Dynasty Warriors: Gundam Hands-On

Although it sounds like a totally bizarre pairing, Dynasty Warriors: Gundam (known as Gundam: Musou in Japan) is arguably one of the most engaging Gundam games to hit the States in a good, long while. The game was released late last year for the PlayStation 3 in Japan and has since been slated to hit the US with an Xbox 360 version added to the mix. Namco Bandai had a localized version of the PlayStation 3 game on display at their recent press event to show off the upcoming game. While the playable game wasn't quite final, the game offered a sample of what to expect from the US version.
Fans of Gundam will spot some familiar faces.
The game offers three modes, official, original, and versus, that let you play as familiar faces from the Gundam universe. The official mode lets you take part in adventures from Gundam lore, while the original mode offers the chance to play against faces from the various Gundam story arcs. Finally, the versus mode lets you compete against a friend. Given the Gundam franchise's long history, the modes offer a wealth of characters and mobile suits. The official mode offers a total of six pilots to play through, while the original mode features more than 12 pilots. As far as the powerful mobile suits go, you'll find more than 15 to choose from. The catch, of course, is that you'll have to unlock a good chunk of the pilots and mobile suits as you play through the various modes.
Though the game features the basic action gameplay seen in the Dynasty Warriors games, you'll find some RPG-lite elements as well. Pilots will gain personal skills, which are unique abilities they can use in battle to boost their offense or defense. In addition, you'll come across parts as you destroy enemies. The parts can be used to buff up one of four attributes on your suit--fight, shoot, defense, and armor--when equipped. Fight affects your melee attacks, shoot affects your ranged attacks, defense reduces the damage you take from attacks, and armor increases the number of hit points your suit has. You can further enhance your mobile suit by pairing up specific parts with in-game mechanics that add additional bonus to the buff you gain from them. You'll have ample opportunity to get used to the various systems in the game thanks to a lengthy list of missions across both modes.
As the title suggests, this is Dynasty Warriors with Gundams.
The visuals and audio in the game are solid, though not as gratuitously flashy as many of the PlayStation 3 titles that have hit. The various mobile suits sport a clean look. The environments follow the same aesthetic and offer a solid amount of detail across the land- and air-based locales. The special effects used for the various mobile-suit super attacks offer some kick to the visuals. Audio in the game is coming along nicely, with extensive English voice-overs already implemented. However, purists can choose to play through the game with Japanese voice and English text if they want to keep it real. The music in the game is solid and mixes original and familiar tunes to frame the action.
While it may still sound a bit insane, Dynasty Warriors: Gundam is a surprisingly fun and addictive game thanks to its accessible gameplay. Though the beat-'em-up action may not be the most stunningly innovative thing you've ever seen, the fact remains that beating the crap out of mobs of enemies is not without its charms. The same holds true of giant robots. Add the two together, and you have a game that's fun and worth a try. Dynasty Warriors: Gundam is slated to ship this summer for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Look for more on the game in the coming weeks.

Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree is a simple collection of brain teasers that are different enough from the other minigame collections on the Wii to make

Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree takes the same basic structure as the first Big Brain game, which appeared on the DS just over a year ago. It's essentially a sequel to the original game because it doesn't duplicate the games found on the DS, but instead replaces them with a collection of new brain-teasing minigames. While this brings the number of minigame collections on the Wii to just under 8 billion, Big Brain Academy is different enough from the average WarioWare or Mario Party-style collection to find its own niche on the platform that players of the first game should find enjoyable.
Though the formula that determines your brain weight is never expressly revealed, it is determined by your speed and your accuracy.
The whole game takes place under the guise of making your brain bigger and heavier, which is, of course, completely ridiculous. Unlike its counterpart, Brain Age, Big Brain makes no wordy claim about actually improving your mind. There's also no sketchy-looking science on the back of the box, attempting to legitimize the whole thing. Big Brain Academy just lets you play minigames in random sequences and gives you a score at the end based on your performance. You can compare these scores with other players locally, and you can also send them over to your online friends so they can compare their scores with your scores.
The different games are broken up into groups named after the sort of brain training they're having you do, such as compute or identify. Each game is very simple to understand, as they intuitively use the pointing and clicking features of the Wii Remote. The Wii speaker is used both for encouragement and, in one neat minigame, as a phone. In that minigame, you must listen to customers ordering food and then duplicate their order on the screen. However, most of the minigames are more basic than that, such as one where a series of number-bearing balloons appear, and you have to pop them in order from lowest to highest. Another shows you four pictures and asks you to choose the pictures that fit different criteria. For example, if the game merely says "wings," you might find yourself clicking on a photo of a duck and an airplane, but not a gorilla or a swimmer. Right off the bat, the practice modes in the game let you go to town on 15 different games, but the other modes mix in games that don't appear in the practice menu, giving you a reason to skip around and try everything out.
The main mode in the game is the test mode, where you play 10 rounds of each category. Your skills translate into an overall score, a letter grade, and a descriptive phrase that is meant to tell you your brain type. These are usually goofy descriptions, such as "improv actor." There's also a group mode that you can actually play alone, but it can include up to eight players in some cases. There's one direct head-to-head mode, where two players race to finish a set of questions first, though the rest involve passing the controller to get more than two players playing, which is kind of lame. A proper four-player simultaneous mode might have been nice, but ultimately, you're best off playing the game alone and then comparing your scores with other players.
Getting online and sharing your scores with other players is a nice idea, though a proper online leaderboard might have been better.
Visually, Big Brain Academy has a basic but functional look to it. It's never flashy, but it also has a very clean and direct look, which fits with the school-like tone of the game. The Mii system is integrated into the game, so things like your student record book will have your Mii face on it. The audio is good as well. A fair amount of speech comes out of the Wii speaker, but most of it is just encouragement from a female voice that eggs you on as you play. The music and sound effects are also catchy and pleasant.
While fans of the Wii's other minigame compilations might find Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree a little more stripped down than the rest, the game stands apart by simply offering different types of slightly more thought-intensive minigames. It's not rocket science, but if you're after something slightly headier than the Mario Party-style of waving the Wii Remote around like a lunatic while mashing the A button as hard as you possibly can, you'll probably enjoy your time with Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree.

Half-Life 2: The Orange Box Hands-On - Episode Two and Team Fortress 2

When Half-Life 2: The Orange Box ships later this year, it promises to deliver an impressively wide range of gameplay. First, there's Half-Life 2: Episode Two, the second part of the trilogy follow-up to 2004's blockbuster Half-Life 2. (The Orange Box will also include Half-Life 2 as well as Episode One to get newcomers up to speed.) Next is Team Fortress 2, the stylized, team-based multiplayer action game that's been in development off and on over the past decade. Finally, The Orange Box will also include Portal, the innovative first-person action puzzle game. While we've had a chance to play Portal, we hadn't seen Episode Two or Team Fortress 2 in action. Well, things have changed, and we got some hands-on time with both for our first impressions on the games.
First, let's cover Episode Two. The middle part of any trilogy tends to be the most challenging to make, since it has to serve as a bridge between the beginning and the end. The challenge is to make sure that the middle episode has its own energy and narrative, and Valve has thought this out. As programmer and project lead David Speyrer and designer Gautam Babbar explained to us, Episode Two is all about variety and throwing new challenges and experiences at the player. There will also be significant story revelations, as you'll finally learn more about the mysterious G-Man who's been dogging you since the original Half-Life, as well as those mysterious Combine advisors who have appeared only on video screens thus far. And yes, a main character will die.
You get a muscle car in Episode Two, and Alyx is riding shotgun.
An early scene in the episode has you (playing as Gordon) waking up in the middle of a train wreck, trapped inside one of the cars. Thankfully, your companion and ally Alyx Vance is outside and is able to free you with use of the trusty gravity gun, which is able to manipulate and throw around large, physical objects. As soon as you emerge from the wreckage, you realize that you're no longer in City 17, the setting of Half-Life 2 and Episode One. Instead, you're surrounded by wilderness and forest--specifically, the White Forest. With City 17 and its Citadel destroyed, a giant dimensional portal has begun to form over the ruins of the city. That portal links to the Combine's alien home, and if it opens, the Combine will rush reinforcements to Earth, dooming humanity. Thankfully, one of the things that Alyx stole from the Citadel in Episode One are important Combine portal codes--but to be useful they must be delivered to the scientists, led by Dr. Eli Vance and the new character, Dr. Magnusson, in their secret lab. And to do that, you've got to get through the White Forest with Combine forces in pursuit.
Episode Two is one, big high-speed chase, and it promises to be epic. We got to play through different sections of the episode, and there's going to be a lot to see. For instance, early on you'll travel through the underground tunnel network used by the antlions, those vicious alien insects from Half-Life 2. There are new species of antlions to encounter, such as workers that spit toxic venom at you. This underground also sports some of the new graphical enhancements made to the Source engine, such as bioluminescent shaders that make the antlions glow in the dark. The caverns themselves look spectacular, with glistening rock walls and deep pools of water, which are useful since antlions apparently can't swim.
What's the deal with the G-Man? We'll find out in Episode Two.
Next up was a dash through an antlion-infested valley alongside Alyx and one of the new vortigaunt allies introduced in the episode. The vortigaunts were one of the alien opponents in the original Half-Life, but in Half-Life 2 they became friends. This battle was pretty large-scale, with a seemingly endless stream of antlions rushing Gordon and his allies. The good news is that those giant Combine thumpers, designed to keep antlions away, are scattered throughout the valley, and it's possible to resupply at crates found next to them. There are also plenty of explosive barrels scattered about, and they can be picked up and thrown using the gravity gun. This sequence ended, though, with a queen antlion appearing, and she didn't look too happy.
Valve then introduced us to the muscle car, the key new vehicle in Episode Two. The muscle car was developed in response to the sense that the buggy from Half-Life 2 was underpowered. The same can't be said of the muscle car, which has wicked turbo acceleration as well as a meaty engine noise. Even better, Alyx can and will ride shotgun from the passenger seat, as well as provide commentary on your driving skills. The sequences that we saw were similar to the vehicle sequences in Half-Life 2, as you'll follow a fairly linear path, though it's mainly off-road this time. The most intense driving sequence involved a breakneck pursuit by Combine forces, including a helicopter. You'll run over a lot of zombies and hit a lot of jumps during this sequence.
Beware the powerful new hunters.
The action in Episode Two is about two parts combat and one part puzzle-solving, as you usually have to figure out a way to navigate through the level. This can involve using the gravity gun to manipulate electrical cables to get current to a radio, or figuring out how to use the environment against opponents. A good example of the latter involves the hunter, which is one of the new enemies introduced in Episode Two and one of the toughest we've seen in a Half-Life game. The hunter is a Combine synth, so it's in the same family as the dreaded strider. And in many ways, the hunter is like a strider, only much smaller so it can chase you indoors. Like striders, hunters can absorb massive amounts of damage, which makes them difficult to take down. Meanwhile, they're armed with explosive plasma darts that can knock down your health and armor in a hurry. Even worse, hunters have a nasty habit of charging at you like a bull, and if they hit you they'll deal a lot of damage and send you hurling through the air--which is more proof that Valve is having fun with physics. A single hunter is tough enough, but we encountered them in packs, which makes them a lot tougher. The most brutal encounter we saw involved a Combine ambush of Gordon and Alyx, with multiple hunters backed up by a squad of Combine soldiers. You'll have to hole up inside a large house (that's thankfully stocked with those helpful resupply crates) and will have to survive the onslaught. One hint: Hunters don't deal well with being knocked around, so put that gravity gun to use and grab things that are large and made of metal.
Episode Two comes off as challenging, which is good considering you've probably gotten used to waxing those pushover Combine soldiers by now. We're also impressed by how good the episode looks. Valve continues to enhance the Source engine, adding better high dynamic range lighting, support for multicore processors, a revamped particle system, large-scale cinematic physics, and more. The good news is that it is also longer than Episode One, as the designers said that their play-tests showed six to eight hours of gameplay, as compared to four to six hours for Episode One. And Episode Two is just one part of the Orange Box package. Next, we'll go over Team Fortress 2.

NHL 08 First Look

There's little denying that the sport of hockey is in flux these days. Televised games here in the US have had some of their worst ratings in years, while the league is considering expanding into such questionable territories as Las Vegas and Kansas City. Perhaps oddest of all, the NHL Finals ended up last week with the Stanley Cup in the hands of the Anaheim (formerly Mighty) Ducks. While the future of the sport is uncertain, isn't it nice that the state of hockey video games is as strong as it's ever been? Last year, EA Sports turned heads with its next-generation console debut of its long-running NHL series, NHL 07. This game did more than look great, thanks to an innovative analog shot stick, and it also played well. The next version of the game, NHL 08, is on its way later this year, and we recently had a chance to see how it's coming along.
Two defenders? No problem. Improved manual deke controls will help you slip your way through traffic.
With such noticeable changes to the series last season, the overarching goal for NHL 08 seems to be refining the new-look controls and adding depth to the overall experience. A big part of that refinement will be in improved skating controls, which look to add more variety and depth to how you move your players around the ice. As producers readily admitted when showing off a work-in-progress build of NHL 08, one of the difficulties in playing last year's game was on the defensive side. Keeping close to offensive skater or better yet, really laying into him with a good, stiff check was difficult because you didn't have enough control over the defensive skater. If those producers are to be believed, that won't be the case in NHL 08, thanks to some new controls that help you decide how a skater carves up the ice.
Being able to distinguish between carved turns (where a skater digs in and turns on a dime) and crossover turns (a wider arc that has a skater crossing his skates over one another) is one of the biggest improvements made to the skating model. You'll be able to choose what kind of turn you want in NHL 08, depending on how you move the analog stick that controls your skater. Turning in the traditional manner--moving the stick left or right--will result in a standard carved turn, which is a sharper, quicker turn but one that requires a lot of momentum. However, rolling the analog stick along the outside edge will cause the skater to perform a crossover turn; a quicker, wider turn. Though we didn't get a chance to try out the game for ourselves, it seems like the implementation of the two turns is seamless, so that you can break from a wider, crossover turn into a quick carved turn at any moment. Skating speed will also play into the mix because how far you push up on the analog stick will determine how fast you skate, giving you that much more control over how your skater moves along the ice.
The direction and speed of skating is just part of the story; puck handling, which changed dramatically in NHL 07 with the innovative skill stick, looks to improve in NHL 08 as well. This time, you'll be able to make the defender look silly as you deke around him with deft moves all controlled with the skill stick and the left button modifier. You can also tap the puck into space or through a defender's legs before scooting past (complete with some excellent player avoidance animations) before opening up for a shot on the net.
The new skating and skill stick moves seem have to been developed, at least partially, with NHL 08's online game in mind. As producers said, online play in NHL 07 had a tendency to be frustrating because the player could deke around the goalie using the skill stick, but it wasn't really possible to do the same thing against a regular defender on the ice; all the defender had to do was switch to the closet player and lay you out with a check. While you could only deke with the puck in one of three directions (left, right, or behind) in NHL 07, that number has expanded to 10 in NHL 08. With this wider variety of angles, improved deke moves, and those slick animations, you'll be able to unleash your inner Sidney Crosby with a flick of the analog stick.
Checking in NHL 08 will be more momentum-based than in previous versions of the NHL series. Collisions in NHL 07 were ported directly from the old-generation versions of the game, so that when a player was hit and went to his knees, he'd still more or less stay frozen at the point of contact. With the new collision system in NHL 08, the momentum of both players will factor in, so that a checked player might slide out of the play; thus, opening up a lane for the player dealing out the punishment.
The new skating engine will differentiate between carved and crossover turns.
Shooting has also gotten a facelift. This time around, the game will depend more on user skill than ever before. As with a golf shot in Tiger Woods PGA Tour, you'll be more accurate in NHL 08 if you make the analog stick shot straighter. If you move the stick at an angle, it will cause your accuracy to drop and the puck to go wide of its target.
Of course, these are just the first details to come for NHL 08. The production team behind the game is promising more information on the improvements to the artificial intelligence (though they did say both offensive and defensive AI have gotten a lot of attention this year), the new practice drill minigames that have been designed to help your individual or team-play skills on the ice, and improvements to the dynasty mode. The game's graphics are looking typically sharp, with lots of player-specific visual idiosyncrasies (Jaromir Jagr's "snazzy" tucked-in jersey look? Yep, it's in there) that should keep the diehard NHL set happy. If you couple that detail with a 60 frames per second frame rate, you've got another visually solid game on the way. We'll be bringing you more on NHL 08 in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Call of Juarez

We know about the genre known as the spaghetti western, but is there such a thing as a pierogi western? There is now, thanks to Polish developer Techland's Call of Juarez. An Old West-themed first-person shooter, Call of Juarez fits snugly into the solid little niche that games like Gun and Red Dead Revolver have already taken up residence in. The game is similarly hard-boiled and filled with gunslinging, horseback riding, train robbery, and all the other staples of the western genre that you might have already gotten your fill of. Still, for as few risks as Call of Juarez takes across the board, it's a well-made genre exercise that's more often entertaining than not.
Never has a game so realistically rendered a Sunday sermon as Call of Juarez does.
The game puts you into the boots of two distinct characters. Billy Candle is a half-white, half-Mexican drifter of sorts who had been on the hunt for the legendary Lost Gold of Juarez, a treasure trove of gold buried somewhere within the titular town. Unable to find it, Billy decides to come home to the town of Hope to visit his mother and stepfather--only to find them murdered upon his arrival. The other character is Reverend Ray, Billy's step-uncle and the town preacher. Ray's a reformed gunslinger now dedicated to spreading the Lord's word, but when he hears of the ruckus going on at his brother's farm and arrives to see a panicked Billy running away from the bloody corpses of his brother and sister-in-law, Ray vows vengeance, and begins tracking his step-nephew until he can satisfy it.
The dynamic of having two playable characters would be more interesting if there weren't such a distinct separation of quality between them. The more entertaining of the two, both in story and gameplay, is easily Ray. Voiced by an actor who seems to be equally channeling Sam Elliott and the creepy priest from Poltergeist II, Ray's sequences are filled with enough amazing, self-righteous bible quoting immediately followed by heavy amounts of murdering that you almost wish they'd gotten Samuel L. Jackson for this role. Heck, Ray's even got what we'll affectionately refer to as a "bible button." One of the weapons he can hold is a bible, and if you press the fire button while he's holding it, he'll start reading random passages to any nearby enemies, who will then stop for a second to listen, at which point you can shoot them in their stupid faces. That's either genius or awful--or possibly both.
Apart from using the gospel as a weapon, you spend most of your time as him running around, shooting various hombres, rustlers, outlaws, and other unsavory individuals. His primary weapon is a pair of six-shooters, which he can actually use to bust into a slow-motion "concentration mode" when he draws them from their holsters. Doing this gives you a pair of targeting reticles you can guide toward any nearby enemies and then unload upon them. Ray also gets to engage in some straight-up gun duels against other gunslinging baddies. These are essentially the bulk of the game's boss fights, though they're very quick. In these fights, a counter ticks down, and when you get to the end, you quickly pull back and then press forward on the right control stick to draw. Once you do, your reticle pops up and the scene goes into slow motion again, though the reticle is a little off-kilter, as you did draw rather quickly. It's up to you to aim and shoot before the other guy offs you. You can't call these sequences brilliant, or even especially original (Red Dead Revolver had some similar mechanics), but they're fun all the same.
Less fun and generally more irritating are Billy's sequences. Billy can fire the occasional pistol, and even exclusively use both a bow and arrow and a whip, but nearly all of the scenarios he finds himself in revolve more around bad first-person platforming and overlong stealth sequences than any form of real action. The stealth stuff isn't bad, exactly. Billy can find shadowy or otherwise dark areas to hide in, as well as use bushes and boxes to hide behind, and that all works pretty much as advertised. The issue is that all the stealth bits take way, way too long. Waiting for your enemies to slowly wander through their patrols so you can move from shrub to shrub is about as fun as it sounds. In a few cases you can run and gun it if you want, but you're rarely ever properly armed for these types of situations, and as you are without uncle Ray's concentration ability, Billy just isn't quite as useful for gunfights. So instead, you're stuck spending 15 minutes just trying to navigate one camp full of bandits.
Less tolerable are the bouts of climbing and swinging. First-person platforming has never been a good idea, yet for some reason developers keep trotting it out in these sorts of games. It doesn't work here, either. Billy can climb up short ledges, use his whip to grab onto branches and other elongated protrusions, and then swing from one ledge to the next. The main problem here is perspective--when you're jumping around in the first-person, it's sometimes difficult to gauge the distance of jumps, so you end up trial-and-erroring it until you get just the right amount of distance. The whip-swinging thing seems neat at first, but it can be tough to get the right amount of swing momentum to hit certain ledges. Again, it's a trial-and-error process to figure out how much you need to climb up the whip to get the proper angle. And like the stealth bits, these scenes are just overly protracted. There's one obnoxious fetch quest in the middle of the game where you have to climb up a giant mountain for nearly a half-hour (counting time needed to die and start over), just to grab an eagle feather for some cranky old Indian, only to have to spend another several minutes jumping your way down. Creating a degree of separation between the two playable characters wasn't a bad idea, but this was perhaps not the ideal way to go about it.
Gun duels are neat, though also very short and relatively easy in most cases.
Horseback riding pops up now and again for both characters, and it's an enjoyable distraction from the usual trudging around that you do. Controlling the horse is initially a bit of a pain, but once you get used to it, it's both a quick way to get places and a fun way to engage in combat. There are a couple of scenes where you'll find yourself blasting away at other bandits on horseback. Aiming while on a horse is tough, but that makes sense.
Once you've bested Call of Juarez's 8-to-10-hour campaign, there are some other options to mess with. There's a series of extra, non-story-related missions to take on, a bunch of gun duels to play around with, and multiplayer for both system link and Xbox Live. The multiplayer is pretty typical class-based FPS style action. You can play as either a rifleman, a gunslinger, a sniper, or a miner, and there is a variety of modes like deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, VIP, and so on. There's also a mode that lists off several "historical events," such as the shootout at the O.K. Corral, but these are basically just fancy names for something like a team deathmatch mode in a vaguely O.K. Corral-themed map.
The multiplayer isn't remarkable, but it can be fun. The four classes are reasonably well balanced, and there are enough different modes to keep the action interesting for a while. It helps that the game isn't kneecapped by bad weapons, as some historical FPSs tend to be in the multiplayer arena. All the weapons pack a nice punch, though each class is only assigned a pair of specific weapons, a primary and a secondary. There are no weapon pickups on the various maps. Though our time with the multiplayer was solid, we did run into some occasional connection issues, including a couple of crashes that forced us to reboot the game.
In terms of presentation, Call of Juarez is all over the map, especially as far as graphics go. Environments are definitely the high point. As you wander around the game, you'll see tons of attractive Old West scenery, from mountain vistas to desert plains. It's great-looking stuff that's made better by some nice lighting effects and solid texture work (save for a few occasional ugly spots). On the other side of the coin are the character models. The people you encounter all have that sort of Doom 3 overly shiny thing going on, and they even look a bit mutated to boot. Animations tend to be stiff, clipping issues pop up quite often, and any time you catch a glimpse of what your own character model is doing, either in a reflection or a shadow, or just by looking down, you'd think you were controlling an animatronic robot from some ghost town tourist trap. Still, the problems are mostly outweighed by the positives, and the game as a whole looks good.
Be prepared to stare at a lot of shrubbery while playing as Billy.
Audio is less scattershot. Apart from some great sound effects and a soundtrack that nicely captures the atmosphere of the era, the game has mostly solid, if slightly hammy voice acting for nearly all the characters. Billy is the only one who didn't fare very well, as the actor who plays him sound like he's in as big a rush as possible to get out of the recording booth, but pretty much everyone else is on their game and delivers an entertaining performance.
As ham-fisted and generic as Call of Juarez can be at times, it does enough right to transcend its various issues and turn in a pleasing shooter. It does the Old West motif well, the gunslinging (and bible slinging) are a lot of fun, and the capable multiplayer modes have enough going for them to give the game a bit of staying power. It doesn't quite rise past the ceiling established by other recent western shooters, but it's good, solid fun all around.