Killzone 2 Reviewed

by Brendan Rose

Now, I know that a lot of people like Killzone 2, but a lot of people like crack, as well. Killzone 2 proudly sports many features which have become standard in the current generation. Like the iron sights, two weapon limit, and automatic regeneration. Iron sights just makes your normal aim pathetic, I prefer the dot in the center of the screen that actually hits the target. I don't really like any of these, but I may as well be complaining about cell phones.

I suppose there's nothing really WRONG with it. The graphics are fine the music is fine it's all fine...but it sucks... It's just androgynous fighting with no real satisfaction in killing anything. You go from fight, to fight, to fight, to fight, slowly advancing, solving whatever goal of the minute is bothering your comrades, and it's just boring. I don't see the appeal. There is very little blood, and there's nothing really tactical about it. It's terrible.

Some people might point out that the multiplayer is better, which I might believe, but will let sit for now. I don't want to play it. Now, everything I said there was actually about Call of Duty 5. The difference is, Killzone 2 is good, and Call of Duty 5 is tripe. What Call of Duty does wrong, Killzone 2 makes work anyway. It's very generic, and at the same time better than anything it seems to imitate.

There are two deaths in Call of Duty 5. You die normally, and you also die when you shoot your own people. It will say "Friendly Fire will not be tolerated" and then starts it again. I hate that, not only do I want to kill these people, half the time in the middle of a firefight they look the same. There is also the little death every time you have to play it. Thankfully, Killzone 2 doesn't have this problem.

Upon completion of Call of Duty 5, you are rewarded with an endless, ultimately unwinnable zombie shooter set inside of a house that just makes you wish you were playing Left 4 Dead. I'd rather eat broken glass than play Call of Duty 5 again. I'd rather pluck off my fingernails one by one than play Call of Duty 5 for one more minute. I'd rather live in a pile of dog doo. That dog's feces would be like manna from heaven pouring over me rather than playing that festering stinking pile. I'd rather eat raw mold. I don't want to play it. Call of Duty 5 is not even worthy of piracy. HELL is having to play Call of Duty World at War over and over for the rest of eternity.

The first thing I noticed about Killzone 2 is how much livelier and cooler the enemy are. The good guys are instantly repulsive. I think I will enjoy playing as the Helghast in multiplayer. Damn right, get the f*@% off my homeworld!

Okay so the story is that your high school football team, is fighting a space Adolph Hitler. You are invading his home world. No matter how many times you try you cannot kill your teammates, so eventually you start killing space Nazis with glowing red eyes instead that populate most of the game.

Killzone 2's graphics are really great, probably the best I've seen on consoles so far. The AI is smart and the Framerate is good. It's fun, and YES, we have physics. To me physics are as beautiful and important as the graphics themselves, which is why I crave fire and destructible buildings. The audio is excellent, including enemies chattering to each other. The gameplay is strong, cogent, and satisfying. It's really excellent, almost triumphant, and I haven't even gotten to the multiplayer portion.

I can't believe my name is Sev. They swear a lot. You move slowly, but there's a sprint. The weapons are kind of modern, assault rifles mostly, and there are also flame throwers and electricity weapons and RPG’s and shotguns. You can only carry one pistol and one main weapon. The pistol is functional.

What's cool about the multiplayer is how it changes objectives in the middle of a match, going from CTF missions to Assassination to Control points to Team Death-match to Search & Destroy, over and over. It's arguably the best multiplayer game on PS3 so far. The multiplayer graphics are spectacular, there's character progression as you play through the game, and it's just a lot of fun. It's great. There's up to 32 player multiplayer and you can have the extra space taken up by bots or play skirmish missions on your own. The red eyed Nazis are just great, real dark and fascist looking, very fun. The ISA are also good, and their chatter is less intrusive. No complaints on the multiplayer, except that a Nazi gives these weird propaganda speeches when you lose as the Helghast.

Overall though Killzone 2 is a really excellent multiplayer game. It was extremely rewarding to earn my first promotion, the "killing specialist" and "good conduct" ribbons. The first promotion is Corporal which allows you to create a squad. Sergeant lets you create a clan, eventually unlocking new weapons and classes. The multiplayer maps are great, and the overall level design is really good. There are eight online maps and lots of trophies to unlock. The boss characters are pretty cool.

So, how do I sum up Killzone 2? I suppose that I could weakly complain about the story, but that would be verging on pointless. This game is better than the sex act. It rocks. It's first-rate - too polished to bitch about the slightest missteps. Soon the gathering darkness will sweep over us and hover for many months, but this title, right now, just makes me glad I have a Playstation 3.

Presentation (10)

Graphics (10)

Sound (9)

Gameplay (10x2)

Lasting appeal (9)

Overall: 9.6

Valkyria Chronicles

By Brendan Rose

Remember SEGA? Back in the nineties the Sega master system was still a serious competitor to the Super Nintendo. They made Sonic, and they were cool, but by the time the Dreamcast was released they were already financial toast, and now they make games for other systems, games like Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3.

Valkyria Chronicles is a bit reminiscent of games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea, except with no grid, bigger levels, and an emphasis on guns and tanks with elements of a third person shooter thrown in for good measure. It starts with an overview map in the Player Phase where you have a limited amount of CP to select units to move. You can select the same unit more than once per turn, but they're able to move less each time. The movement phase is a bit like a third person shooter. You run around until the movement bar is finished, and you can attack once per turn. Enemies automatically attack as you appear within range. When you are out of CP, or finished the round, you end the phase. Then the Enemy Phase starts, they move their units and attack, your characters fire at targets within range, and then the process repeats until somebody wins.

The goals are stuff like:

"Victory"
The enemy base camp is captured.

"Failure"
Welkin dies

Valkyria Chronicles is one of those games that tries to make you gay. For instance clearly the enemy is your heterosexuality, and Welkin is their own salivating sense of arousal. The cell shading however makes up for this with lots of lively pastel colors.

The game is awesome; it's actually one of the best games I've played this year. It's very tactical and you have to work strategically as a team to win. One of the important factors is hiding behind cover, you take a lot less damage from behind cover, and in turn sandbags and cover can be destroyed by tanks and explosives. You're also able to issue orders (like attack boost). You can fight skirmish battles to gain experience and you level up by class. So if you spend all your experience to bring up Shock Troopers to level 6, all your Shock Troopers will level up. There are also Scouts, Lancers, Engineers and Snipers.

The “plot” is simple. The Empire was at war with a united group of democratic states, and the minor state of Galia had remained neutral in the conflict, but was later invaded by the Empire. You take control of a local militia, and kill an endless slew of nameless, faceless soldiers. Your militia soldiers all look different and have their own personalities. They have individual if somewhat repetitive animations, voices, special abilities and afflictions, and if they die in combat and don't get to a medic, that's it. There are about 50 of them to choose from.

Welkin meets Alicia when he is drawing fish by a stream. Alicia points a gun at his back and tries to arrest him, and eventually they join together to fight the Empire. The story is good, and there's a lot of it, but it is a little bit happy flying pigs and kitty butterflies. Every time it loads there's a picture of two pretty flowers. Still, that is tempered by some rather good action, and the graphics are great. The plot is told by selecting frames on the pages of a book, and is partly in fmv and partly in animated frames. It gets a little tired playing the same skirmish missions over and over for experience, but it is a rich and rewarding game, and a lot of fun. There are at least 20 hours of gameplay, and 9 skirmish missions to unlock. If you try Valkyria Chronicles out you'll find one of the better RPG’s on PlayStation 3, and nobody wants to see SEGA begging for change at the side of the street in ten years. So, if you need a good game, try Valkyria Chronicles.

Halo Revisited

by Tiberius Jonez

In November of 2001, Microsoft released the original Xbox, and the game touted as the console's "killer app" at launch was Halo. Halo was a trend-setting game in many respects, such as the auto-recharging shield, which has been adopted by virtually every major shooter since, in the form of auto-regenerating health systems like those used in Gears of War and Call of Duty. It was also the first major game to limit you to carrying two weapons at a time. Another first was the Warthog, Master Chief's favorite armored 4X4. Halo was the first game I can remember to present driving in a shooter in an accesible, fun and satisfying way.

At the time of its release, the Xbox was far superior, technically, to the Playstation 2, and Halo showed us exactly what the new-kid-on-the-block console could do; and the results were stunning; no game had ever looked this good. The first time you emerged from the drop ship and stepped into Halo's ring world is a moment permanently etched in the minds of many gamers. The Xbox was the first console to include a hard-drive, and as such, programmers were able to stream information from the hard-drive, lightening a considerable load for the processor and RAM. The ability to stream from the hard-drive allowed Halo to become the first single-player game to offer an entire game world free of loading screens, so there was nothing to pull you out of the experience; an absolute technical marvel at the time.

While Halo was a trend-setter, it was also just plain fun. It was the first console game to spawn a serious LAN party following; something previously reserved for blockbuster PC titles. In fact, before Xbox Live was even born, loyal players had already figured out a way to play Halo online using their PC's and "tunnel" software. I admit, I used the Xbox Tunnel software to play Halo online with my brother. Even though it was a less than smooth online experience, when it worked it was great fun, and it gave us a taste of things to come.

Sure, it took PC veterans a while to adjust to using a controller in a shooter...but Halo proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that a console shooter with a gamepad control scheme could work, and work well. Seven years later, I now prefer an Xbox 360 controller over a mouse and keyboard anyday.

I recently installed Halo on my PC to see what I thought of the game today, and somewhat to my surprise - it holds up amazingly well, even by today's graphical standards. The animations are excellent, the textures, while not high-res by today's standards, are bright and crisp, and the environmental effects like flying dirt, smoke and muzzle flashes still look very nice.

What made Halo the complete package was its story. Bungie crafted a legitimate sci-fi masterpiece that told an imaginative and well-written story using strong dialogue and the occasional plot twist. It didn't hurt that the game's voice-acting was universally strong...for once voice acting didn't make you cringe - quite the opposite - even today, Halo's voice work sucks you in and keeps you there for the duration.

Some may say the end portion of the game is cheap by virtue of the fact that you essentially play the game's levels in reverse. But in reality, it sticks with the story - you have to go in deep to complete your objective, and you have to get your ass back out of there in one piece to escape.

Another area in which Halo excelled was enemy A.I.. Few games today can match the cunning and unpredictablilty of Master Chief's many foes.

Aside from the weak story, many Xbox fans consider Halo 2 to be the better game, but not me. Sure, Halo 2 had it all over the original in terms of online play, with its fantastic matchmaking and bazillion game types. But the original Halo set the stage for that game and Halo 3 as well as virtually every other online shooter released since on any platform, both in terms of gameplay and presentation.

More than seven years after its original release, I enjoyed Halo as much today as I did then, and in some ways I enjoyed it more now, mainly due to the new respect and admiration gained with the perspective of time. If you've been living under a rock since November, 2001 and have somehow never played Halo, please, do yourself a favor and play it now. I guarantee you will have some fun, whether you play it on the Xbox, Xbox 360 or the PC.

Left 4 Dead at a glance

by Brendan Rose

The surprise hit of 2008, and an instant classic for me, was definitely Left 4 Dead by Valve software, makers of the archaic masterpiece Half Life. Half Life spawned games like Team Fortress 2, Counterstrike, Half Life 2 and eventually the evil and draconian Steam, which often refuses to let you play a game even though you’ve already paid for it.

Left 4 Dead is a Co-Op zombie shooter modeled on a movie theme. The zombies are kind of like those from 28 Days Later, really wild and crazy running at you slavering and screaming for blood, trying to rip your throat out when they notice you, and just standing around staring off into space when they don't.

L4D features 5 boss zombies. The Boomer, a bloated fat zombie barfs or explodes, sending a hoard of lesser zombies to kill you. The Smoker, like the licker from Resident Evil, constricts you with its tongue and drags you away to eat or strangle. The Hunter moves quickly and dives at you to tear you to shreds with his hands. The Witch cries until she's startled and then rips you apart. The Tank slaughters everyone half the time; you really need to stick with your team or you'll find yourself swarmed, restrained, and dead pretty quickly.

All the monsters and most items are placed randomly by the AI director, ensuring that every outing through the four chapters of screaming infected, each containing five levels, always feels fresh and new.

The game also features a versus mode where two teams face off as either the Zombies or the Survivors.

There is no way to express the joy of ditching your three stupid friends as they die in a hoard of zombies, overcome by their own dumbness, while you escape unscathed. Left 4 Dead features crisp live voice chat (or garbled gibberish on 360), swarms of enemies, and is really one of the most fun games of the year. I bought it twice, so I can easily recommend that you buy it once.

Far Cry 2 at a glance

By Brendan Rose

I wasn't particularly excited about Far Cry 2. It was released along side a slew of other more interesting titles and it was one of the last that I picked up. I played through the start, wasn't really impressed, got frustrated hunting diamonds, and gave up. That was it for a while. But after sitting down with it, sometime around the point I'd just wiped out an enemy unit and blew up a fuel tank which set fire to the grass that spread all through the area as I drove away, I realized, I love this game.

The graphics are rich and colorful; the African landscape looks great, ranging from dry plains to lush green jungles. It's a very pretty game. Not as pretty as Crysis, and I was disappointed that destructible buildings didn't make it over for instance, but at least it doesn't abuse and debase your computer like Crysis does.

Sure the story is crap, and it's just repetitive shooting and driving from place to place, but it's fun. The action is solid and the graphics are pure and beautiful. It’s one of the nicest looking games I've played, and it looks even better on the PC. The fire physics are the best I've seen in a game so far. It's also just plain cool to see your character pull a bullet out of his leg with a knife. It's a well rounded, polished, balanced and fun action shooter. The landscape is detailed and full of color and life, and it's funny to run over a gazelle.

Far Cry 2 is said to be a sequel in name only. It carries over none of the story or mutant powers of the first game. You are dropped into an unnamed African nation in the middle of a civil war and your mission is to track down and kill the arms dealer supplying both sides. The plan goes sideways as you're overcome with malaria and you have to start doing missions for either side for diamonds to buy weapons, and help the underground for malaria pills.

The AI is passable but nothing to scream about and there is the issue that you will be fighting the exact same enemies, time after time for the rest of the game. Most of the variation centers around your choice of weapons, and there's plenty. the game also includes a map editor.

There's not much depth to be found in Far Cry 2, but what it does, it does well. If you like first person shooters, it's worth a look.

Watch the video below for a taste of Far Cry 2's eye candy.

Fallout 3 - Game of the Year

by Brendan Rose

Fallout 3 is the next in line of the classic series of games from the nineties that allowed you to wander a post apocalyptic wasteland and lose much of your soul in the process, pillaging and tormenting survivors. With it's over the top violence, prostitution, drugs, pimping your wife for money, and killing little kids that throw stones, the game quickly gained cult status among fans. They were warped and deformed by the game forever, and hid in damp caves until the release of Fallout 3. Many of them were frightened and hateful towards the new game, but most have now come to accept it.

After the developer tanked, the licence was picked up by Bethesda, makers of the classic Morrowind, and the tripe Oblivion. Oblivion was a terrible game, but it's barebones engine provided the perfect framework for the new Fallout.

A lot of people thought it was just Oblivion with guns, which was true, but far more importantly, it was Oblivion with decapitation and dismemberment, and they fixed the damn level scaling, and the guards don't attack you everywhere for crimes in one city.

But that is just nerd history. The game starts you out being yanked out of your mothers vagina and told to decide the sex of your character. Your father (Liam Neeson) then has you sent off and you begin a series of milestones in your characters development in the underground vault where you decide your stats and skills which have an important impact on your character. You can also choose your appearance.

The game tries hard to give you the option of pursuing whatever interests you and still being able to get by. If you want to play it like a shooter, you can put your points into perception and weapons. If you want to use stealth, or melee, or focus on speech, the game will accommodate you.

As you level up you are able to receive perks depending on your stats and level that bulk up and customize your character in often unique ways. You can kill most of the people in the vault eventually, not all though. You can kill almost anyone in the game actually, which is nice. One of the first choices you're presented with is whether you want to destroy a town (Megaton) or save it. Your choices have some effect on the story and the ending is dynamic based on a few variables.

It's a very polished, fun game, with lots of depth. The wasteland goes on for miles and it's rich and full with beautiful graphics and plenty of detail, and it's just nice to be able to wipe out a town.

There's also a lot of depth to most of the characters, with a nice variety of dialogue choices, which makes it a lot more fun to blast their head off. The game uses a system called VATS to freeze time and line up attacks against different body parts and then watch all the violence in flashy slow motion. It's a nice throw back to the original isometric game. Strangely, watching limbs and heads go flying off, does not get old over time. The only problem is the regular FPS style fighting feels a bit clunky, you really need to use VATS.

Also available for the PC version is the GECK, which with a simple PHD in Quantum Physics, you can design and build your own levels, and the rest of us can try vainly to place one NPC that immediately runs away from where we placed it.

You can follow the main quest or just explore the wasteland, doing side quests, of which there is an abundance. There are also other characters you can recruit depending on your alignment.

There's a nice variety of enemies to suit different points in your development, ranging from Raiders to Supermutants to The Enclave, and plenty of random monsters like the Deathclaws. It's a nice nod to the spirit of the original games, and the next logical step for the series. The ending, however, is terrible...just terrible.

The main story lasts about 20 hours, and if you like exploring weird vaults and caves full of monsters, there's a lot more beyond that to be experienced.

It's my favorite game for 2008 and definitely worth a try.


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Far Cry 2 - Make your old PC feel cutting edge

Posted by Tiberius Jonez

I think we'd all agree that good gameplay is what ultimately counts in making any great videogame, but there is no doubt that great graphics make any gaming experience that much more immersive. Unfortunately, modern games with directx 10 capabilities and all the bells and whistles are often unplayable for the average PC owner.

With Far Cry 2, the brainwizards at Ubisoft have somehow managed to make one of the most stunning graphics engines without requiring a $3,000 uber-rig to run the game.

The Far Cry 2 video below (recorded from my PC using FRAPS) features the game's opening sequence so you can see just how pretty this game is, even without maxing out every graphics option. While my PC is capable of running Far Cry 2 with maxed out settings, this video demonstrates that even if you don't have the latest tech in your PC, you can still enjoy beautiful graphics.

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Far Cry 2's manual recommends 2GB of ram to run the game with full settings, and as you can see, it runs well. My PC has 2 Gb of OCZ Platinum Rev 2 Ram (800mhz). The game's graphics settings are set to "very high" with 4x antialiasing, "ultra real" trees and lighting.

I am thoroughly impressed with this engine. It runs smoothly while making your eyes burn with glorious graphics splendor. The only downside is, if you weren't a graphics whore before playing this game, you will be after. You've been warned.

Enjoy the video.

Blogging with video - the basics

Posted by Tiberius Jonez

As an avid gamer and gaming journalist, I’ve always appreciated blogs that include original video with their stories. Unfortunately, until recently, the prospect of including videos here at GameJonez Blog just seemed like more effort than it was worth.

From capturing video, to editing it and compressing it to an acceptable size for blogging (100MB or less) while still retaining a high enough level of quality to make it worth viewing online, the prospect of learning the process was daunting to say the least.

As usual, we fear that which we don’t understand. After several hours of googling, downloading and trial and error, I can safely say I now have at least a functioning understanding of how to make this video blogging thing a reality.

The Gears of War video below was created using the steps outlined in this short article.



If you want to learn how to do this yourself, read on.

There are some basic steps to keep in mind when it comes to capturing, manipulating and uploading videos to the internet. First, you need a utility for capturing the video. For the purposes of this article, I am talking only about capturing PC video, not video from gaming consoles. By far, the best utility I found, and the highest rated around the net is FRAPS. You can buy the full version of FRAPS for $37, which is a steal when you see how powerful and easy it is to use. A trial version is also available and will work for this purpose.

Once installed, simply start FRAPS and then start whatever program you want to capture video from – a game, a browser, whatever. Basically whatever your video card is outputting at the time, FRAPS will capture it and save it. Simply hit the F9 key to begin capturing, and press it again to stop. FRAPS can also take and save screenshots in your preferred format by hitting the F10 key. Besides capturing video and screenshots, FRAPS has many functions as a benchmarking utility as well. For more info on FRAPS’ benchmarking capabilities, visit the FRAPS website.

Once you’ve captured some avi video with FRAPS, you will see the next problem to overcome – that video you captured is HUGE!!! The video below (which is under 5 minutes long) originally weighed in at over 2.5 GIGS! Most blogs and other sites like YouTube will limit you to uploading videos of 100MB or less.

Not to worry, our friends over at Adobe have the perfect solution – Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0. You can download the 30 day free trial for short term use, but if you have any interest in video editing from your camcorder or other source, you really can’t go wrong with Adobe Premiere Elements.

Now, Premiere Elements isn’t quite as simple as FRAPS, but it’s far from rocket science. For now, let’s keep it simple. All you’re going to do in Elements is open your saved avi file, edit it if you like, and then export it.

When you choose to export, you will be prompted to select your preferred codec. I recommend Windows Media Player simply because almost everyone has it and, more importantly, it does an excellent job of compressing video while maintaining a high level of visual quality. Once you’ve selected a codec, you can set several other parameters like aspect ration, etc. Otherwise, you can just click OK and go with the defaults.

The cool thing here is any changes you make to the export settings can be saved as an export template, so you can use these same settings for future projects.

After the video finishes saving, open it up and prepare to be amazed. Our video which was once 2.5GB’s is now only 17.5MB’s (your numbers will vary based on the settings you chose). That’s an astounding level of compression. Of course, the higher quality video settings you select during the export process, the larger your final file will be. You may be surprised just how high a quality of video you can achieve while staying under 100MB’s.

Voila! That’s pretty much it. Your video is done. All you need to do now is upload it to Blogger or YouTube and that’s as easy as following their simple instructions. With Blogger, it’s as simple as adding a photo to a story.

So, let your inner video producer out and start posting your videos for the world to see today!

Gears of War 2: Flashback Map Pack

Posted by Tiberius Jonez

Tomorrow, one of the biggest titles of the year ships with a sizable bonus regardless of which version you pick up. In addition to the ten multiplayer maps included with Gears of War 2, Epic Games has added a download code within each new copy of the game to download five additional maps taken from the original Gears of War. The Flashback Map Pack not only adds a dose of nostalgia to the Gears of War 2 multiplayer experience but it freshens the "old" maps with new designs for each.

Some of the changes you can expect include the waters of Canals now being frozen, Gridlock's been overtaken by lush vegetation, Tyro Station seems to have had an upgrade in tech, Mansion appears more abandoned than ever and Subway has dried up and now rains pieces of ash from the ongoing war.

Check out the video to see the changes for yourself.

Mounting losses force EA to layoff 600 employees

Submitted by Tiberius Jonez

It seems noone is immune to the ill-effects of this Bush economy, and that includes industry giant Electronic Arts. The uber publisher announced its second quarter fiscal results and the news is not good. Coming off a first quarter loss of $95 million, EA announced a loss of $310 million for the period ending September 30. The loss comes despite the retail successes of Madden NFL 09 (4.5 million units sold), Spore (2 million units sold) and Warhammer Online (1.2 million units sold).

Due to the mounting losses, EA announced plans to eliminate roughly 600 employees, representing 6% of the company's total work force. While EA expects to make up some of the losses with upcoming holiday sales, we doubt that makes those 600 feel any better.