant assaults, sneak attacks, dirty tricks, desperate last stands and amazingly funny moments than in a year of another MMOs PvP. If the greatest piece of content in an MMO is other people, Warhammer Online offers an endless variety of PvP "content" to explore.

Unfortunately, all of this PvP combat comes at a price -- fairly steep system requirements. While lag, stutter and chug are usually not a problem at the game's lower levels, in larger battles with dozens of players it's very possible players without a high-end system will see their game slow down. We never had a problem so bad it made the game unplayable, but even on our highest-end machines we had to tone down the graphics in some of the larger fights. That may turn off some gamers who were looking forward to the game but may not wish to upgrade their systems -- especially that segment that's been playing nothing but World of Warcraft for the past four years without an upgrade.

Hell is Other People

The biggest irony of Warhammer Online is that its greatest strength is also its biggest weakness -- the reliance on other people. The vast majority of the game's content, especially its meta-game, requires an active and enthusiastic player-base committed to getting to the city sieges. In the game's opening days as everybody levels up and the game still exudes that "new game smell," that isn't a problem. Even in these first days, however, we've found that there are inconveniently located PQs that are virtually abandoned. We're concerned that as the player base ages, these areas may be abandoned, making the trip to level 40 the grind that Mythic worked so hard to avoid.

Fortunately, Mythic is aware of this and put systems in place to try to stem it. Since every zone in the game contributes to the push-pull city-raiding meta-game, there is certainly an incentive for players to level alts and leave them at specific levels in order to be able to switch to different content tiers when the situation requires it. The game also offers a "Tome of Knowledge" that in itself is a huge piece of content. The Tome is combination achievement/kill-counter system that tracks virtually every aspect of gameplay. There's a kill counter for every type of creature (and player) in the game, exploration unlocks for finding specific locations, well-written story snippets as a reward for following the PvE questlines, titles, new skills and much much more. In fact, there's even a whole host of silly and secret achievements in the Tome such as clicking on your own character 100 times, fighting while naked or just adding five players to your friends list.

Xbox Live's achievement system proved some time ago that people will go to incredible lengths for a score beside their name and a few virtual medals. The developers at Mythic took that lesson and ran with it. There will certainly be a large contingent of players who make it a goal to unlock everything in the Tome. For everyone else, the Tome is a sort of goad to experience everything in the game. It's worth playing that PvP scenario one more time to finish an obscure Tome unlock. It's worth going through low-level PvE quest lines in the other races' areas and doing public quests that one has outleveled just to get the unlocks. More than that, the Tome is just one of a host of meters to fill and counters to click and trophies to go for. The game's guild system treats guilds almost like players with their own system of levels and bonuses and prizes that players can work to unlock. There's an entire separate system of PvP leveling that unlocks access to high-level loot. One of the key benefits of all this is it keeps players circulating throughout the world and participating in all of its content.

Greenskins in the Woodpile

Despite all the well-deserved praise, Warhammer Online is not without its problems. While the game seems to have avoided the big technical nightmare of unstable servers, there's a definite danger of population imbalance. As players come on board, there seems to be a pronounced predilection for the Destruction side. While the developers at Mythic have taken steps to ameliorate this, the resulting low population caps on servers have contributed to long wait times for scenarios and 10- to 20-minute waits to log in at peak hours. Since balanced populations fighting each other are the key to this game -- much more so than in World of Warcraft, which continues to wrestle with this issue four years after launch -- this is something that needs to be carefully monitored and controlled as the game moves forward.

There's also a host of smaller problems, though none of them rise to more than a small level of annoyance. Players in scenarios can "AFK" their way through, stealing experience and renown points they don't deserve. There's a weird graphic bug that will lock an avatar into one animation cycle (though you can still play the game). The crafting is confusing and feels like an afterthought. The UI, while quite good, could use a few now-common elements like the ability to hot-link items and abilities in chat. Considering how important player coordination is in higher-level PvP, the game could really use some type of built-in voice chat system. Some of the terrain in the scenarios and the PvP lakes could use some tweaking, as their proximity to spawn points sometimes gives an advantage to one side while the other faction faces an incredibly long post-death trek.

In the end, though, all of the problems, even the most serious one of lag in heavy player combat, are ultimately fixable. Warhammer Online has had the smoothest, most complete MMO launch we've ever seen. Game balance and other elements of the game need tweaking but they're all there, they all work and most importantly, they're all fun. This is a game that has 20 separate classes and while some may be overpowered or underpowered, none of them are boring to play. The game comes loaded with PvP and PvE content that -- balance issues notwithstanding -- is as good as or much better than that of any other MMO on the market. Warhammer Online is the next great game of Player vs. Player and Realm vs. Realm content and we have the feeling that somewhere on the other side of reality, the Chaos god Tzeentch is smiling.

©2008-09-26, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization

A worthy sequel to a long-neglected classic.

By: Steve Butts

Ah, Colonization. It has been too long, my friend. Too long since you held me prisoner in your intricate production chains. Too long since you stifled my economic growth with your spiteful tax hikes. Too long since you battered down my settlements with a seemingly infinite army of cannons and settlements. Too long since you and I have been together. And after years of waiting, you have finally reappeared in all your Vista-compatible glory and filled my days, my nights, and my late, late nights with hours of joyful frustration and aggravating delights.

The awkward title makes it seem like an expansion pack but Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization is actually a remake of one of our favorite and most fondly remembered strategy games of the 1990s. And like Firaxis' remake of Sid Meier's classic Pirates! it manages to do what few remakes can: stylishly upgrading the overall presentation and interface without sacrificing the appeal of the original game's mechanics and character. If you were a fan of the original Colonization, you'll love the updated look and feel of this game. And if you never played Colonization before, you'll find a compelling design that has held up extremely well over the last fifteen years.

Colonization essentially zooms in on one aspect of the Civilization experience and expands it into it's own game. Players begin as European explorers in a lone ship just off the coast of an unexplored (and unexploited) continent. Once you make landfall, your colonists establish a new settlement and begin working to harvest raw materials from the land. Food, wood and ore support the growth of the new settlement and its population. Commodities like fur, sugar and tobacco can be gathered up and transformed into finished goods that you can ship back to Europe or trade with friendly natives. The natives can even teach your colonists new jobs that will help them make the most out of the unique resources found in this land. Since food is required by everyone but produced only by a few, you'll have to specialize each settlement around a mere handful of activities and jobs. This forces the player to make some tough decisions about their priorities. And since any imbalance in raw materials and finished goods can throw the system off, you'll need to stay on top of it all the time.

If your settlements are stocked with enough food, eventually you'll start to generate new colonists that can take on new jobs. Specialized workers can be hired back in the Old World, or even attracted to the religious climate you create in the colonies. Missions set up among the Natives can even encourage native workers to come live in your settlements. As your population grows, you'll send colonists out to establish new settlements and take advantage of nearby resources. Wagon trains and roads help you move goods around, so you can get the raw materials to the industries that need them, and the finished goods to your main trading cities.

Of course, it's not just about the assembly line. Not all the native tribes are friendly, and any of them might become hostile depending on your treatment of them and your attitude towards encroaching on their settlements. You'll also find that other European powers are establishing their own colonies here, and you'll have to compete with them for scare resources and land. So you'll need to assign some colonists as soldiers to protect your interests.

Once you start to generate a little profit, the King starts demanding a bigger and bigger cut of the action. If you let him get away with it, eventually you'll be expending more and more effort for less and less gain. You can stage protests from time to time but this also limits your economic potential, and angers the king. So while you're focusing on growing your settlements, producing raw materials and goods, keeping the natives happy, and ensuring that you can protect what you have, you'll also need to begin generating rebel sentiment in the form of Liberty Bells and preparing for a full on war of independence against your home country.

Where the Civilization games have a variety of victory conditions, Colonization all builds to this revolt as the player's sole objective. Fail to win your freedom in the time allotted and it doesn't matter how much cash you're generating or how much land you own or how much the natives love you. The good news is that the King is aggressive enough with demands for tribute and tax, not to mention his own intimidating military build up, that revolution becomes more than just a victory condition; it becomes a declaration of your independence that carries real emotional weight with the player. And because the game has this one winning condition, it should appeal to strategy gamers who are unhappy with the less structured victory paths in Civilization IV.

When you revolt, you'll have a chance to set your own constitution, which basically is a series of either/or choices you can make to determine what types of bonuses you want when waging the war against your home country. If your constitution supports slavery, for instance, you get a big boost to all your raw material production. If it abolishes slavery, you get a one-time population boost in each settlement. Each of the choices here has a compelling benefit and also offers you to make a sort of personal statement about the identity of your new country. Will you be a monarchy so you can keep trading with Europe? Will you run a theocratic state so you can translate religious freedom into additional production?

As attractive as it all is, this is all stuff we expected from a Colonization remake. But the designers at Firaxis have managed to incorporate a number of significant improvements that make the experience that much more enjoyable. Some, like the concept of colonial borders, are clearly borrowed from Civilization IV and serve basically the same purpose. The difference here is that rebel sentiment takes the place of culture, so you're encouraged to protest against the home country to ensure your access to important resources (and to deny them to your rivals). The strength of your borders will even sometimes flip enemy cities to your side and absorb native settlements.

Other Civilization IV concepts and features are here as well. Military units have a whole list of possible promotions now, so you can reward and strengthen units that succeed in combat. A wide range of multiplayer options are also included and, given that a game of Colonization is substantially shorter than Civilization (particularly on "quick" speed), it's much easier to get in and get your fix.

Our favorite addition, by far, is the automation of trade. The original Colonization let players create discreet trade routes and assign a specific wagon train to run that route, picking up and dropping off goods as directed. While it was a workable system, everything had to be done by hand, with the player setting up each individual pick up and drop off and having dedicated wagons ready for each strand in the network. Needless to say, it was a management headache that involved lots of scratch paper and frequent revisions when goods ran out and the system broke down.

The new version lets players assign an import or export tag as well as stock limits to every single good in every single settlement. Then the player just has to set the wagon trains on automatic and they'll start redistributing goods on their own according to the tags and stock limits you've set. You just tell the game that you want to export cotton where it's produced and move it to your weaving centers and the wagon trains take care of it. Of course, you have to have enough wagon trains to meet your trading needs, and you'll still want a couple under your direct control for one-time transfers, but the new system frees up part of your brain from worrying about the smallest details of your logistic system and lets you focus instead on your actual strategies.

If all this sounds complicated, it is. Colonization is one of those games that you actually have to play through a few times before you really begin to understand how it works. I played lots of the original Colonization but even I had to have a practice games under my belt before victory was even a consideration. My first game, I had my infrastructure running fine but could never get enough rebel sentiment to declare independence. And when I saw the Spanish colonies revolt and get absolutely crushed by the Spanish king, I knew I wasn't ready. My second game, I got the revolutionary fervor worked up quite quickly, but just didn't have a secure enough military position to take on the mother country. By the third game, things finally had started to click. And here's where Colonization gets really good.

It's not all uphill for most players though. Since the game uses many of the same concepts and interface elements of Civilization IV, it's quite easy to pick it up and least get a sense of direction. The interface is very clean and presents the game in way that makes it very easy to maintain awareness of what's going on around you. Summary screens provide all the detail you need to manage the big picture, while simple yield displays let you see what each and every settlement needs at any given moment. There are a few downsides, unfortunately. It takes a lot of switching back and forth sometimes to get colonists in the right jobs and the roads between your settlements are nearly invisible.

Otherwise, the game's visual and audio elements are solid. Sure, the map can get a bit busy at times, and your pioneers are basically camouflaged against the terrain, but the animation and detail on each of your units makes it easy to stare at your monitor for four hours in a row. The sound is amazing, with the pleasant background music giving way to swelling national themes in as you zoom in and mouse over your settlements. As the view slides from your settlements to a native village, you'll even hear the music change to reflect the different character of the two societies. Battle effects and ambient sounds also add a bit of life to the game, but our favorite effect so far is the little kissy sound and subsequent chorus of disapproval that are made whenever you give in to your home country's requests.

If there is a gameplay criticism to be made here, it's that the game ramps up the difficulty far too quickly with very little forgiveness of player mismanagement. With so many balls to keep up in the air, and so few turns to ready yourself for revolution, there's not much hope that you can recover from your own negligence or the unforeseen setbacks that come your way. Wars with other colonial empires and native forces may help blood your forces a bit, but it will bleed your strength in the long run. We certainly don't want to fault the game for requiring players to stay focused on their objective but this isn't like Civilization where your strengths in one area can smooth out your deficiencies in another. In Colonization, you've really got to get every aspect of your strategy working properly or you're really setting yourself up for a loss.

Some critics feel that very idea of a game about the European colonization of the Americas is both embarrassing and insulting and that it celebrates a racist doctrine that led to the destruction of numerous native cultures. While it's true that the game does cover a period of history where European powers used their technological and logistical advantages to subjugate and exploit native people, players are encouraged to consider the benefits of peaceful coexistence with their neighbors. In fact, once you revolt from your mother country, a friendly native population becomes one of your greatest strengths. Other critics who fault the game for not being harsh enough to include smallpox or slave trading will merely have to be content with the game's abstraction of these concepts.

We say it at the end of every Civilization review, but it belongs here as well: there's still so much more that we could cover. There are Founding Fathers that will join you and give you massive bonuses based on your success in various areas. There are ancient ruins with massive treasures you can ship back to the mother country. There are privateers that let you attack your rivals without risking a full war, and pioneers you can employ to improve the land around your settlements.

Closing Comments
Like Pirates! before it, Colonization is brilliant, not just for the way that it successfully captures the fun and feel of one of a classic PC game, but also for the way that it brings that design into a new era. The presentation here is very polished and the design is deeply captivating. To be sure, the sophisticated economic aspects of the game only appeals to a very specific type of gamer so, while it's an amazing game, it's definitely not for everyone. But any gamer who wasn't scared off by the complications and challenges of Civilization will feel right at home here.

©2008-09-26, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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The Price Is Right

There's nothing right about this.

By: Jack DeVries

Price is Right has never been the same without Bob Barker. The hit game show that attracts everyone from old women, to Midwestern frat boys, lost a lot of its charm when Drew Carey took the reins and immediately started dialing in his performance like he was doing community service. It's hard to imagine how the show could become less entertaining, unless of course you happen to play the Price is Right video game. It's like standing in line for four hours to get into the audience, then being told it's full and you only get to watch from the lobby.

Ubisoft released three versions of The Price is Right. The PC versions is the best, and cheapest of the three at $20. The Wii version is just a port of the PC title, with double the price tag. And the DS falls in the middle of the price range, but is by far the worst of the bunch. The only "right" price among these seems to the be the PC version.

The video game not only doesn't have Bob Barker, it doesn't even have Drew Carey as the host. There is no host, just the disembodied voice of the announcer, presumably Rich Fields, the sound alike replacement for the late Rod Roddy. Both the Wii and PC versions feature full voice work for all the games. The announcer describes the prizes in his overly excited voice while video clips of the beautiful models play. Most of the time it's actually clips taken from the show from the last few years. The videos are extremely small, making it hard to see. Why can't they be bigger? I don't need to see the contestants when I'm trying to look at a "NEW CAR!"

Unfortunately the DS version features considerably less voice work. Rich does say a few key phrases (Come on down!) and yells out dollar amounts when you win big, but the descriptions of prizes are handled by a scrolling text box. For whatever reason, most of the time the text boxes cannot be skipped or sped up, so the pacing of the game just crawls along.

What's bizarre about the DS version is that the description is the exact text the announcer would have said. So during something like the Showcase, when the models put on a little skit, all the text is there, but there's only a picture of TV or a car. I guess the developers just want you to imagine what hilarious things those ladies are doing.

It's actually probably a good idea that no real celebrities are represented in the game, because if the other character models are any indication, they would have looked like deformed monster people. The eight different contestants (only four in the DS version) are all supposed to represent typical Price is Right audience members. There's the military man, the grandmother, the college guy, the housewife, and others. The models are so bad that not only is it hard to tell what gender some of them hard, it's hard to tell if a couple are even human. Their limited animation (excited, pretty excited, really excited) are so jerky and terribly animated that it looks like they're having seizures.

For the most part the games aren't too terrible if you like Price is Right games. All the versions have about 15 different games, all taken directly from the show. The sound effects on the Wii and PC are spot on, and the DS has most of them in there, too. Plinko could have used a physics engine to actually mimic the game, since it's clear that the game just runs on a formula. The DS version in particular doesn't even try to make it look realistic, and the plinko chip smoothly slides down the chutes.

The game operates on a three strike rule. So if you don't guess the right price in the contestant corner at the beginning, you still go on stage, but take a strike. Likewise, if you lose on the wheel you get a strike. Players get to keep playing through the game, from contestant corner to showcase, until they get three strikes. Except for a few times on the DS version, I could never get past the wheel. It's like the game is rigged. I've been up to the wheel over two dozen times on the Wii and PC and have never won. Some old granny will magically bet my score (sometimes as high as 95 cents) and I get a strike and start over. It's total crap.

Multiplayer is a mode in the game that should be fun, but the rules to it are so broken that there's no point in playing. The players go through a whole game, and at the end the player with the most money wins. Anyone that has watched the Price is Right knows that the games don't give the same amount of money. If I play Cliffhanger, I win $40,000. The other player gets something like checkout and wins $7,500. He may go on and win the showcase (which would mean he's the winner of the show) and get another $21,000, but then I still win the game because my random minigame was worth more money. There's no way to control it.

All three versions of the game have Challenges in the game. So every time you win a game, or do something like win a Showcase with less than a $1000 difference, you win the challenge. On the DS these are just useless achievements, but on the Wii and DS they unlock video clips. They're usually bloopers, which are varying degrees of amusing. Some of the videos have commercials in front of them though. Yeah, there are commercials in this game about a show that is really just an hour long commercial to begin with.

Closing Comments
The Price is Right is a fun show because it's high energy, and the host is (or used to be) charming and friendly. Plus, instead of answering boring questions, you get to actually play games. As a video game, the excitement is completely gone, replaced by a show with no host, starring hideous contestants, a rule system that is arbitrary, and with seemingly rigged AI. This is the kind of game you would show to a huge Price is Right fan and they would go, "Oh yeah, that's Plinko. No thanks, I don�t want to play." And to think I made a custom "IGN <3>

©2008-09-25, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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King's Bounty

Russian developer Katauri Interactive does the legend proud with a terrific updated version of the New World Computing classic.

By: Allen 'Delsyn' Rausch

Remakes are a tricky business. It's always tempting to update a beloved property from the past so a new generation can appreciate it. But how much can you modernize without losing what made the original so compelling? Do it right and you get the new "Battlestar Galactica." Do it wrong and you end up with "Godzilla" starring Matthew Broderick. Russian developers Katauri Interactive took just such a risk when they embarked on a labor of love to resurrect New World Computing's classic King's Bounty and thankfully the resulting title, King's Bounty: The Legend, is far more "Battlestar" than "Godzilla."

The basic premise of King's Bounty: The Legend is standard-issue fantasy. There's a magical kingdom run by a noble king named Mark who has a beautiful daughter who apparently fell from the stars. Despite Mark being all good and nice and stuff, the kingdom has fallen on some difficult times as the number of bandit attacks and monster sightings has gone up in recent months. It's up to the player, a new hero and recent graduate of the Darion Temple, to head out into the world, fight a gazillion assorted monsters, loot everything that's not nailed down, track down the source of this new evil and blast it to smithereens in the name of truth, justice and all that stuff.

A great story and well-written dialogue in an RPG can vault an otherwise mediocre product into greatness. King's Bounty's story, on the other hand, marks the game's most significant weakness. While the game has already been on store shelves in Russia for several months, publishers Atari and 1C made a point of trying to make sure that the game got a good translation for the English-speaking market. The grammatically challenged, typo-ridden and poorly written game text doesn't seem to have benefited from the extra effort (although we question how much good stuff there was to work with in the first place).

Players travel through the world on horseback via an isometric overhead perspective. The world itself is lovely if a bit cartoonish, filled with all sorts of eye-pleasing animations, with well-designed (if a bit generic) fantasy creatures wandering about the landscape and all-sorts of little ambient details that make the world an enticing place to explore. As players travel around, they'll run into various wandering monster armies as well as hero-led troops that can be fought for gold and experience points. There are also a number of castles, towns, building and ruins filled with all sorts of baddies to kill. Many of these must be cleared as parts of long quest chains, while many others offer long-term benefits or serve as a source of troops when their guardians are cleared out.

It's when the player goes into combat that the real attraction of King's Bounty: The Legend becomes clear. The conceit of the battle system is that the player's hero doesn't personally fight in battle. Instead he acts as commander and chief spell-caster for armies of men and monsters that struggle with each other across a hex-grid battlefield in the manner of classic turn-based strategy games. Katauri Interactive's recreation and update of this system does their team and the legacy of New World Computing proud. King's Bounty's battle system is incredibly deep and enjoyable, more than a match for the original game or any of the classic Heroes of Might and Magic games they inspired.

While there's a lot to the system that makes it work, two elements in particular stand out. The first are the game's beautifully drawn interactive battlefields. What battlefield the player fights on is dictated by where on the overhead map the hero encounters the opposition. While each battlefield is somewhat randomized, they'll usually have a chest the player can open (in later stages of the game, these chests become a significant source of income and magical items) as well as environmental hazards such as a bee's nest that attacks both sides or a cursed cross that slows down any army near it. That makes every battle tactically unique and really helps to stave off the "same old, same old" feeling that can come from a 60-70 hour game like this. It also makes the player's choice of where to fight often as significant as what to fight with.

The second is the sheer variety of armies the player can command. The world of Endoria is filled with a ton of controllable creatures ranging from poison-spitting mobile plants to vampires and dragons. Each comes with their own set of basic abilities as well as special powers (basic archers, for example, can be upgraded with fire arrows that do damage-over-time or ice arrows that paralyze enemy units). As the player rises in power and clears out more of the world they'll be faced with more and more powerful army mixes that will require a strategist's eye in putting together a coalition of unlikely army units to stop. Players will also acquire the ability to command "Spirits of Rage," four super-powerful units with different powers that can be leveled up separately and then employed at strategically critical moments.

What makes the game's battle system especially enjoyable is the way it dovetails seamlessly with the player-hero's RPG mechanics. Players can choose from one of three classes (Warrior, Paladin or Mage) and each choice has a significant impact on the way the game's strategic battles play out. As the player wins battles they gain experience points in order to level up, but unlike in traditional RPGs, the heroes of King's Bounty: The Legend utilize an MMO-style "talent tree" in which skills are purchased via runes littered about the overworld landscape. As players continue to clear out areas and lose troops with every battle, they'll uncover new sources of troops, gold and magic runes. Clearing out a haunted castle, in fact, may just result in the artifact or the new source of purchasable zombies needed to take down an obstinate army that's been bedeviling the player for a few levels.

The result is a game where the logistic aspects of the overworld game are as much a strategic consideration as the choice of what troops that player takes into battle. It doesn't take too many levels before a player starts to realize that each and every talent purchase has a significant impact on how their army fights. The overworld's resources are not unlimited, either. As players fight and lose troops with every battle, scarcity can becomes a reality, forcing players to radically re-order their army's composition or shift their explorations because a key troop is no longer available. Both RPG and strategy game fans will have a great time digging into this impressively detailed system and when they're done, game randomization ensures there will always be another challenge.

The game does have a few other minor negatives. The very randomness that ensures replayability also contributes to distinctly weird creature distribution. It's not unusual for players to see massive armies they have no hope of defeating in the game's introductory zones while end-game regions will sometimes be loaded with creampuff battles that do nothing but slow the game down. There is an automatic pilot for combat but the game desperately needs some sort of autoresolve function to avoid players sitting through five minutes of boringly unlosable combat. The crowded overland map also makes it difficult to pick up what features are interactive, what's just scenery, what's a road and what's not (this has an unfortunate consequences if the game's pathing runs the player into a battle he or she's not prepared for). The game could also use more fast-travel options and some sort of a central "bank" for purchased creatures. As it stands now, the player often has to backtrack over huge swaths of landscape to find the troops they need for a particular combat.

Despite a couple of missteps (most notably the poor translation and storyline) none of the game's annoyances should keep any serious strategy gamer from seeking out King's Bounty: The Legend. The game's RPG trappings are just the sugarcoating for an incredibly deep and enjoyable strategic experience. There's a whole host of classic games out there just waiting for a fresh coat of paint and a serious upgrade from a developer who loves them as much as the team at Katauri Interactive obviously loves King's Bounty. Here's hoping they do as good a job!

©2008-09-23, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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The Witcher: Enhanced Edition

It's out, it's good, you should play it.

By: Charles Onyett

When it originally came out last year, IGN PC's ex-editor-in-chief Dan Adams gave CD Projekt RED's The Witcher an 8.5, an editor's choice award, and the game eventually went on to win our best PC RPG of the Year award. Even though the title was certainly worthy of the praise, it wasn't without issues, something the developer took pretty seriously. They compiled a list of the top grievances players and reviewers had with the game and released it as The Witcher Enhanced Edition, which, about a year later, is now available.

The thing to note about the Enhanced Edition is, while it is a new retail box with lots of bonus content included alongside the updated game, it's also free to all those who already own The Witcher. So if you've got the box sitting around on your game shelf, or table, or section of floor, or whatever, and still have your registration code, you can install and register the product and upgrade it without any additional fee.

To be clear, this isn't just a simple patch that fixes a few bugs. It's a massive update that makes quite a few changes to the game, something you may be more used to seeing with subscription-based online RPGs. And on top of that, you also get the bonus content for free, which includes updated voice-over and text language support, the soundtrack, behind the scenes making-of movies, two new adventures, and a digital map. You don't have to download all the extra stuff, but it's there if you want it.

If you're totally unfamiliar with the game, Dan's review does a good job pointing out the strengths and weaknesses. It's got a dynamic storyline, an entertaining combat system, a strong protagonist in Geralt, some nice visuals, and an excellent orchestral soundtrack. On the other hand, the original release had excruciatingly long load times, enough to make me bail out of playing the game as I figured they'd eventually be fixed. After downloading the EE patch for the copy of the game I still had lying around, I was happy to find the load times had, in fact, been shortened.

Another point Dan brings up in his review is how cluttered the inventory gets, and therefore how difficult it is to manage the alchemy system. In the original release, the player's inventory was just a large, unorganized mess of items, making it particularly difficult to tell which alchemical reagents you had, which you needed, and made the process of finding all this information out a giant pain as you basically had to comb through everything you'd collected every time. With the EE patch you get a more organized inventory with separate satchels for items and alchemical components, as well as sorting options to keep things in order.

With those two issues out of the way, playing through The Witcher should be a much more enjoyable experience. If you've never played it, we absolutely recommend you go out and pick up the Enhanced Edition. The upgrade also works with old saves, so if you still have your progress stored on your hard drive, you can pick up where you left off with all the new features in place.

©2008-09-22, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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