Kane & Lynch: Dead Men

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men Unlockables

Achievements

Complete each achievement to get the allotted gamerscore.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Bulletproof (10)	Avoid using adrenaline on a level.
Behemoth (10)	Stop the roaring beast.
Sweet Revenge (5)	Get personal revenge in Fragile Alliance.
Some (5)	Escape with $50,000 from a Fragile Alliance heist.
Family Member (5)	Complete a Fragile Alliance session.
True Elite (0)	Play as Kane in Fragile Alliance.
Celebrity (0)	Play as Lynch in Fragile Alliance.
By the Grace of… (10)	Lynch puts them out of their misery.
Crime Buster (10)	Kill 10 traitors in Fragile Alliance.
Fragile Alliance (10)	Complete the first level in co-op.
Headmaster (10)	47 headshots.
Hindsight (10)	Get that bird out of the sky.
Return to Sender (10)	Throw back enemy grenades.
A Lot (15)	Escape with $1,500,000 from a Fragile Alliance heist.
Mercenary (15)	Complete one session in each Fragile Alliance scenario.
Rush Hour (15)	Escape in all rounds of a Fragile Alliance session.
Boomstick (20)	Shotgun messiah.
Bullseye (20)	Lynch reacts fast at the Exchange.
Damned if you do (20)	Let them burn.
Frag Out (20)	5 with one fragmentation grenade.
Have Gun, Will Travel Part I (20)	Travel into the Rising Sun.
Veteran (35)	Complete 200 Fragile Alliance sessions.
End of the Road (50)	Complete the game in co-op.
Iron Flower (50)	Complete the game on hard.
Most Wanted (50)	Escape with $150,000,000 from Fragile Alliance heists.
Mr. Play-It-Straight (50)	Win 50 rounds of Fragile Alliance as a merc.
Have Gun, Will Travel Part II (20)	Counter-revolution.
Have Gun, Will Travel Part III (20)	The Beginning of the End.
Impact (20)	Escape from death row.
Pushblade Symphony (20)	Points for getting up close and personal.
Revenge Part I (20)	Silencing the silent one.
Revenge Part II & III (20)	Who’s the old timer now?
Revenge Part IV (20)	Shouldn’t have gotten personal.
Sun Tzu (20)	Let your crew do the dirty work.
Teflon (20)	Avoid damage on a level.
50 to Won (25)	Win 50 rounds of Fragile Alliance.
Cash Addict (25)	Help to get all the money out in a Fragile Alliance round.
Double Trouble (25)	Kill 2 traitors in a Fragile Alliance round.
Perfect Split (25)	All players split the money equally from a Fragile Alliance heist.
Berserkopath (30)	Make the most of Lynch’s condition.
Crowd Control (30)	Surgical precision in the nightclub.
Damned if you don’t (30)	No rest for the wicked.
Never Give Up (30)	Get 3 personal revenge kills in a Fragile Alliance session.
No Going Back Now (30)	Go to the point of no return in co-op.
Revenge Part V (30)	Glad it got personal.
The Cleaner (30)	Get 30 personal revenge kills in Fragile Alliance.
Mr. Popularity (35)	Kill 100 traitors in Fragile Alliance.

Playable Characters in Fragile Alliance

Certain characters are unlocked at certain rank levels for play in Fragile Alliance.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Kane – Playable in Fragile Alliance	Achieve Rank 35
Lynch – Playable in Fragile Alliance	Achieve Rank 30

My Reveiw:

The Good

• Interesting multiplayer mode  
• You’ll see a variety of different scenery as you play.

The Bad

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• Artificial Intelligence is quite lacking  
• Weapons don’t feel right  
• Characters and storyline do everything in their power to drive you away from the game  
• No online co-op mode.

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Game Details  |  About Our Rating System

Io Interactive is best known for its stealth-focused Hitman series, but there’s nothing quiet and sneaky about its latest release, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. This time around, the developer put together a crime-themed shooter that starts out with a couple of simple, heist-like objectives and then rapidly spins out of control until, without much warning, you’re gunning down soldiers in the middle of a foreign revolution. While the journey sounds interesting at first, and has a few bright points, it’s weighed down by bad storytelling, a real lack of character development, and a host of gameplay-related issues. The end result is a game that squanders much of its potential and just doesn’t come together as well as it probably should have.

Kane and Lynch don’t get along–not in an especially interesting way either.

The story mode opens with you in the role of Kane, a death row inmate on his way to his execution, apparently convicted of being a very savage criminal as part of a notorious gang called The7. You’re on your last ride with a quirky guy named Lynch who tells you to cover your head. After an explosion, you’re both busted out and on the run. That might sound great, but it’s a fate worse than death. The surviving members of The7 have busted you out to force you to recover something they think you stole from them. They consider you a traitor and will kill Kane’s family if he doesn’t comply. Lynch is sent along for the ride to watch over Kane and report in if anything weird happens. Circumstances change over time and the back half plays out like a revenge tale, but it’s a revenge tale where you don’t actually care if anyone actually gets their revenge. Every single person you play as or encounter is despicable and wholly abrasive; thus, it’ll probably be tough for you to find anyone to latch onto and care about, even if you typically go for this sort of crime drama on TV or in movies. You can play through this story alone or with a friend in co-op mode, though this mode is only available locally and takes place on a vertically split screen that makes it difficult to follow the action, even on a widescreen TV.

The core gameplay in Kane & Lynch is your standard third-person shooter with cover elements and a light dusting of squad tactics. You can fire from the hip, but it’s somewhat more accurate to fire while aiming. Unfortunately, even when you’re aiming, hitting your targets is more difficult than it should be because your automatic fire has a wide spread on it. Kane is supposedly a badass arch-criminal; he should be able to hit his targets with short, controlled bursts. You’re able to get behind cover and either blindfire or pop out for aimed shots, but there’s no easy way to stick to walls. You don’t press a button or anything; instead you sort of get up against a wall and turn sideways. Then after jiggling the controls back and forth a bit, you’ll eventually snap into place to get behind cover. It’s such a pain that you’ll rarely want to use it, and it seems like you’re always snapping into cover behind something at the most inopportune times, making the game quite frustrating. There’s no health meter, but if you go down, you don’t die immediately either. You can be revived by one of your teammates with an adrenaline shot. If you get that shot too frequently, you’ll overdose and die. If your teammates don’t reach you in time, you’ll die too. Also, if one of the guys on your crew gets dropped, you have to make sure he gets revived. If he dies, the game ends. Between your poor accuracy, the enemy’s sharp accuracy, and the boneheaded AI from your squadmates, this all adds up to you keeping your squad on a very short leash.

When you’ve got a team with you, you can order team members around individually or order the team all at once by telling it to regroup to your location, move to a specific spot, or attack specific targets. Telling team members to move to locations is the most effective move because you can keep them close and revive them when they get shot down. Sending them after targets results in your squad running around aimlessly and trying to get too close to targets. That leads to them getting dropped in the line of fire, where you probably won’t be able to rescue them. So whether you’re doing the shooting yourself or hanging back and letting your men do the dirty work, the game is a real disappointment, especially when you consider how well this same sort of stuff worked in the developer’s previous squad-based game, Freedom Fighters.

There’s only one multiplayer mode in Kane & Lynch, and it’s a great idea. Unfortunately, the idea doesn’t translate into a great or long-lasting experience. It’s called Fragile Alliance and puts up to eight players in one team of criminals. Then, it sets the team off to steal money, cocaine, and jewels from various locations seen in the single-player game. So you might start out in front of a bank, run in, collect a bunch of cash, and then escape from in a van out back. The catch is the way the money is split up among teammates. If you all work together, the money is split evenly. But at any point, a player can go rogue and gun down one of his teammates. This brands you a traitor; thus, any money you collect and escape with is yours to keep. Of course, this also means that other players who are still part of the team will try to waste you before you escape with their hard-stolen loot. So every round is a tentative affair where you always expect the worst–you’re just never sure when someone’s going to finally turn on you. When you die, whether it’s from the AI that opposes you or another player, you respawn on the other side of the heist. Now you need to stop the heist by eliminating the other players and you earn money by collecting it before the criminals collect.

It’s a bummer that the multiplayer is mucked up by a few different things. First, you’re still playing Kane & Lynch, so all of the inaccurate firing issues and poor cover tactics from the single-player still apply. But another problem is that you can see the names of the other players over their heads from a distance and through walls, even if they’re on the other side. While you can run while crouched to make your name disappear, it’s pretty weak that you can see the names of the police team members as they head your way. There’s no element of surprise. Also, there are only a handful of different scenarios for this, and they play out the same way every single time. The security guards are always in the same positions in the bank and the cops are always waiting for you right outside, so it gets old fast.

While it might seem like a basic heist game, Kane & Lynch does a good job of moving the action around, and you’ll see a variety of different environments and situations, ranging from banks, to prison breaks, to full-scale conflicts in the middle of illicit poppy fields. It also has some good-looking player models, with Kane and Lynch both looking appropriate as over-the-hill criminals. And even though their faces don’t animate much in-game, they still look good. Most of the animation isn’t so hot, though, and you’ll see a few ugly textures here and there too. Some of it looks a bit unfinished, like the way you see guys go through the motion of hitting you with an adrenaline shot, but their hands are actually empty.

The multiplayer mode is a really cool idea that leaves you wondering who’s going to turn traitor on you, but it isn’t strong enough to make you forget the game’s other problems.

The soundtrack is probably the best part of the whole game, delivering some tense music when the game calls for it. There’s a lot of voice acting in the game. The voices are appropriate for the characters, but the dialogue is hokey and filled with gratuitous cursing. The good ol’ F word is certainly appropriate, given the nature of what these guys are doing, but when it’s every third word out of every character’s mouth, it comes across as a crutch that drags down the rest of the game a bit. Lynch frequently responds to your squad-orders by just shouting “F*** you!” Things like that just make the game feel purposely abrasive, and not in a “gritty” or “cool” sort of way.

The game is available on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as of this writing, and the differences between the two versions are minimal. Both games have occasional frame rate issues and the control issues with finding cover and hitting targets are noticeable in both. The only real difference is that the PlayStation 3 version doesn’t seem to have voice chat support. The multiplayer mode only really clicks when you can talk things out with other players and try to convince them that you’re not going to turn traitor–only to turn traitor on them and then laugh about it. Without that, the whole experience feels a little dry. The Xbox 360 version also has the standard set of 1,000 achievement points, a few of which reward you for specific moments in co-op, like having the player controlling Lynch put a few cops out of their misery, rather than leaving them to writhe on the ground.

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is a premise with promise, and if you’ve been waiting patiently for a game to really dive into the whole “crew-based heist tale” concept, you might be able to look past some of the story flaws. But when you consider the nearly ridiculous number of extremely high-quality shooters available recently, there’s not much room for something like Kane & Lynch, even taking into account the somewhat unique nature of its story. That said, the multiplayer is a smart idea that’s worth seeing, even if playing it makes you wish that it was used in another, better game.

Origanal Post By:Gamespot.com

Mass Effect

Mass Effect Unlockables

Unlockables

Complete the game on Normal to unlock the secrets

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Hardcore Mode	Complete the game once
Increased Level Cap (51 – 60)	Complete the game once
New Game +	Start a New Game, then select to use existing Career. You’ll be playing with your older character (with all items and skills intact)
Insane Difficulty	Beat the game on the Hardcore difficulty without changing the difficulty

Achievements

Complete each of the following achievements below to get the allotted gamerscore.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Medal of Honor (100)	Complete 1 Mass Effect Playthrough on any setting.
Medal of Heroism (25)	Complete Feros.
Distinguished Service Medal (25)	Complete Eden Prime.
Council Legion of Merit (25)	Complete Virmire.
Honorarium of Corporate Service (25)	Complete Noveria.
Long Service Medal (25)	Complete 2 Mass Effect Playthroughs on any setting.
Distinguished Combat Medal (25)	Complete 1 Mass Effect playthrough on the Hardcore difficulty setting.
Medal of Valor (50)	Complete 1 Mass Effect playthrough on the Insanity difficulty setting.
Pistol Expert (10)	Register 150 Pistol Kills.
Shotgun Expert (15)	Register 150 Shotgun Kills.
Assault Rifle Expert (15)	Register 150 Assault Rifle Kills.
Sniper Expert (15)	Register 150 Sniper Rifle Kills.
Lift Mastery (15)	Use biotic Lift 75 times.
Throw Mastery (15)	Use biotic Throw 75 times.
Warp Mastery (15)	Use biotic Warp 75 times.
Singularity Mastery (15)	Use biotic Singularity 75 times.
Barrier Mastery (15)	Use biotic Barrier 75 times.
Stasis Mastery (15)	Use biotic Stasis 75 times.
Damping Specialist (15)	Use Damping Field 75 times.
AI Hacking Specialist (15)	Use AI Hacking 75 times.
Overlord Specialist (15)	Use Shield Overload 75 times.
Spectre Inductee (15)	Become a Spectre.
Charismatic (10)	Use Charm or Intimidate to resolve an impossible situation.
Search and Rescue (10)	Locate Dr. T’Soni in the Artemis Tau cluster.
Paramour (10)	Complete any romance subplot.
Paragon (15)	Accumulate 75% of total Paragon points.
Renegade (15)	Accumulate 75% of total Renegade points.
Extreme Power Gamer (50)	Reach 60th level with one character.
Power Gamer (20)	Reach 50th level with one character.
Asari Ally (20)	Complete the majority of the game with the asari squad member.
Quarian Ally (20)	Complete the majority of the game with the quarian squad member.
Turian Ally (20)	Complete the majority of the game with the turian squad member.
Krogan Ally (20)	Complete the majority of the game with the Krogan squad member.
Sentinal Ally (20)	Complete the majority of the game with the Alliance sentinel squad member.
Soldier Ally (20)	Complete the majority of the game with the Alliance soldier squad member.
Geth Hunter (25)	Register 250 Synthetic enemy kills.
Dog of War (25)	Register 150 organic enemy kills.
Rich (25)	Exceed 1,000,000 Credits.
Medal of Exploration (50)	Land on an uncharted world.
Tactician (25)	Complete playthrough with shield damage greater than health damage.
Completionist (25)	Complete the majority of the game.
Sabotage Specialist (15)	Use Sabotage 75 times.
First Aid Specialist (15)	Use medi-gel 150 times.
Neural Shock Specialist (15)	Use Neural Shock 75 times.
Scholar (25)	Find all primary Aliens: Council Races, Extinct Races and Non-Council Races codex entries.

Character Benefit Unlockables

You have to attain certain achievements to gain benefits on future plays through the game. Simply do the achievement to gain it.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Sniper Rifle Skill for New Characters	Attain 150 Kills with Sniper Rifle
Assault Rifle Skill for New Characters	Attain 150 Kills with Assault Rifle
Shotgun Skill for New Characters	Attain 150 Kills with Shotgun
Electronics Skill for New Characters	Use Overload 75 Times
Decryption Skill for New Characters	Use Sabotage 75 Times
Shielding Skill for New Characters	Use Dampening 75 Times
+10% Health Bonus	Kill 150 Organic Beings
+10% Shield Bonus	Kill 250 Synthetics
+25% Marksman Cooldown Bonus	Attain 150 Kills with Pistol
+10% Experience Bonus	Complete 75% of Game
+10% Hardening Bonus	Complete 75% of Game with Ashley in Squad
Spectre Grade Weapons for Purchase	Attain 1,000,000 Credits in your Wallet.
Lift Skill (for non-biotics)	Use Lift 75 Times
Unlocks “Singularity” skill for future characters	Use “Singularity” 75 times
Regenerate 1 Health per Second	Complete 75% of Game with Wrex in Squad
10% Reduced Cooldown for Sabotage and AI Hacking	Complete 75% of Game with Tali in Squad
10% Reduced Cooldown for Overload and Damping	Complete 75% of Game with Garrusin Squad
10% Reduced Cooldown for Lift and Throw	Complete 75% of Game with Kaiden in Squad
10% Reduced Cooldown for Barrier and Stasis	Complete 75% of Game with Liara in Squad
First Aid Skill for New Characters	Use 150 Medi-gel
Throw Skill for New Characters	Use Throw 75 Times
Statis Skill for New Characters	Use Statis 75 Times
Barrier Skill for New Characters	Use Barrier 75 Times
Warp Skill for New Characters	Use Warp 75 Times
Medicine Skill for New Characters	Use Neural Hacking 75 Times
Hacking Skill for New Characters	Use AI Hacking 75 Times
5% Increase in Weapon Damage	Complete the Game Twice on any Difficulty
10% Shield Increase	Sustain More Shield Damage than Health Damage on One Playthrough
+5% Experience Bonus	Reach 50th level with one character
+5% Experience Bonus	Reach 60th level with one character

Unlockable Gamer Pics

Completing the game on the Hardcore and Insanity difficulties will unlock 2 special gamer pics for use on your profile.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Saren Gamer Pic	Gain the Distinguished Combat Medal achievement
“N7″ Gamer Pic	Gain the Medal of Valor achievement

Mass Effect Glitches

Infinite Renegade/Paragon

On the planet Noveria, head to the hotel bar and look for a Turian named Lorik Quinn. Accept his quest to steal the data from his office. Once you get the data, the receptionist will ask you to get Quinn to testify. Tell her you’ll do it, and then go talk to Quinn. From here:1) Tell Quinn that he should testify (top left option).2) When he refuses, select the Charm option (top left) for Paragon points or the Intimidate (bottom left) for Renegade points and end the conversation.

3) Talk to him again, and ask about the Matriarch.

4) When he gets done talking about her, select the “Other questions” option (bottom right).

5) Now, you’ll have the option to ask him to testify again (top left). He’ll refuse, and you’ll be able to use the Charm or Intimidate option again to gain another 24 Paragon or Renegade points.

Repeat steps 3-5 until you have all the Paragon or Renegade points you want.

Glitch: Use Mako on Therum Mini-Boss Fight

It is possible to take the Mako through the gap in between the two rocks, where you are supposed to get out and travel on foot. Drive in to the gap, then from inside the gap drive up the left rock, until you are completely on your side, wedged between both rocks. Slowly inch forward and use boosts to slide through the gap.The geth and the walkers (the mini boss fight after the video) will not attack the Mako, and they die after only a couple of cannon shots.My Reveiw:

The Good

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• Powerful storyline draws you into a tense, politically charged universe  
• Dialogue options will keep you constantly engaged in your missions  
• Great visuals and superb voice acting  
• Biotic powers are fun to pull off in battle.

The Bad

• Vehicle navigation and combat are weak  
• A bunch of annoying interface issues.

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Game Details  |  About Our Rating System

Developer BioWare has always been at the forefront of progressive storytelling in games, so it’s no surprise that Mass Effect’s story is one of its best yet. It’s got a unique take on the chase-the-bad-guy-across-the-universe plot, and just when you think you’ve got everything figured out, the game throws you yet another surprise. BioWare has created a politically charged universe with an exhaustive backstory and filled it with a bunch of interesting, multifaceted characters. Combined with an exciting and unique combat mechanic, it makes for a fun and absorbing experience that you’ll want to see through to the end, just to see how everything turns out–even if the game isn’t perfect by any means. In fact, it’s surprising that so many small annoyances and glitches made their way into a game of such general high quality. Still, most players will be able to look past them and enjoy Mass Effect for what it is: A terrific role-playing game with great production values and fun, exciting action.

The story is one of BioWare’s best.

As in most role-playing games of this nature, you begin by customizing an avatar. You play as Commander Shepard, potential savior of the galaxy, but there’s plenty of room to mold him or her as you see fit. Physical customization isn’t as deep as you’ll find in something like last year’s Oblivion, but the system is relatively robust, letting you choose from a variety of preset features, and even letting you round everything off with a scar. Shouldn’t every badass commander have one? Of course, you’ll also choose a class. In this case, you’ve got six to choose from, each with various strengths in combat, tech, and biotics (Mass Effect’s sci-fi equivalent of magic). More impressively, you will select a few autobiographical tidbits–and these choices aren’t just for show. Through the course of the game, characters will refer to your past, and your resulting dialogue options will allow you to react to their comments with various degrees of humility, wistfulness, and scorn.

The narrative is pure space opera, yet there’s no denying that BioWare has created a tale of surprising depth and appeal. Surprise number one: Humanity is not the political center of the universe. We don’t have a seat on the galactic council, or even a representative on the Spectre squad, an elite group of special forces whose members are given wide berth to solve political and military challenges as they see fit. In the meantime, a Spectre has gone rogue, ransacking ancient artifacts and unleashing the violent, robotic Geth race on an unsuspecting galaxy. As Shepard, you pursue him across the Milky Way, visiting one alien world after another and discovering the fallen Spectre’s intentions along the way. He isn’t the best villain ever created: He disappears for the bulk of the game, which makes finding him feel less urgent than it should. Still, the journey to the game’s exciting end is one worth taking.

In true BioWare fashion, you’ll be navigating through loads of dialogue trees throughout the game, and how you respond can have life-or-death consequences–though you shouldn’t take that to mean that you need to brood over every decision. Oftentimes, multiple choices have the same result, a somewhat transparent trick that makes it seem as though you have a lot more impact on the conversation than you really do. At important junctures, however, your decisions can affect how missions play out. You can turn friend to foe, console (or devastate) a suicide-attack victim, or exploit evil corporate executives for fun and profit. And it all plays out amid an intricate melodrama of political intrigue and racial prejudice, and in a galaxy populated by fascinating, complex characters. There are pages ripped from the Star Wars and Star Trek playbooks, certainly, but quirks such as the interesting speech patterns of the overly-formal Hanar alien race, or the nomadic structure of the Quarian flotilla–a galactic government that’s always on the move–make Mass Effect’s version of the Milky Way a unique one.

When navigating dialogue, you’ll also be earning paragon or renegade points, which is the usual light-versus-dark system we’ve come to expect from the developer. Unlike in Knights of the Old Republic, however, your decisions here will not affect any abilities you have. However, the intricate relationship between the story and the game proper means that these decisions still affect gameplay–though that effect is usually an indirect one. More interestingly, your paragon and renegade meters are separate, rather than being at opposite sides of a single spectrum. It’s a subtle but effective choice that lends itself to Mass Effect’s shades-of-gray fiction, where light and dark aren’t mutually exclusive.

The main quest starts you on a huge space station called the Citadel, but takes you across a small series of planets before reaching the game’s exciting final moments. Not that you’re stuck with the main story, since you can pick up a good number of side quests along the way. Some of them are simple and relatively self-contained, while others will send you across the galaxy to uncivilized planets and derelict spaceships. This involves bringing up your galactic map, selecting a destination system, and going planetside to kick some alien butt. There are multiple regions to choose from, and often multiple solar systems within them, but while that sounds intimidating, it’s not nearly as mind-bogglingly huge as you would expect. In any given system, you can usually only land on one planet–and on each of these planets, there are usually only a few things to do before you get to your destination. More surprisingly, once you’ve finished the mission, there’s never a reason to return. Aside from the annoying thresher maws (more on these later), there aren’t any hostile indigenous creatures, so once you’ve dispatched your foes and scavenged for loot, it’s time to move on.

Thresher maw battles are exciting–and annoying.

When you first land on a planet, you drive around in a rover called the Mako. The thing’s possibly the most resilient vehicle ever created in a game. You get dropped onto the surface from hundreds of feet in the air and drive up impossibly steep mountains without much difficulty. Too bad that the driving portions are undoubtedly the weakest of the game. The weird bouncy nature of the rover and the fact that gravity is the same on every world (even Earth’s own moon) are both suspect issues, though they don’t really affect gameplay.

The rocky planetary design and Mako combat mechanics can really be a downer when combined together. You can spray machine gun fire or launch shells at your foes, and it works fine, provided you are on the same level as your enemies. However, the Mako’s turret, for whatever reason, can’t move up or down. The result is that bullets don’t necessarily land where your crosshair is, so if you’re on higher terrain or your target is too close, those endless clips you’re unloading are useless (though you can hit enemies above you without difficulty). It’s sometimes maddening, since in many situations, the enemy base is nestled below you in a crevasse, and you’re forced to either get in closer (often a death sentence in an area swarming with tough foes like the robotic Geth colossi), or get out and try to take on the toughest foes of the game on foot. Be careful if you get out of the Mako in areas like these though, since your adventuring party can slide into a deep valley and get stuck very easily, which forces you to either return to the Normandy (your ship) and return to the planet, or reload a saved game.

The other issue here is with the aforementioned thresher maws, which are sandworm-like beings that burst from the ground, spew deadly goo at you, submerge, and emerge elsewhere. These encounters can be really exciting, since the things are tough to take down and keep you on the move. The problem is that the game doesn’t check on the Mako’s position before respawning the thresher maw. Multiple times, we had the creature emerge from directly underneath us, which either resulted in an unavoidable insta-kill or getting stuck in the thresher’s geometry while the camera jittered madly. That’s just not fun, and you will find yourself avoiding flat expanses on planets just to avoid these problems.

Thankfully, on-foot combat is a lot of fun. You’ll accumulate six total teammates, two of whom can accompany you on missions at any given time. They have a variety of talents, and each of them is special in his or her own way. There’s a variety of guns to choose from, from pistols to shotguns to assault rifles, and each weapon can be outfitted with various upgrades that may increase stability, add scanners that bypass disrupted enemy radar, and more. You can also outfit special ammunition, though you always have unlimited ammo.

On top of that, some characters have magic-like powers called biotics to mess with. It’s worth noting, however, that these powers are focused on manipulation rather than direct offense. You can push enemies back with the throw power (awesome to behold at higher levels), lift them in the air, or create a vortex that sucks enemies toward it (another great use of Mass Effect’s fun combat physics). Engineers have some nice abilities as well, such as the ability to sabotage weapons from a distance, which makes your enemy’s weapon explode, or the power to turn robotic enemies against your own foes. As a rule, your teammates aren’t a liability, though they aren’t governed by the most advanced artificial intelligence we’ve ever seen. But provided you micromanage them as described below, you’ll not only be getting the most out of the experience, you won’t be apt to notice any drawbacks to the AI.

The radial menu allows you to choose special abilities while the game is paused.

The combat feels like it belongs in a third-person shooter at first, but if you continually approach it this way, you’ll die. A lot. Like in many previous BioWare RPGs, you’re meant to pause, survey the situation, and perform your actions. As long as you stick to that method, you’ll find combat to be a lot easier than it first appears. You can set your party members to automate their actions, simply perform defensive powers on their own (the better choice), or only perform powers on your command. Holding the right bumper brings up the command wheel, which lets you assign orders to your companions, as well as perform your own abilities. You can also take cover behind walls or other objects, though this mechanic isn’t all that helpful. Once you get into the groove, battles are rather enjoyable, with a flurry of bullets and biotic powers flying around. The joy of flinging the Geth around, filling them with shotgun shells, and watching them drop from the ceiling after lifting them in the air is a joy few RPGs can approximate.

The spoils of battle are always a fun reward for a job well done, and loot ramps up pretty well. You can also open up various lockers and containers for more loot, though it’s best to level one of your party members in the decryption skill for the more difficult-to-open ones. To open locked containers, you have two equally odd choices: Either perform a minigame that resembles the overdone contextual button presses we’ve seen in far too many games of late, or smear omnigel on the container, which is an all-purpose goo that opens cabinets, repairs the Mako, and, we suspect, may also eliminate ring-around-the-collar. It sounds like a silly mechanic, but all things considered, it’s a perfectly legitimate way of keeping the user engaged in the looting process, and it makes you feel like you earned the resulting spoils.

As you can imagine, you’ll be doing a lot of fiddling with your inventory, what with all these weapons, upgrades, and party members to deal with, but this is another stumbling block that could have used some streamlining. The menu interface isn’t terrible, though on its own, it’s a bit clunky. But it’s the little things that add up in a game that requires you to spend so much time in menu screens. First annoyance: In some menu screens, you can’t hit a button simply to escape to the previous menu. For example, in the weapons upgrade menu, if you decide you don’t want to make any changes, you can’t just leave the menu–you have to choose something, even if it means scrolling to the top of the list and selecting the same upgrade you already had equipped. In other cases, such as when you convert an item to omnigel, the menu jumps back to the top of the list, which is vexing. You can’t even deselect a power from the ability wheel in combat once you’ve chosen one. You can change the skill, but on the frequent occasion where you will want to change your mind after selection and not cast one at all, you’re stuck wasting a skill and waiting for it to recharge.

Other problems rear their heads as well, such as the occasions when you or your party members get trapped on level geometry, which forces you to reload your last save. But you’ll be apt to forgive them in light of the depth and variety to be found here. It’s fun to get to know your crew, conduct a clandestine romance, or turn Shepard into a hard-line exclusionary (or a racially sensitive diplomat). You could finish a fairly complete play-through in 40 hours–standard for a role-playing game–but there’s enough contextual content to make it worth a second play, if only to explore your renegade side, try out other romance options, or see another of the multiple endings. On the other hand, if you ignored the side quests and stuck with just the main storyline, you could be done in 15 hours or less.

Mass Effect’s visuals are excellent. Facial animations are among the best in gaming: Characters move their lips believably with the dialogue, further expressing themselves with subtle tilts of the head or with a slight raise of the eyebrows. Character models are beautifully detailed, such as with your Krogan teammate Wrex, whose every wrinkle and ridge is carefully textured and molded. There are some technical hitches, however. The framerate can dramatically dip at the worst possible times, and there is a lot of texture pop-in. There are also frequent load times–some of them hidden by elevator rides, others popping up in the midst of exploration. Nevertheless, Mass Effect looks wonderful. From an artistic perspective, the game looks great, if not quite original. Planet outposts tend to use only one of two interior layouts, and environments owe a lot to games and films of the past (much of the game’s look wouldn’t be out of place in a Halo title). But even with the obvious inspirations, Mass Effect still conveys its vision clearly, thanks to meticulous character designs and dramatic set pieces, such as the Citadel itself.

Wrex isn’t just a badass character model–he’s also a badass.

It’s also one of the best-acted games in recent memory. An all-star cast including such well-known actors as Fred Tatasciore and Seth Green bring Mass Effect’s characters to brilliant life. Not once will a drab line delivery or overzealous histrionics get in the way of your immersion. The soundtrack is evocative, with just the right amount of sci-fi shimmering to round out the occasional symphonic swelling. Sound effects are great across the board, from the robotic yammering of the Geth to the din of a planetary blizzard filling the room with its high-powered whooshing.

All told, Mass Effect is a great game with moments of brilliance and a number of small but significant obstacles that hold it back from reaching its true potential. But in the end, if you like RPGs and want to spend some time in an absorbing sci-world populated with a bunch of unique inhabitants, you’ll definitely have plenty of fun with this one.

 Origanal post by:GameSpot.com

Madden 08

Madden NFL 08 Unlockables

Achievements

Complete each achievement to get the allotted gamerscore.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
60 Yard Pass (15)	Complete a 60 yard pass.
60 Yard Run (15)	Complete a 60 yard run.
90 Yard Pass (30)	Complete a 90 yard pass.
80 Yard Run (35)	Complete an 80 yard run.
Intercept 2 Passes (20)	Get 2 interceptions with one player.
Intercept 5 Passes (35)	Intercept 5 total passes in one game.
Deflect 4 Passes (20)	Deflect 4 or more passes with one player.
7 Sacks with One Player (35)	Sack the Quarterback 7 times with one player in one game.
8 Tackles with One Player (10)	Get 8 tackles with one player in one game.
Recover 2 Fumbles (25)	Recover 2 fumbles in one game with one player.
Force 3 Fumbles (10)	Force 3 fumbles with one player.
200 Kick Return Yards (20)	Achieve 200 Kick Return Yards with One Player. Max 5min Qtr.
200 Punt Return Yards (20)	Get 200 punt return yards in one game with one player.
4 TD Passes (10)	Throw 4 touchdown passes in one game.
Score 84 Points (35)	Score 84 or more points in one game. Max 5min Qtr.
10 Catches in a Row (15)	Catch ten passes in a row with one player. Max 5min Qtr.
20 Completions in a Row (25)	Get 20 completions in a row with one player.
300 Pass Yards (10)	Achieve 300 passing yards in one game.
500 Pass Yards (30)	Pass for 500 yards in one game.
80 Percent Pass Completion (15)	Complete 80 percent of the attempted passes in one game.
100 Percent Pass Completion (25)	100 Percent Pass Completion.
Complete 25 Passes (30)	Complete 25 passes in one game.
1 Catch by Seven Players (20)	Catch one pass with seven players.
200 Pass Yards (10)	Get 200 passing yards in a game.
2 TD Catches with One Player (10)	Get 2 touchdown catches with one player.
150 Receiving Yards (15)	Achieve 150 receiving yards with one player.
200 Receiving Yards (25)	Get 200 receiving yards with one player.
100 Rec Yards with 2 Players (15)	Get 100 reception yards by two players.
10 Catches with One Player (15)	Get 10 receptions with One Player.
200 Rush Yards (15)	Rush for 200 yards or more with one player in one game.
40 Rush Attempts with One Player (15)	Attempt 40 rushes with one player in one game. Max 5min Qtr.
Average 20 Yards Rushing (25)	Average 20 yards rushing per attempt with one player in one game.
150 Rush Yards in One Qtr (25)	Get 150 yards or more rushing in one quarter with one player.
250 Rush Yards (25)	Rush for 250 yards with one player in one game.
100 Rush Yards with One Player (15)	Get 100 rush yards with One Player.
100 Rush Yards with Two Players (30)	Get 100 rushing yards with two players.
400 Yards on Offense (10)	Achieve 400 yards of offense in one game. Max 5min Qtr.
650 Yards on Offense (30)	Get 650 yards on offense. Max 5min Qtr.
No Dropped Passes (20)	Don’t drop a pass for an entire game. Min 5min Qtr.
No Sacks Allowed (20)	Don’t allow a sack for an entire game. Min 5min Qtr.
3 2pt Conversions Passing (35)	Pass for three 2 point conversions in one game.
3 2pt Conversions Rushing (35)	Rush for three 2 point conversions in one game.
50 Yard Field Goal (20)	Kick a 50 yard or more field goal.
40 Yard Field Goal (15)	Kick a 40 or more yard field goal.
4 Sacks (10)	Get 4 sacks with one player in one game. Max 5min Qtr.
3 Rushing TDs (15)	Get 3 rushing touchdowns with one player.
Intercept 3 Passes (20)	Get 3 interceptions in one game.
Average 20 Yards Receiving (25)	Average 20 yards receiving with one player in one game.

My Reveiw:

The Good

• The new “weapons” feature is a terrific addition  
• A complex but fully manageable control scheme  
• Much deeper franchise mode with owner mode features  
• Excellent animations  
• Much more challenging game than last year.

The Bad

• Fumbles pop up more than they ought to  
• Audio design is lackluster  
• Still no significant additions to the online play.

It’s taken two and a half years and three releases, but Madden is finally back to form. In Madden NFL 08 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, EA Tiburon has put together the most complete version of Madden seen on either console to date. The gameplay is tight, practically every old feature that had been previously missing is back in some form or another, and new additions have been made that significantly change how you play the game–for the better. By no means is this year’s Madden flawless; it’s definitely got some quirks and underpolished aspects that will probably drive some people crazy. But taken as a whole, Madden 08 is easily the first great entry for the series on the 360 and PS3.You’ll notice the big difference in this year’s title the second you hop into a game. Marquee players have been given icons to specifically represent what type of “weapon” they are on the field. There are a ton of these different designations, separating out multiple types of players at each position. Wide receivers, for instance, come in a wide variety of forms. There are quick receivers who are able to nimbly duck and dodge around defenders to get open; possession receivers are good at catching the ball in traffic; hands receivers can grab onto just about any ball thrown their way; and big play receivers will leap up to make those really spectacular catches. Every position has at least a couple of these different designations, though not every player is truly a weapon. In addition, each weapon type has an opposite, a player on the other side of the field who can, in a sense, cancel out their abilities. Big play receivers, for instance, are vulnerable to big hitters, finesse move defensive linemen have a tougher time getting by top pass blockers, and so on.

Say hello to the first great football game for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

The system itself works beautifully within the context of the game. Sure, you’ll certainly note the differences between QBs like Brett Favre and Vince Young, but that would have been the case in any Madden game of the last few years. Here, you’ll notice the differences in just about every position. Power running backs and speedier running backs are more individually defined than ever before, as are the differences between run blockers and pass blockers. On the defensive side of the ball, you see more in the technical differences in play between a shutdown corner that guards against the deep threat, and the press coverage corners who prefer to jam up receivers at the line. And the big hitters? Yes, they hit big.

These new weapon designations even go beyond basic techniques–they can actually give you insight into what the other team is doing. Specifically, the “smart” QB and defender designations come with a meter that fills up as individual plays on the other side of the ball are called throughout a game. After a single play or coverage scheme has been called four times, a quarterback like Peyton Manning or Tom Brady can actually see exactly what the defense is going to do, whereas a smart defender can get a glimpse of where the offensive play is going to go. Obviously the counterattack to something like this is to vary up your playbook as much as possible, which is in itself a great thing, since that’s what real offensive and defensive coordinators are forced to do in the real game.

The excellent new weapons feature isn’t the only way the on-field action has changed. Madden’s control scheme is more complex than ever before, with more presnap controls than you’ll probably ever know what to do with. Once you get the hang of it, the controls become like second nature, but it’s likely that players not extremely well versed in the ways of Madden will get a little confused at first as they fumble around with the controls, especially since practically every button on the controller does at least something presnap. This is especially true on defense. The defensive playmaker controls are back, letting you assign coverage changes to individual players before the ball is snapped. You can also now focus coverage on a specific receiver with a quick button press, though doing so will draw defensive resources away from other receivers. When laying in big hits via the right analog stick, you can hit a player high by pressing up, and low by pressing down. Doing this has different effects on different types of players. Hitting high might cause a less cautious ball carrier to cough up the rock, while going low on a power back is probably the best way to take him down as he pushes past the line. There’s also a button that will make your controlled defender attempt to strip the ball from a carrier, provided you time the button press right.

Between that function and the big hits, you’ll actually be seeing quite a few fumbles throughout Madden 08. We’re not talking NCAA 08 numbers of turnovers here, nor is the number of fumbles per game outlandish or unrealistic, but fumbling is far more regular an occurrence now than it’s ever been in a Madden game to date. It’s definitely noticeable enough that it will probably frustrate some players. More than anything else, it simply pays to be extra careful with the ball.

Between the new weapons feature and all the various control adjustments to this year’s game, Madden 08 provides an extremely deep and challenging experience on the field, possibly even a bit too challenging, depending on your tastes. One of the complaints about last year’s game was that the defensive back artificial intelligence was too much of a pushover, allowing too many easy completions. That’s definitely not the case this year. DBs are quite tough to get out of position, especially on the higher difficulty settings. It’s maybe a little overblown in terms of challenge there, as DBs seem to just magnetize themselves to receivers and always find a way to get an arm up to swat a pass away, however unlikely the situation. Even linebackers are tough to get the ball by a lot of times. But that’s really the worst thing you can say about the AI on any level. Otherwise, it plays a very realistic game of football across practically every position.

The new weapons system of characterizing various players’ abilities adds a whole new dimension to the game.

nother big complaint about the last couple of iterations of Madden was the distinct lack of features. Madden 06 had only a barren franchise mode and basic online play to its name, and while 07 cranked out a new version of superstar mode and a couple of minigames, franchise and online went basically untouched. In Madden 08, many of these modes have seen at least slight upgrades. The biggest and best differences are to be found in the franchise mode, which, while still not as rich with features as previous installments on older consoles, still has a fair amount to offer. During the season, you can now train individual players before each week’s game to try to boost up their stats in certain categories. These stat boosts are tied into point totals you earn during drills. So, say you’ve got a receiver that’s got a high, but not quite high enough rating in the “hands” category; what you’d then do is look at how many points you’d need in order to get him to the next level (points earned are determined by the difficulty level of the drill), and put him through his reps. These stat bonuses stay put, too, so you won’t lose them the next week.

In terms of offseason features, the owner mode is back in a relatively new form. During the season, you can keep track of your finances via a series of menus that tell you everything from how your revenues and costs stack up against other teams in the league, to which players are currently in a contract year. You’ll also hire a scouting agency at some point, and during the season you can task them with keeping tabs on up to 20 rookies from the upcoming draft class. The reports they give you aren’t necessarily much more detailed than the ones you get by default on every player, but they tend to be more accurate in judging potential. Rookie potential is actually a new feature in and of itself, in that now, rookies with different expectation levels can become gems or busts over time. These icons don’t pop up until a player has been in the league for a little while, but it’s all about what a player’s potential is. If a player turns out to be greater than his draft position would initially suggest, he’ll get a gem icon and actually perform above his stats. Busts are, as you’d imagine, the polar opposite. Even a bust can still be a useful player if you find a way to get him to make plays, but it’s far more challenging a prospect than with any other player.

Lastly, franchise owners can now maintain their team finances by buying upgrades for their stadiums, gaining sponsorship deals, and even opting to move the whole bloody thing to another town if so inclined. Of course, doing so is a tricky process. You have to find a city interested in a team, and on top of that, the costs of doing so are prohibitive. There’s a neat system in place that shows how interested a city is in having you in relation to how much money they’ll have to spend in order to do it. You basically have to find ways to cut the city’s costs down if you want to move there, and if you submit an offer that isn’t up to the city’s liking, you lose your chance to move until the following year. Once you do move, you’ll build a stadium, edit your squad as you please, and finally have that team in Winnipeg that we’re sure you’ve always dreamed of.

The superstar mode is much as it was last year, but considering how good the mode was last year, that’s not a bad thing. You still create your player, use your influence on the field to boost up your teammates, talk to your agent, sign contracts, and generally go through the motions to try to get yourself into the Hall of Fame. One neat addition is that you can actually choose players from this year’s rookie pool, so if you want to live the life as Calvin Johnson or live in a fantasy world where Jamarcus Russell actually signs a contract with the Raiders and gets to start, you can do so. There has also been a slight alteration made to the camera system in this mode. The camera is now a bit more zoomed out, making it easier for you to actually see the field. Granted, the camera is still pretty tight on your player, so it’s only a minor improvement.

Tired of the fact that Jacksonville has a team, yet not Las Vegas, Los Angeles, or Toronto? Move ‘em!

Online play is functionally unchanged from the last couple of iterations of Madden. You can go head-to-head against only one other player in ranked and unranked matches. The online matches are certainly solid. Lag popped up here and there, and when it did, it had a palpably negative effect on gameplay–specifically, it made completing passes nearly impossible in the worst instances. But the bulk of the matches we played weren’t very laggy at all. As always, your mileage online may vary. There are some online bells and whistles, like the ability to glance at ESPN-licensed news videos, audio clips, and stories, but nothing you couldn’t easily get faster directly from the ESPN Web site. There’s still no league play of any kind, which is extra-sad when you consider that EA’s NHL franchise plans to debut this exact feature in just a few short weeks.

Other ancillary features include the same basic minigames from last year, such as the 40-yard dash and bench press, the same functional create-a-player mode, and, finally, a create-a-team mode, which had been missing. There’s a decent amount of customization available for jerseys, stadiums, and whatnot, though you can’t actually customize the roster of a created team with actual players unless you bring that team into franchise mode and do a fantasy draft. By default, the game populates the team with generic players that are rated depending on how you set your team up (run heavy, pass heavy, balanced, and the like). You also can’t import a created team into franchise mode without replacing another team, though that’s not exactly a new issue.

The core graphics engine hasn’t evolved much from last year, with maybe a touch more detail in the various player models, and not much else. However, animation is decidedly more impressive than ever before. Essentially, a gaggle of new branching animations have been thrown into the mix. Receivers who catch the ball on the sidelines will drag their toe while falling out of bounds or carefully angle their steps to stay in bounds. Running backs look decidedly more fluid as they juke and spin past defenders. And on defense, gang tackles are finally on board and look fantastic. Watching as two big defenders wrap up a running back, or two defensive backs simultaneously go high and low on a ball carrier, effectively flipping that poor schmuck head over heels, is quite a sight to behold. There are a few slightly off-looking animations, like the way that every single player on a field goal defense or an onside kick return team will simultaneously stand up and then crouch down into proper position, and a few catches we saw looked a little buggy and off-kilter. But by and large, the animation in this year’s Madden is the best it’s ever been.

One of the big points of contention about this year’s Madden has been the difference in performance between the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions. It was announced some time ago that the 360 version would run at 60 frames a second, versus 30 on the PS3. When you compare the two games side by side, yes, there is a noticeable difference. The PS3 version is certainly choppier and slightly more prone to hitching up in-game than the 360 one. However, simply taken on its own merits, the PS3 version isn’t suddenly awful because of this one issue. The choppiness rarely ever distracts you from the gameplay, and for the most part, the 30 frames a second number holds pretty steady. If you have a choice between the two, certainly the 360 version is the preferable one from a visual standpoint, but the PS3 version isn’t unplayable by any means.

Madden 08′s audio is the one area that really feels like it lacks. The on-the-field sound effects are still great, and the soundtrack consists of the usual roster of modern rock and rap acts, combined with the NFL Films music. Commentary, however, is a sticking point. The EA Sports radio announcer who’s been around since Madden 06 sounds like he’s still spouting the same lines from two years ago, and he still can’t seem to get the correct yardage numbers at the end of each play. John Madden still provides voice work for any plays where you choose to “Ask Madden” for a suggestion, but this dialogue is also largely recycled, and sometimes incorrect. There are times when he’ll go off about running a screen play when the play being suggested is a four wide receiver set with nothing but deep routes, or a quick pass play when the suggestion is a run up the middle. Finally, Marshall Faulk tries to provide a bit of preshow and postgame commentary, talking about the matchup, key players, and the like. The problem is that he’s terrible. The commentary is flat, monotone, and completely uninteresting, not to mention that he practically never uses a player’s name.

New animations are the high points of this year’s visual presentation.

Sadly enough, ESPN commentators Merril Hodge and Mark Schlereth pop up to do tutorials for some of the minigames, but that’s it. You’ve got actual broadcasters in the game, and they’re not even broadcasting. This speaks to a larger issue with Madden, which is that it still hasn’t found a way to do broadcast presentation right. The EA Sports radio guy felt like a placeholder when he first debuted, and while he was good, isn’t it time to get a real broadcast team? EA has the ESPN license, so there’s not much excuse not to get the Monday Night Football crew for games. And why no ESPN integration into the franchise mode? No commentary or week-in-review from Schlereth, Hodge, or the multitude of other NFL experts floating around the network? Heck, even the Super Bowl feels low-rent. There’s practically nothing in the game to separate it from any other game during the regular season. Considering it’s the biggest sporting event out there, that just strikes as lazy.

It’s issues like these that hold Madden NFL 08 back from being a truly stellar effort. Make no mistake, this is a great game of football through and through, especially on the field, where the new weapons feature has a fantastic effect on how you play the game. The new additions to the control scheme, the new animation system, and the franchise upgrades also can’t be counted out. If anything, Madden 08 seems to represent a tipping point of sorts for the series. You feel like the game is right on the brink of getting back to where it was four or five years ago in terms of stature and innovation. Still, while it might not be quite there yet, Madden NFL 08 offers more than enough quality content to make it worth your while, and features the best football gameplay you’ll find on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Origaanal post by:Gamespot.com

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock

Guitar Hero III Cheat Codes

Codes

From the main menu, go to “Options”, then “Cheats”, then “Enter Cheat”. Then play the following notes.

Cheat	Effect
O,B,O,Y,O,B,O,Y	Hyperspeed
RY, RB, RO, RB, RY, GB, RY RB	Performance Mode
YO,RB,RO,GB,RY,YO,RY,RB,GY,GY,YB,YB,YO,YO,YB,Y,R,RY,R,Y,O	Unlocks All Songs
GR,GR,GR,RY,RY,RB,RB,YB,YO,YO,GR,GR,GR,RY,RY,RB,RB,YB,YO,YO	Precision Mode
YB, GY, GY, RB, RB, RY, RY, YB, GY, GY, RB, RB, RY, RY, GY, GY, RY, RY	Air Guitar
GR, B, GR, GY, B, GY, RY, O, RY, GY, Y, GY, GR	You won’t fail any song on any difficulty. This does not work with career mode, online, or with top scores online.
(GR) (GR) (GR) (GB) (GB) (GB) (RB) R R R (RB) R R R (RB) R R R	It makes Bret Michaels the singer
GR, GY, YB, RB, BO, YO, RY, RB	Easy Expert (Widens timing windows, Does not work in career mode)
[GRBO] [GRYB] [GRYO] [GBYO] [GRYB] [RYBO] [GRYB] [GYBO] [GRYB] [GRYO] [GRYO] [GRYB] [GRYO]	Unlock everything (no audio will play when entering this code)

Guitar Hero III Unlockables

Dragonforce – Through The Fire And Flames

To unlock Dragonforce – Through The Fire And Flames, defeat Lou in the final guitar battle on any difficulty. The song will be unlocked for all difficulties.

Unlock new characters

Beat the respective character in a Guitar Battle during Career to unlock them for purchase in the shop.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Unlock Tom Morello	Beat him in the first Guitar Battle
Unlock Slash	Beat him in the second Guitar Battle
Unlock Lou	Beat him on the final Guitar Battle

Unlockable Guitars

For each guitar, you need to either complete the corresponding difficulty or 5-star every song on that difficulty

Unlockable	How to Unlock
“Bat” Gutiar	5-Star Every Song On Easy
“Beach Life” Bass	Complete Co-Op Career Mode On Hard
“Distant Visitor” Guitar	Complete Career Mode On Expert
“El Jefe” Guitar	5-Star Every Song On Expert
“Jolly Rodger” Guitar	5-Star Every Song On Medium
“Moon Shot” Guitar	Complete Career Mode On Easy
“Nemisis 13″ Guitar	Complete Co-Op Career Mode On Any Difficult
“Neversoft Skateboard” Guitar	5-Star Co-Op Career Mode On Expert
“PendulAxe” Bass	Complete Co-Op Career Mode On Expert
“Rojimo” Guitar	Complete Career Mode On Hard
“Saint George” Guitar	Complete Career Mode On Medium
“Tiki” Guitar	5-Star Every Song On Hard

My Review:

The Good

• The best tracklist of any Guitar Hero game to date  
• Lots of master tracks from the original bands and artists  
• Online play is a fantastic addition  
• Higher difficulty level ensures experienced players won’t get bored quickly.

The Bad

• Higher difficulty level ensures most people’s arms will fall off halfway through the expert career  
• Battle mode and boss battles aren’t interesting additions  
• A heavy dose of in-game advertising  
• Some frame-rate issues .

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Game Details  |  About Our Rating System

You wouldn’t have been wrong to come into Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock with some sense of trepidation. With original Guitar Hero developer Harmonix off the project and Tony Hawk creators Neversoft now on board, it would be fair to wonder if anything that made the wildly popular rhythm game franchise so awesome would be lost in the shuffle. The good news is that Guitar Hero III is Guitar Hero through and through. The core gameplay that fans love hasn’t changed outside of some basic tweaks, and the long and varied tracklist is the best of any game in the series to date. If there are any chinks in the armor of this sequel, it’s that some of the newer mode additions and a few odd design decisions do more to get in the way of the fun than anything else. Likewise, the extreme difficulty of some of the game’s more severe songs might end up turning off newer players. Those issues aside, it’s hard to argue with what Guitar Hero III offers from a content perspective, especially if you’re a longtime fan of the franchise.

Say hello to the return of the shred.

We won’t spend a great deal of time trying to educate you on the ways of Guitar Hero if you’ve never played one of these games before. The quick and dirty explanation is that you have a guitar controller with five fret buttons and a strummer. Notes appear on the screen, you hit the matching buttons, and rock is made. In Guitar Hero III, you’ll be making the rock with one of the best soundtracks to be found in any rhythm game. The soundtrack spans multiple eras and genres. Classic rock is represented with songs such as Santana’s “Black Magic Woman,” the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black,” and ZZ Top’s “La Grange.” Alternative rock from the ’90s is present in a big way with tracks such as The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Cherub Rock,” Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Suck My Kiss” and Pearl Jam’s “Evenflow” on-hand. Classic punk fans will dig being able to play the Dead Kennedys’ “Holiday in Cambodia,” Social Distortion’s “Story of My Life,” and the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK.” Modern rock hits such as Bloc Party’s “Helicopter,” The Killers’ “When You Were Young” and Queens of the Stone Age’s “3′s and 7′s” are also available. And for all the metalheads, you get major classics such as Slayer’s “Raining Blood,” Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast” and Metallica’s “One.” It’s an all-around fantastic list with only a few blemishes here and there. It’s easily a much higher ratio of quality over crap than what Guitar Hero II had.

It’s worth noting the number of original tracks added into this year’s game. Well over half of the songs in Guitar Hero III are the original songs by the artists, as opposed to covers created for the purposes of the game. A couple of bands, including the Sex Pistols and early ’90s funk-metal outfit Living Colour, actually went into the studio and rerecorded their songs for the game, which is pretty cool. The one downside to having so many master tracks in this game is that it does make the songs that are still covers stick out all the more. It doesn’t help that the general quality of the covers has also been downgraded a good bit since the last sequel. The woman covering Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” doesn’t really sound anything like the ’80s songstress; the version of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” in the game features a uniformly unimpressive Ozzy Osbourne impersonator; and the entire cover of “Holiday in Cambodia” has been pretty badly butchered with some weird structuring changes, badly edited lyrics, and a guy who sounds more like someone trying to parody Jello Biafra than anyone remotely authentic. Of course, the guitar parts in these covers don’t suffer much and in fact do a fine job of emulating the real-life songs. It’s just the surrounding pieces that rob the tracks of authenticity.

Of note as well is the fact that Guitar Hero II’s focus on extreme shredding over simple yet memorable riffs is even more intense in this sequel. The easy and medium difficulties are as good a starting point as they’ve ever been (though even they are a smidge more difficult than previous installments), but the curve definitely takes a steep incline when you bump up to hard and expert. The jump in expertise required for each setting is far greater than ever before, and at times it comes across as just too much. As awesome as songs like “One” and “Raining Blood” are, they’re so intense that it’s unlikely that anyone who didn’t get all the way through expert in Guitar Hero II will have a blessed clue what to do with these songs. And then there’s that pesky song from extreme power metal group DragonForce, “Through the Fire and Flames.” It sounds a little bit like a Dungeons & Dragons dork singing over a tape of the Contra soundtrack that’s been thrown in a blender and set to “liquefy,” and it is so excruciatingly, arthritis-inflictingly difficult that you’ll be thanking your lucky stars it’s a bonus song and not something you’re required to complete to advance. Regardless, there are enough songs that do require completion that aren’t terribly far behind in difficulty level that it might just be enough to scare some people off from finishing expert altogether. There’s an old adage along the lines of “You win more friends with accessible fun than you do by breaking people’s fingers with a fake guitar.” Or something like that. Whatever. The point is that Guitar Hero III feels decidedly geared toward the hardcore Guitar Hero fan, and less for the newcomer.

Painful difficulty aside, the game is still lots and lots of fun. The core gameplay hasn’t been altered much, save for a few minor adjustments here and there. Hammer-ons and pull-offs, the techniques used to hit crazy streaks of tightly packed single notes, are now easier than ever before (possibly to offset some of the extreme extremeness of the harder songs), and the notes that can be hammered on or pulled off now glow brightly to signify as such. While playing, you’ll notice that the game also keeps track of your note streaks both with a counter and with periodic exclamatory text messages on the screen that notify you when you’ve hit certain streak milestones. There are also some changes to the way your star-power meter is displayed, as well as your score tracker, though these are mostly just aesthetic changes.

If RedOctane were a band, Guitar Hero III would be that album that they made ‘for the fans.’

You progress through Guitar Hero III much as you would any of the previous games. The career mode uses the same tiered-unlocking system as its predecessors, with encores at the end of each tier. One wrinkle to this year’s mode is the addition of animated cutscenes that sketch a minimal story about your band’s meteoric rise and eventual fall (literally) into hell. It’s not much of a tale, but there are a few moments of amusement here and there. One particularly interesting addition to this year’s game is a co-op career mode. This works much like the single-player career mode, but you can play through with a friend who you can divvy up either lead or rhythm guitar/bass duties with. Co-op play hasn’t changed much since last year’s game, but this new career progression is a neat idea.

Unfortunately, it’s a neat idea that’s overly restrictive in practice. For one thing, there are six songs you can unlock only in co-op career, which means that if you don’t have a buddy with a second guitar that can come over and spend an afternoon playing, you won’t get those songs (at least until someone eventually digs up the “unlock all songs” code for the game). Also, no version of the game ships with a co-op quick-play option. The only way to play cooperatively on a single console is to play in the co-op career mode, and you have to unlock six tiers’ worth of songs before you unlock all the available songs. Interestingly enough, there is a launch-day patch for the Xbox 360 version of the game that adds a co-op quick-play option. However, if your 360 isn’t connected to Xbox Live, or you happen to buy any other version of the game, you’re out of luck at the moment.

Elsewhere in the multiplayer arena, the face-off and pro face-off modes from the previous Guitar Hero games return, and they’re still generally excellent. However, the one new addition is anything but. Titled battle mode, this mode replaces the star-power mechanic with Mario Kart-style weapons. If you hit a specific note string, you’ll gain a weapon you can launch at your opponent by tilting the guitar. Weapons include broken strings, jacked-up whammy bars, amplifier overloads (which cause notes to appear and disappear randomly), and a reversal of the notes to lefty flip (and vice versa). On paper, this mode seems as if it could be amusing, but in practice it’s just dumb. Most of the battle-mode matches we played were over in 30 seconds or less because one player simply couldn’t recover quickly enough to get a weapon and fire back. It’s basically a situation where whoever gets a weapon first wins most of the time. Even when matches do go on for a bit longer, they aren’t really much fun anyway.

Get used to severe hand pain.

Battle mode actually finds its way into the career mode in the form of boss battles. Activision went out and licensed a pair of notable guitar players: Guns N’ Roses/Velvet Revolver legend Slash, and Rage Against the Machine/Audioslave shredder Tom Morello. At the end of a couple of tiers in the career mode, you go head-to-head against these guys in original guitar tracks that they themselves recorded, during which time battle-mode rules apply. Nevertheless, the same balancing issue pops up. Most of the boss battles can be bested pretty quickly if you get a couple of weapons in a row. The last boss battle has you playing a heavy-metal cover of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” against a fairly obvious opponent, and that fight is considerably tougher than the other two, but it’s also the last boss of the game, so it would kind of have to be. The boss-battle mechanic just feels tacked on. With only three battles out of eight tiers in the game, and only two of them against real guitarists, it feels like a quickly tossed-together mechanic that, again, just isn’t that much fun.

Quite a bit more enjoyable than any battle modes or boss battles is the addition of online play for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii versions of the game. Guitar Hero has never been online before, and the ability to go online and take on the top axe grinders in the world is a huge bonus. Online options include all the offline gameplay modes. Ranked matches let you play face-off, pro face-off, and battle modes, and player matches let you do all of that plus the co-op songs. Sadly, you can’t do the co-op career mode online, but at least your friends can strap on a bass and play online. There are some key differences between the three online versions of the game. The PlayStation 3 version doesn’t include any manner of friends-list support, which means you can play only against random players online. The Wii version lets you play both random players and friends, though the friend options are limited to game-specific friend codes. The Xbox 360 version probably has the greatest ease of use online, with all the standard Xbox Live accoutrements, as well as easy access to downloadable songs (though, depending on your opinion of the pricing of said songs, that might be a blessing or a curse). The PS3 version should also include downloadable songs through the PlayStation Network store; unfortunately, the Wii version isn’t set up for any kind of content downloads. The good news about all three versions is that they perform wonderfully online. Lag never got in the way of the gameplay experience in any matches we played.

While on the subject of differences between versions, it’s worth noting that each version of Guitar Hero III comes with its own guitar bundle. Xbox 360 owners may not necessarily want a bundle if they already own the Guitar Hero II guitar, but III comes with a new wireless guitar that features a detachable neck, a much better whammy bar, better strap design, and more responsive buttons. If you weren’t satisfied with the GH II guitar, this is a good upgrade and potentially worth the $100 asking price for the bundle. PS3 and Wii owners have never had a GH game before, so you will need to buy a bundle to play with the guitar. The PS3 version costs the same as the 360 one, and the guitar is functionally identical as well, save for a small dongle that has to be plugged into the PS3′s USB port to make the wireless action work. The Wii version costs $90, and has the most unique guitar of all of the available versions, in that it features a connector for the Wii Remote. The remote fits snugly into a port on the back of the guitar, and the remote essentially takes over as the guitar’s tilt sensor. It also does a few unique things, such as buzzing slightly when you engage star power, and playing all the missed note sounds through the Wii Remote speaker. PS2 owners also get a bundle, though unless you really, really want a wireless guitar, there’s not much reason to go that route here. The new guitar’s buttons aren’t much better than the previous PS2 guitars, and the sync process for the wireless controller is kind of clunky. It’s a nice-looking guitar, but it’s not quite worth paying $90 for.

The change in developers has also resulted in a slight change in visual style in Guitar Hero III. The look of all the various characters and environments has changed noticeably, and everything has been given a more defined and exaggerated look. It might be slightly jarring to those accustomed to the standard Guitar Hero visuals, but once you get used to it, you’ll find the game to be pretty sharp-looking. The guitarist characters look excellent, and even the secondary band players look more detailed than ever before (though considering how dog-ugly the singer is, maybe he could have stood to have a little less detail). The PS2 and Wii versions look about on par with one another, and look maybe slightly better than the last couple of PS2 Guitar Hero games. The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions are considerably better-looking, even over Guitar Hero II on the 360. However, the one thing that does get in the way with these versions is occasional bouts of frame-rate slowdown, specifically when engaging star power while lots of notes are onscreen. This chugging is really distracting and can occasionally throw you off while you’re playing. Rhythm games, perhaps more than any other genre, really need to not slow down, and it’s disappointing that this one does.

These are the characters you remember, but they look a bit different now.

It’s also disappointing that Activision has finally decided to corporate up the Guitar Hero experience with a fair amount of lame product placement and dynamic in-game advertising. It’s one thing to get branded guitars and get Guitar Center to sponsor your in-game shop– it’s quite another to have several of the game’s environments feature billboards that display ads dynamically, and logos for Pontiac and Axe Body Spray that pop up all over the place. It even goes so far as to have Axe-sponsored guitars you can buy in-game, and Axe-sponsored go-go dancers prancing about the stage while you play. Gross.

An abundance of advertising, a few visual issues, some overly restrictive design decisions, weak new modes, and a major upping of the difficulty level might seem like a lot of potential hindrances for a game to overcome, and yet none of these problems are big enough to rob Guitar Hero III of the same brand of addictive fun that made the previous entries in the franchise so engaging. Certainly the fantastic track list goes a long way toward that end, but the gameplay is really what sells it. Sure, the difficulty can be vexing, but the game never loses that sense of “just one more song” addictiveness, even at the height of its challenge level. Once you start playing, you’ll be hooked for hours at a time, both online and off. It might ultimately just be more Guitar Hero, but that’s hardly a bad thing–in fact, it’s a great thing.

Oriaanal post by:Gamespot.com

Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity

Sonic Riders: Zero G Unlockables

Unlockable Cinemas

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Opening	Start the Heroes Story
Insert	Beat Babylon Story
Ending	Beat Babylon Story

Unlockables

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Shadow the Hedgehog	Beat Team Sonic’s Story
Rouge the Bat	Beat Team Sonic’s Story
Cream the Rabbit	Beat Team Sonic’s Story
World Grand Prix Mode	Beat Team Sonic’s Story
Silver	Beat Babylon Story
90s Boulevard	Beat Babylon Story
80s Boulevard	Beat Babylon Story
SCR-GP	Beat Babylon Story
Eggman	Beat Babylon Story
Blaze	Beat Babylon Story
Amigo	Clear all missions in story mode.
Billy Hatcher	Clear all missions in story mode.
NiGHTS	Clear all missions in story mode.
Chaos Emerald Gear	Get Extreme Rank on all missions in story mode.
MAG Gear	Clear all missions in story mode.
SCR-HD	Beat SCR-HD during a Free Race.

My Review:

Before thinking about this game, ask yourself a question or two:1. Did i like the original Sonic Riders on (insert platform here)?
2. What were my main complaints from before?
3. Will it be worth my time and investment?Let me answer a couple of those questions to the best of my abilities:1. If you liked the original (all 5 of us), you’ll likely know what to expect for the most part with this game. If however you have NOT played the original, expect a completely different experience to what your used to seeing.
2. People had numerous different kinds of complaints, let me list some of the popular ones

Concern: Controls were shallow and stiff
Real deal: i can whole heartedly agree that controls were more than some were willing to swallow. With un-intuitive steering, weird air and boost systems, and did i mention the steering?
New Deal: Rejoice! The controls have been reworked and in its favor too! Strangely controlled powersliding has been tossed out the window, in favor for a Gravity Boost idea that lets you turn on a dime, completely under your control. The way this one works is you hold down square (ps2 version) and your character will jump in the air and hold it while time seemingly slows down, you may now adjust the direction with which you want to go via the left stick, release to get a massive boost in the right direction. Feel free to hit those U-Turns with ease now. Another complaint with the controls was the awkward way the board handles, well this has been reworked too. instead of the awkward sliding, were now greeted with controls that actually feel like air-board. As you steer, the character will tilt his feet with the gear and the system turns you like that based on turbulence and how good the gears “curve” rating is. REMEMBER: This is NOT rubber on pavement, do NOT expect anything remotely close to this. In regards to air-riding, i can commend Sonic Team for tweaking this enough to be believable enough. in other words: Controls have been reworked entirely, and the game definitely benefits from all of the changes present.

Concern: 4kids and Sonic Team USA just cant seem to localize right, lines are cheesy and performances are rushed, its a mess
Real deal: i wholeheartedly agree, its been since…never since Sonic and crew have given award winning performances
New Deal: While still not a nominee for best acting (Uncharted gets my vote) its some of the best performances I’ve seen SEGA pull out for the Sonic Series. the 4kids voice actors actually feel like their trying now, which was INCREDIBLY odd to hear. While some cheese exists (like Jets inherent audacity to refer to sonic by his full title “Sonic the hedgehog”, it makes me cringe) and Tails’s IQ is supposed to be equivalent to Eggmans, why does he have to keep asking sonic “What should be do, sonic?” the moment trouble stirs, all I’m saying is a little quick thinking on Tails part would have produced a solid and near perfect beginning intro cinematic. The voice acting is pretty solid, the performances in the animation for the characters show a little over-acting (it definitely feels like a SEGA game in that regard) and the localization in the lip-synching is near perfect, a couple de-synchronization’s here and there, but barely noticeable. The story and performances, and the incredibly beautiful rendered cinematics, get my both of my thumbs up.

Concern: the story mode is short and theres no online multiplayer
Real Deal: definitely, and yeah thats a bummer
New Deal: unfortunately nothing here has changed. For a person who liked and played the original to death (ie. Me), you can blast through the entire single player campaign (both story modes) in as little as 3 hours. The campaign is fun though, and ive played through it a couple times, plus its a great way to get extra rings. If you have a Wii, your in for the treat here: Online Racing capabilities. This however is lacking in the PS2 version unfortunately. Whats the deal with that? At least the solid regular racing segments are nice and challenging, but extra difficult settings would have been good.

Concern: The game didn’t express the feeling of speed, and “air” meter was disheartening when you ran out
Real Deal: it most certainly didn’t. As for running out of air, running on feet was very annoying to deal with. air recharge stations didn’t help the feeling either.
New Deal: Youll never have to experience that “running out of air” feeling again. Gone is that meter, its been replaced with “GP” or “Gravity points”. The only thing that happens when this meter runs out, is you can no longer boost or do special abilities (like gravity pulling yourself onto the wall). However there IS still running off the board, its an item pickup now, when you get it, your character is given their weapon (reminiscent of boosting in the original) and when you run into another character, their hit silly, lose rings and speed. Plus your given a ginormous temporary speed boost as you run, once that runs out, your back on your board. This game however, thrives on your unique ability of gravity control, to go super fast the whole time. If you can manage it well, the only slow bits should be when you’ve somehow managed to hit the wall and lose all speed, acceleration is sloooow. I wont lie to you, Sonic Riders Zero Gravity is good. But its only good if you consider some facts, such as what ive reiterated numerous times: People: THIS IS NOT RUBBER ON PAVEMENT, this is not a Driving Game, this is most certainly not realistic, at ALL. And if your still complaining that you cant turn or break on a dime, i suggest you pick up a hover board and try it yourself. (plus if you had the ability to break, your setting yourself up for a loss anyways)

3. Theres some phantom depth here however, there are over 60 different (and imaginative) gears to earn, there are characters to unlock, and 16 different, well thought out and balanced tracks to compete in.

While some die-hards don’t consider games like this apart of the actual Sonic series, I’m going to go ahead and say its probably the best we’ve gotten in terms of a solid and polished experience since Sonic Adventure 2 for the Dreamcast (or Shadow The Hedgehog… maybe.) Since, this game also features something we haven’t seen in a long time in a Sonic game. Its a special kind of feeling that your experiencing when playing it, watching it, experiencing it.

Its a little thing called: Love. The company definitely made sure they were having fun making this game.

so in short: Spread the love. Pick it up, rental or purchase. Choose your poison, you cant go wrong either way. The next person to compare this to any other racing game aside from maybe Mario Kart, has no merit, and no soul.

Origanal post by:Gamespot.com

NFL Tour

NFL Tour Unlockables

Achievements

Complete each achievement to get the allotted gamerscore.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Airborne (25)	Wall Hurdle to score a TD (Exhibition, 1-player, Standard rules, Veteran or harder)
Army of Two (50)	Win a game of Redzone Rush (1-player, Standard rules, Veteran or harder)
Homecourt (50)	Win a game of Smash & Dash (1-player, Standard rules, Veteran or harder)
Need for Speed (50)	Get a 40+ yd TD, no turbo or wall hurdles (Exhibition, 1-player, Standard rules, Veteran or harder)
Paradise (50)	Get a TD on a play longer than 30 seconds (Exhibition, 1-player, Standard rules, Veteran or harder)
Playground (50)	Score 56 points (Exhibition, 1-player, Standard rules, Veteran or harder)
Slippery (50)	Hit 3 reversals, same player, same play (Exhibition, 1-player, Standard rules, Veteran or harder)
Boogie (100)	Win Smash & Dash with over 50% possession (1-player, Standard rules, Veteran or harder)
Icon (100)	Score on every possession in Redzone Rush (1-player, Standard rules, Veteran or harder)
Skate Through (100)	Shutout a team on All Star or Legend (Exhibition, 1-player, Standard rules)
Tour Superstar (100)	Complete Tour Mode
Coast to Coast – 100G	Wall hurdle off both walls for a touchdown
Really? – 25G	Same play four times in a row? Cheeser…

My Reveiw:

The Good

• Simple controls are easy to pick up and play  
• Someone was smart enough to not charge the standard $60 for what is essentially an arcade game.

The Bad

• Trey Wingo’s repetitive jokes about repetitive announcers stink  
• Trey Wingo’s repetitive jokes about repetitive announcers stink  
• Not many game modes and too few customization options  
• Defense is pretty pointless  
• Trey Wingo’s repetitive jokes about repetitive announcers stink.

When EA unveiled NFL Tour, the question many people found themselves asking was “What’s the difference between NFL Tour and NFL Street?” After spending a lot of the time with the game, we can finally reveal the answer: NFL Tour isn’t played on the street. There’s also a little less “attitude” and fewer customization options in NFL Tour. If this sounds like a significant step backward–it is. You’ll probably be able to squeeze out a few hours of enjoyment from the game, but there’s nothing to keep you coming back for more.

There are plenty of plays available, but you can win by running the same few again and again.

For starters, NFL Tour is light on game modes–really light. You can play an exhibition game, online game, two minigames, or tour mode. The two minigames are Smash & Dash and Redzone Rush. Smash & Dash is essentially keep-away in a small arena, whereas Redzone Rush has players taking turns going one-on-one in an effort to score from the 20-yard line. Both games are ultrasimple and fun for a few minutes, but there’s very little reason to revisit them once you’ve played them a few times. Online play is limited to ranked and unranked play, which is about what you’d expect for an arcade-style football game–it’s better than nothing, but nothing special.

If there’s any depth to be found in NFL Tour, it is in the tour mode. Here, you pick a team, create a player, and then take on all the other NFL teams in ladder-style tournament. The mode is similar to what was found in NFL Street, but more straightforward (read: stripped-down). Your goal is always to win, but there’s often more to it than just being ahead when time expires–sometimes you’ll have to hit a certain score to win, but other times, you have to come from behind. It’s a fine format for an arcade game that you’re going to drop a few quarters in to kill some time with, but there’s no stat-tracking or real customization–just beat a team and move on.

Tour’s lone bright spot is its gameplay. That’s not to say it’s amazing or anything–it’s not–but the game is fun to play. The action takes place in what is essentially an outdoor Arena League field, complete with walls. Teams consist of seven offense players and seven defensive players. Other than your quarterback playing special teams because he’s the person who throws the ball off, players don’t have to pull double-duty on offense and defense. You can pick from a small number of passing and running plays. There are a few trick and option plays to choose from as well. Like real football, you get four downs to gain 10 yards for a first down. There are no field goals or punts, and after a touchdown, you must run a normal play for either one or two points.

The play on the field is fast, and the controls are easy to learn. There’s a button for turbo, one for juking, and one to power through tackles. You can avoid tackles or make them with well-timed presses of a button. The only button mashing you’ll need to do is to pound a button to break certain tackles or overpower a blocker. On the PS3, this is done by shaking the controller–a mechanic that is not only uninteresting but also curiously not covered in the instruction manual. For the first hour or so, it’s quite satisfying to break off huge plays, blow up would-be tacklers, pound ball carriers into the wall, and decimate quarterbacks with huge sacks.

After the first few hours, you’ll realize that there’s not much of anything to the gameplay. You can run up walls to avoid a tackle, but the mechanic doesn’t work very often. Slants are particularly unstoppable, and it’s possible to successfully run the same few plays repeatedly. Heck, the Xbox 360 version even rewards you with an achievement for running the same play four times in a row. Eventually, you’ll learn a few tricks to play a bit of defense against the CPU, but stopping a real person who can adapt to cheesy tactics is nearly impossible. It doesn’t help that it only takes 10 yards to get a first down and that your players tend to knock the ball carrier toward the first-down marker, giving just about any play that gains one yard a few more bonus yards at the end. It’s nice that there aren’t a whole lot of cheap turnovers, but this–combined with how difficult it is to stop someone–makes it so that most games end up being won by the last person to score. In fact, there’s such little emphasis on defense that in some of the tour modes (such as first to score 24 points) you’ll find that you win faster by letting the CPU score in one quick play rather than spending time trying to slow it down.

Tour’s visuals show off some decent-looking player models that are nicely animated, but the overall presentation leaves a lot to be desired. There are several different arenas, but other than slightly different-looking cityscapes, they all look the same and don’t play any differently from one another. It really feels like the “No Fun League” had a lot of input on how over-the-top to make the game, which has a negative impact on the overall experience. The tackles aren’t all that nasty-looking, and players convey very little personality before, during, or after the play. The only bit of visual flair is a bit of blurring on a player when he’s using turbo, a trail on the ball, and some really ugly fireworks after lead changes.

How is this different from NFL Street? It’s totally different! They play on a field now!

NFL Tour is the worst-sounding sports game since video games made the leap from cartridge to disc. All the other aspects–the graphics, the gameplay, the game modes–seem like the best things ever when compared to the unbearable play-by-play of ESPN’s Trey Wingo. His entire performance centers around the notion that announcers in sports games tend to repeat themselves too often, so he has about a dozen “jokes” like, “You ever notice how video game announcers repeat themselves too often? You ever notice how video game announcers repeat themselves too often?” He repeats these jokes over and over again. He’ll also make the same stupid quips about repetition multiple times on the same drive. Whoever sold the development team on this idea has a future selling snake oil because it’s absolutely astounding that commentary this terrible could have even made it past the idea phase. It will not only annoy you, but also anyone in the immediate vicinity. You’re better off turning the commentary off and asking an ex to yell the things he or she dislikes about you into your ear for the duration of the game.

Outside of the fact that there are no NFL Street games available for the PS3 or 360, it’s puzzling why NFL Tour even exists. If you’re cool with spending $40 on a few hours of entertainment–go to town, but don’t say you weren’t warned. However, if you don’t like wasting money, take a pass on this one altogether and pick up an old copy of Street (or even Blitz) if you need an arcade football fix.

Origianal post by:Gamespot.com

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter Cheat Codes

Invincibility Codes

While in the pause menu press and hold in this order:
Left Trigger, Right Trigger and Back. Enter the codes while holding these buttons. A noise should tell you it has worked.

Cheat	Effect
Y, Y, X, RB, X, LB	Makes player invincible
X,X, Y, RB, Y, LB	Makes team invincible

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter Unlockables

Achievements

Complete the following to unlock GRAW’s Achievements:

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Unyielding (Multiplayer)	Get 30 kills before being killed in multiplayer
Perfect chapter 1 (Multiplayer)	Complete all primary and secondary objectives in chapter 1
Locate the Football (hard)	Take the Football back from Carlos Ontiveros
Capture Ontiveros (hard)	Capture General Ontiveros alive
Reach the Football (normal)	Reach the Football’s location
Clear the way (normal)	Clear access to rebel HQ
Capture Ontiveros (normal)	Capture General Ontiveros alive
Locate the Football (normal)	Take the Football back from Carlos Ontiveros
Secure Ballantine (hard)	Secure the US president
Escort Ruiz-Pena (hard)	Escort the Mexican president to US Embassy
Neutralize rebel outpost (hard)	Neutralize a rebel outpost blocking the highway
Eliminate defenses (hard)	Eliminate Chapultepek castle defenses
Secure US tanks (hard)	Take control of 50 US tanks stolen by rebels
Protect US president (hard)	Locate and protect US president
Reach the Football (hard)	Reach the Football’s location
Clear the way (hard)	Clear access to rebel HQ
Protect US president (normal)	Locate and protect US president
Secure US tanks (normal)	Take control of 50 US tanks stolen by rebels
Eliminate defenses (normal)	Eliminate Chapultepek castle defenses
Neutralize rebel outpost (normal)	Neutralize a rebel outpost blocking the highway
Escort Ruiz-Pena (normal)	Escort the Mexican president to US Embassy
Secure Ballantine (normal)	Secure the US president
Reach Ramirez (hard)	Reach Captain Ramirez’s position
Reach Ramirez (normal)	Reach Captain Ramirez’s position
Team champion (Multiplayer)	Climb to the top of the team leaderboard
Solo champion (Multiplayer)	Climb to the top of the solo leaderboard
World Champion (Multiplayer)	Climb to the top of the universal leaderboard
Coop 1-4	Win missions in the cooperative campaign
Coop 1-3	Win missions in the cooperative campaign
Coop 1-2	Win missions in the cooperative campaign
Coop 1-1	Win missions in the cooperative campaign
Master of Ceremonies	Host at least 1000 matches
Committed (Multiplayer)	Play for 8 hours straight in multiplayer
Sniper (Multiplayer)	Get a career total of 500 head shots in multiplayer
Falcon (Multiplayer)	Shoot down 100 helicopters in multiplayer
Deadly (Multiplayer)	Get 4 kills in 4 seconds or less in multiplayer
Heavyweight (Multiplayer)	Get a total of 10,000 kills in multiplayer
Complete the training mission	Complete the training mission

New added Achievements

These are the new achievements added via Live, they are all multiplayer. Worth 75 gamer points total.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Explorer (Multiplayer)	Win 5 Team or Solo matches on each original MP map with at least 5 different gamertags in the room
Victor (Multiplayer)	Win a public player match in all original game types with at least 5 different gamertags in the room
Team Player (Multiplayer)	Win 30 co-op matches with at least 6 gamertags in the room
Assassin (Multiplayer)	Find and kill an opponent who has the Assassin Achievement
Crack Shot (Multiplayer)	Kill 10 players with gunshots and at least 5 gamertags in the room without reloading or dying

My Reveiw:

The Good

• Campaign is exciting and challenging, even at normal difficulty  
• The door-gunner missions are awesome  
• Offers a definite tactical feel with its difficulty  
• Amazing graphics and presentation  
• Really looks and feels like you’re in a city.

The Bad

• except there are no civilians  
• Teammate artificial intelligence leaves something to be desired  
• Bright, high-contrast lighting can sometimes make it difficult to see.

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When Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter was first announced for the Xbox 360, it looked like a pretty ambitious project. Ubisoft was asking a lot out of the engine to have the game set entirely within a sprawling metropolis, complete with advanced lighting and particle effects, as well as lots of picture-in-picture video screens on the heads-up display. The early video and screenshots looked fabulous, so it was disappointing when the game didn’t quite make the release of the system late last year. The wait was definitely worth it, though, as Advanced Warfighter isn’t just the best-looking game on the Xbox 360, but also, arguably, the best game in the series.

Scott Mitchell, are you a bad-enough dude to rescue the president?

You take the role of Scott Mitchell, a captain in the elite Ghosts–the light-infantry unit whose members are renowned for their skill and heroism in the face of long odds. You find yourself in Mexico City as part of the security entourage tasked with guarding a summit between the leaders of Mexico, Canada, and the US. Disaster strikes when Mexican rebels attack the summit, killing the Canadian prime minister and causing both the Mexican and US presidents to go missing. Over the course of the campaign, you’ll explore the massive city–fighting rebel infantry, armored vehicles, and helicopters from within the dense, high-rise areas in the center to the dilapidated shanty towns on the outskirts. You’ll do this solo and with the help of three teammates–who you can issue simple commands to–and supporting vehicles. Major landmarks, such as Chapultepec and the spire at Angel Plaza, are represented fairly accurately in the game’s depiction of Mexico City.

The first thing you’ll notice about the game is how breathtakingly massive and believable the city looks. You take several helicopter rides throughout the campaign, and the city is literally sprawled out all the way to the horizon with buildings and streets. Fires and smoke curl up into the sky from patches of fighting or factories. As you land, you find yourself engulfed by the metropolis and plying your way through the maze of buildings, streets, and alleys. The graphic detail extends not only to the character models, which are some of the best we’ve seen in a modern shooter, but also to the unique lighting and shadows. The sunlight is so bright and intense that it’s almost oppressive at times, with the way the glare affects your vision, particularly when you’re squinting through a scope. Some people may find this annoying, as the high-contrast lighting makes certain areas very hard to see. But, presumably, this overbearing light is pretty realistic of how daylight can be in a near-equatorial area.

Our only major complaint about the graphics is that for a city that looks so believable, it’s as empty as a ghost town. Apparently, all 9 million residents of Mexico City either vanished or are hiding indoors with all the unrest going on. Still, it’s a little eerie to see no cars moving around the streets and highways or people trying to go about their daily business. To be fair, though, it’s only the stark realism of the environment that gets you to notice a flaw like this in the first place. The good news for those playing on standard-definition televisions is that the graphic quality of the game is plainly obvious no matter what type of television you use. HDTVs make it all the better of course, but even using just an S-Video connection, it’s clear that a game that looks this good couldn’t be done on a regular Xbox or PlayStation 2.

The game engine is incredible, what with the level of detail it uses to render an entire city.

The size of the city affects the gameplay, in that at any given moment, you operate within several city blocks. There are often different ways you can take to get from point A to point B, and you’re encouraged to explore around to find the best path. If, for example, you find a road block as you make your way down a street, it’s usually possible to go around and try to flank those defenses from a different angle. Other missions let you climb up on something and take advantage of elevation for an assault instead of running headlong into entrenched defenses. The maps are not always so open-ended, though, and you can and will run into arbitrary borders if you try to. But for the most part, Advanced Warfighter does a nice job at keeping you from feeling hemmed in, and there’s generally a good amount of freedom to roam. The game also does a good job at keeping up the tension by throwing enemies at you from different elevations. There’s nothing quite as tense as turning a corner into a street that looks clear, only to narrowly miss getting sniped by a marksman on top of a roof that you didn’t notice.

To help you get through these massive battlefields, the game lets you control not only a three-man support team, but also support vehicles, as well. Robotic UAV recon units, for example, can scout ahead and detect enemies that may be lurking. The enemies, as well as your objectives and teammates, are marked digitally on your HUD, so you can track them even when they’re not in your line of sight. You’ll do a lot of fighting in this game from extreme distances by shooting with scoped weapons, so the plain markings on your HUD often come in handy. At various times throughout the game, you’ll command tanks or armored vehicles, as well as helicopter gunships. You can only command the tanks to move forward or backward, as if they’re on rails, but they make for a good source of movable cover. Gunships are great for support fire, as you can command them to take out distant targets without getting into danger yourself. These support vehicles aren’t invincible, though, so if you run your tank into a rocket-propelled-grenade ambush or send your choppers into machine-gun fire, they can go down.

Commands for your teammates are pretty basic. You can command them as a unit, and they’ll respond to move, attack, or regroup commands. If you position them well, behind some low cover for instance, they’re generally effective at shooting enemies, but they’re not so smart about operating around corners. Too often when you command them to fire from around a corner, they’ll step out and expose too much of themselves. They’re also not so good about keeping themselves safe when they’re following you behind a tank, but they do try to use the environment whenever possible to stay under cover. Commanding teammates may not be one of GRAW’s highlights, but since you’re probably doing most of the shooting anyway, it’s not too big of a drawback, and they can be very effective in the right situations.

Get used to peeking around corners–you’ll do it a lot in this game.

Advanced Warfighter affords you an impressive amount of control over your character. You can sidle up to any wall or flat surface and peek around the side by pushing up against it, which lets you peek around the corner while remaining safe. The game lets you fire around the corner or over a low wall with a minimally exposed profile, although this method of firing is less accurate. If you use a scope, you will expose more of your body to fire. You can kneel or go prone and even dive for cover if you try to go prone while running. There’s a low-light mode, which you’ll need to use for darker areas of the game. You do lose a lot of sharpness and resolution in this mode, so even in dark areas, you’ll probably find yourself frequently switching in and out of this mode.

The fact that you can die in a single hail of fire, or just a few glancing shots, means a slow, tactical pace for GRAW. This is definitely a slower-paced fare than something like Call of Duty 2, since you can’t fire accurately while on the move or at all when you’re on a dead run. You’ll definitely need to take advantage of corner-peeking and recon vehicles whenever possible to plan your movements and attacks. This aspect gives the game a bit more of a cerebral feel–but make no mistake, there’s plenty of action in the game. There are no medikits. Occasionally, though, you’ll find ammo stations on the battlefield that will heal you, and you’ll also get healed whenever you rendezvous with a troop carrier to get new teammates or move to another location.

The game’s campaign should last most players around 10 hours or so, counting restarts from death, but the campaign is fun enough that it’s probably worth a replay on the hardest setting, which is devilishly difficult. GRAW offers plenty of value outside the single-player campaign as well, with 16-player online play over Xbox Live. There are standard deathmatch and capture the flag modes, which are fun and work pretty well with the 10 maps that are included. Some of the maps are symmetric, while others are not so much, and the environments offer a good variety no matter what sorts of levels you like–lots of cover for sneaking or more-open environments for faster gameplay. The most interesting aspect of GRAW’s multiplayer repertoire is the included cooperative campaign. These are four specially designed missions for co-op play that can be played locally or online for up to 16 players. They’re pretty fun, and the difficulty does scale depending on how many players are in the game.

The minimap is a useful tool for planning out assaults or movement.

The game’s sound is an excellent complement to the fantastic graphics. The different guns have very unique sound effects, and they’re all very sharp and impactful, which adds to the chaos of pitched battles. The best sound effect in the game, though, is the high-pitched whine of the Vulcan cannon as you spin it up and fire out the side door of a Blackhawk during the helicopter-combat portions. Just the sound of that gun as you hose down enemy infantry and vehicles with a hail of depleted uranium is enough to get any action-fan’s blood pumping. Tank cannons and rocket explosions are literally deafening, as the game muffles the sound coming out of the speakers briefly if any explosions go off near you, thus simulating a deafening effect. There’s some music that spools up during the gameplay, and the thumping beats suit the theme for the most part, but during some of the helicopter rides, licensed rock music comes up that sounds oddly out of place.

If you like shooters or action games, and you own an Xbox 360, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is a must-own for your library. A solid and challenging campaign and a unique, online-co-op mode combine with an unmatched presentation in what is arguably the best game yet on the Xbox 360. Even those who don’t necessarily like shooters may want to at least try the game out, as GRAW represents the best of what a tactical shooter can offer and can serve as a useful graphical benchmark to judge other games on the console by.

Origanil post by:gamespot.com

Trauma Center: New Blood

Unlock X-missions

Upon beating the final Mission, you’ll unlock the extremely popular and infamous X-missions. These are the most difficult missions in the game.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
X-missions	Beat the Main Storyline (Any difficulty)

My Review:

The Good

• Awesome control scheme  
• Gruesome injuries will tickle your fancy without grossing you out  
• Challenging, priority-based puzzles  
• Bring a friend to the operating table.

The Bad

• Instructions not as clear as they could be  
• The dialogue will put you under  
• No amount of surgery can save the overall plot.

A trauma center is a major league hospital, equipped with around-the-clock surgical staff, state-of-the-art equipment, and as much pain and carnage as a Texas Chain Saw family reunion. Normally you’d want to spend as much time in one as you’d want to spend covered in rats, so you wouldn’t think the concept would make for a nice, leisurely video game. Yet Atlus has already turned it into three, and its latest, Trauma Center: New Blood, is the best of the bunch.Just like the other operations in the series, New Blood is a surgery simulation that has you slicing into patients, excising their tumors, removing bullets, draining blood, and sowing them back up again, all with healthy doses of antibiotics and, most importantly, fun. But despite its presence on the family-friendly Wii, this is not an easy game.

This is your brain surgeon. This is your brain surgeon on drugs. Any questions?

But before we get to the shattered arms, impaled hearts, and shot dogs, you should know that the game is about the surgical exploits of Valerie Blaylock and Markus Vaughn. The curtains rise in “Alaska–the frigid northern extremity of America.” That is literally the first line in the entire game. Makes you wonder what they would’ve said if it began in Florida (“the long, hot leg of America”?) or Texas (“the giant bottom”?). After that, there are only a few plot points worth paying attention to.

In one, a rich patient complains that his appendectomy isn’t costing enough, while across the hospital, a poor child without insurance needs the same operation but can’t pay for it. So you bill the rich kid for two appendectomies, because, as Markus says, “Rich or poor, we’re all the same under the knife.” And you thought your HMO was crazy. At least Markus can back up his god complex with supernatural powers–he and Valerie wield the medical equivalent of bullet time, known as the “Healing Touch.” It’s all part of a wacky spiritual hoodoo both doctors buy into that has them saying things like, “As the stars have taught me…I am one with life…I am one with now…”

The rest of the dialogue and plot details that unfold between surgeries are as dull as local anesthetic. Sure, there’s a game show that’s a cross between Iron Chef and, well, surgery, plus a talking surgery dog, but these are things you can enjoy all while quickly tapping the A button on the remote to skip ahead. In fact, seeing the dog chime in between conversations is actually more entertaining if you don’t stop to read what’s actually being said.

Besides, the gameplay is so good you’ll want to skip straight to it. While the Wii is chock-full of minigame collections trying to cash in on the system’s expiring novelty, the Trauma Center series has developed an elegant, complex control scheme that believably and thoroughly adapts the system’s capabilities to surgery. After hours and hours of play, you’ll excise tumors with deft speed and precision. You’ll quickly pluck bullets, drain the blood, use forceps to pinch the wound shut, and suture it like it’s second nature before moving on to the next life-threatening injury.

This splinter is going to require more than a pocket knife and some Jack Daniels.

The only downside to all of this is that some of the surgeries are extremely long and sensitive. If you make a mistake five minutes in, for instance, your patient dies and you are told that, unable to overcome the shame, Markus and Valerie leave the surgery world forever. Quitters. This is exacerbated by two factors: (1) The game doesn’t always tell you things you need to know, and (2) Mistakes that shouldn’t remotely affect the health of the patient will make them die, such as trying to pick up a pacemaker with a blood drainer.

Those issues aside, it’s fun and rewarding to figure out things for yourself. For instance, an operation on a burn victim is horribly frustrating at first, but becomes rewarding once you figure out how to grow skin grafts, place them in the right spots, drain the blood, and boost the patient’s vitals in the right order.

Aside from fixing normal injuries and ailments, you’ll also do battle with the Stigma virus–an evolving and malignant malady that really lets the game designers get creative with their procedures. For instance, the first Stigma you encounter is like a razor strapped to a micromachine that races around and lacerates your patient’s organs. Later versions hide in the flesh, float around and fart tumors, or grow tentacles that must be pinched and severed.

About seven hours in, even on the easiest difficulty level, the game becomes obscenely difficult. You’ll battle multiple, consecutive stigmas, treat a shotgun-blasted dog, and face more blood and carnage than you can shake a scalpel at. With the right priorities, you can pass these challenges, or you can pull in a friend for some cooperative slicing and dicing. That’s right, two players can operate on the same patient, each with a full suite of tools at their disposal. The early missions provide good opportunities to acquaint novice partners with the controls and concepts, and the later missions are difficult even for two skilled surgeons, especially when facing two different kinds of stigma at the same time. New Blood’s cooperative play is fun, easy on beginners, and definitely extends its life span.

One surgeon attaches the modules, while the other brandishes a scalpel.

When rendering wounds and body parts, New Blood doesn’t go for brutal realism, but rather clarity and simplicity. For instance, the vessels you need to work on during the appendectomy are color-coded for your convenience, not your sense of anatomical correctness. Such an approach might’ve sterilized the game’s injuries, if New Blood didn’t go so over the top with some of them. In one operation, your patient’s rib cage has shattered, and all the shards have embedded themselves in a major internal organ, which now looks like a frightened puffer fish, or a fully loaded voodoo doll. It’s super nasty, even without realistic flesh textures or blood shooting across the screen and sticking to the camera. Besides, they have to leave something for the sequel.

New Blood sounds fine, though the solid voice acting is wasted on the boring dialogue. The music is entirely forgettable and the surgery sound effects are passable, though the only one that will really stick in your memory occurs when you “accidentally” push one of the aforementioned bone shards deeper into the organ, rather than pulling it free.

Trauma Center: New Blood is a successful operation. Even though the dialogue is insipid and some of the procedures are frustrating, this game combines signature surgical gameplay with a double dose of challenge and great cooperative play for a trip to the hospital you won’t require painkillers to enjoy.

Origanil post by:gamespot.com

Unreal Tournament 3

Unlock Characters

Enter At Custom Character Screen

Password	Effect
phayder	Unlock Alanna (Necris)
jihan	Unlock Ariel (Iron Clad)

Unlock all characters in campaign

In addition to the two preorder characters (Alanna and Ariel), 8 more characters are unlocked via campaign on any difficulty. Note: to unlock Leaders (Lauren, Matrix, Scythe), be sure to choose all the second choices for missions in all chapters, and kill the Leader in every deathmatch with them. By the end of the chapter, they will be unlocked.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Lauren	Defeat in Deathmatch sidemission in Chapter 2
Matrix	Defeat in Deathmatch sidemission in Chapter 3
Kragoth	Unlocked after early mission in Chapter 4
Malakai	Unlocked after early mission in Chapter 4
Damian	Unlocked after early mission in Chapter 4
Scythe	Defeat in Deathmatch sidemission in Chapter 4
Loque	Unlocked after CTF in Chapter 5
Akasha	Unlocked after final mission

My Reveiw:

The Good

• Exhilarating shooting action  
• A number of high-quality modes to choose from, including the intense warfare mode  
• Great map design encourages early, exciting action  
• Fantastic visuals that generally run at a consistently smooth frame rate.

The Bad

• Some occasional performance and lag issues  
• User-created content options not yet implemented.

The Unreal franchise has had a comfortable home on the PC for many years. On the other hand, Unreal Tournament 3 is the first game from the franchise to hit a Sony console since the original Unreal Tournament landed on the PlayStation 2 in 2000. PlayStation 3 owners will be thrilled to hear that this version of UT3 is for the most part everything the PC version was when it was released in November. Aside from some online hiccups, it is fast, furious, and fun to play, and never fails to impress from a visual perspective. As a result, it stands up favorably against the other strong multiplayer shooters available on the platform.

The series’ latest feature: aliens on surfboards.

There are a number of good ways to play Unreal Tournament 3. If you are new to the series, you’ll probably want to start with the campaign. Rather than the traditional single-player mode you’re used to, you’ll fight against computer opponents in a series of matches that are bundled into an inconsequential story and basically meant to prepare you for the online portion of the game. You can also play against bots on the multiplayer maps, though the meat of the experience is found online, where you can compete against up to 15 others. There are several modes available: traditional deathmatch and team deathmatch; a one-on-one deathmatch mode called duel; capture the flag, with and without vehicles; and warfare mode, in which two teams compete to destroy each other’s power core. From a content perspective, the PlayStation 3 version is identical to its PC counterpart. For more information on what that gameplay entails, you should read our PC review of Unreal Tournament 3.

Of course, there are some technical differences between the two versions, despite the fact that the gameplay experience is essentially the same. On the visual side of things, the PS3 version looks absolutely fantastic and features high-quality character and weapon models, detailed textures, and great lighting and shadow effects. As a rule, it runs at a fairly speedy clip throughout, with some occasional slowdown only when there are a lot of effects onscreen at a given time, though it doesn’t happen enough to be annoying. For the most part, our online matches tended to be free of frustrating lag, provided that we chose servers with a low ping. However, this wasn’t always the case. Even in dedicated servers, we encountered moments of noticeable lag. Likewise, even when things were running smoothly, we often found that there were noticeable delays when cycling through weapons. This was not common, and most matches were smooth, hitch-free experiences, but it’s an issue worth noting–particularly when there are rather few servers available at any given moment. The game supports voice chat as well, and we used both USB and Bluetooth headsets with no noticeable problems.

You should also note that you can play with a mouse and keyboard on the PS3, which works reasonably well, though these controls don’t feel as responsive here as they do on the PC. Thankfully, the Sixaxis controller does a great job of keeping up, and the control mappings are intuitive. You can also choose to filter out games that allow mouse and keyboard controls, so you needn’t worry about those players having an unfair advantage in a given match. There is also room for modders and map makers to create downloadable maps, though the tools to create PS3 content have yet to be released, so there isn’t any user-created content available as of this writing.

What’s most impressive about Unreal Tournament 3 on the PS3 is how at-home it feels on the platform. The visuals look great and keep up splendidly, and the action is intense and satisfying. Even with such fantastic options as Warhawk and Call of Duty 4 at your disposal, UT3 is worth a purchase for anyone who likes to shoot guns in video games.

Original post y:gamespot.com

Super Mario Bros. 3

Super Mario Bros. 3 Secrets

Make player ‘hide’ behind scenery

To ”hide” behind scenery, simply hold down for a couple seconds while standing on a white block. Then your player can ”hide” behind scenery for about thirty seconds.

28 P-Wings

Complete the game and watch the ending. Now start a new game. You got 28 P-Wings!

Warp to Level 8

You could just use the warp whistle at level 7…If you want to go straight to level 8, you must use a Warp Whistle to proceed to the Warp Zone, then use another warp whistle IN THE WARP ZONE. You will be transported to the level 8 pipe at the bottom of the screen.

Warp Whistles

These secret items will allow you to warp. Here are their locations.Level 1-3
Find the white block near the end and crouch on to of it for 5 seconds. Then proceed to the goal, and go behind it. You will find a Mushroom house with a Whistle.Level 1 Fortress
Fly over the top of the level when you find the first door with your raccoon powers, and find a hidden door at the far right on the ceiling. It leads to a warp whistle

Level 2 Hammer Brother
Get the Hammer from one of the Hammer Brothers here and use it to destroy the rock at the upper right corner of the Level 2 Map. Then engage the hammer brother on the other side. You should get a chest with a Warp Whistle.

White Mushroom Houses

If you get enough coins in a certain course, you can get a White Mushroom House!A White Mushroom House in worlds 1,3,5,7 have P Wings
A White Mushroom House in worlds 2,4,6 have AnchorsLevels and required coins:

1-4 (44 coins)
2-2 (30 coins)
3-8 (42? coins)
4-2 (22 coins)
5-5 (28 coins)
6-7 (78 coins)
7-2 (42? coins)

See a different Thank You letter from the King

Get through an airship and defeat the boss as a frog, Hammer Mario, or Tannooki, and you’ll receive a letter from the King that reads a little differently.

To get the N-Spade Card Game

To get the N-Spade card game to appear on the World Map. You must do gain 80,000 points as one player, and successfully beat the stage that you broke the 80,000 points with.

Infinite 1-Ups

Get to World 1-2 as Raccoon Mario, with the tail. Climb the hill at the beginning and jump over the horizontal pipe. Stand there for a bit and a whole bunch of Goombas will start walking out of the pipe. Wait for 2-3 of them to come out of the pipe, then jump ontop of one and HOLD A to fly high into the air. Now that you are in the air, use your tail to slowly glide down from the air. On you landing, be sure to land on a second Goomba. Repeat this process for as long as you can. Eventually, the points you get for hitting each Goomba will turn into extra lives. This can be done for as long as you desire to do so.This can also be done in 2-Fortress, and 7-5, but it is most notably done in 1-2.

Morph a wandering hammer brother into a treasure ship.

To turn a wandering hammer brother (the ones that walk about on the world map) into a white ship full of coins, collect a number of coins that is a multiple of 11. Make the tens digit in your score match the multiple of 11. Stop the timer at the end of the stage that you are playing in on an even number.One combination would be: 11 coins, 9,310 as your score, and the timer at 104. This only works in worlds 1, 3, 5, and 6.

Fight Bowser With No Fireballs

In Bowsers castle at the end of the game, it is possible to make it so he DOES NOT SPIT FIRE AT YOU. This trick is easy and only requires getting to world 8 with a P-wing. First off, use your P-wing on the map before entering the Final Castle. YOU MUST GET TO BOWSER INTACT. If you get to the Bowser fight room and the Bricks that he smashes through are not flush with the rest of the floor, then you are in the wrong room. Now, when you reach Bowsers room, FLY straight up and to the left. You will be able to walk on a wall above the screen. Drop down on the other side. You will be in another room to Fight Bowser in. When you drop, you will be on a door that opens to the princess. Ignore this room and DO NOT GO TOO FAR TO THE LEFT. If you do, you will have to fight Bowser and he will still have his Fire Balls. Fly back over the wall to the first room you were in and start the Bowser fight. He will still throw his head back and make the sound of spitting fire, but nothing will come out.

Harmless Bowser

Only the top part of Boswer can hurt you. So, it is possible to run through Bowser as small Mario and not get hurt. Or, you could have big Mario duck while Bowser tries to stomp on him. He’ll remain unharmed.

My Review:

“Mario! Mario! Mario!” was the chant echoed by a legion of people in the TV advertisements for Super Mario Bros. 3 that aired leading up to its original release in 1990. At the end of that famous commercial, the camera flies skyward to reveal the population of North America grouped together in color-coordinated outfits to create a visage of Mario spanning the entire continent. Looking back, that ad was a deft summary of the anticipation that had built up prior to the game’s release, as well as an accurate predictor of the praise it would receive once people got their hot little handss on that grey NES cartridge. In Super Mario Bros. 3, Nintendo promised and delivered one of the best 2D platformers of all time. Now, this genuine milestone in the history of video games is available once again; this time as a download for the Wii’s Virtual Console service.

Mario’s reign of terror against turtles, mushrooms, and carnivorous plants continues unabated.

If you’re already intimately familiar with Super Mario Bros. 3, feel free to skip ahead a couple of paragraphs. If, somehow, you haven’t played the game before, or you’ve been boycotting everything associated with the movie The Wizard starring Fred Savage, you need to get with the program, fast. Super Mario Bros. 3 is eight worlds and 70-plus levels of side-scrolling goodness. You run fast, you leap across pits, you pounce on Goombas, and you pick up turtle shells then throw them. You’ll also want to head-bash all of the “?” blocks you see because they release power-ups that make Mario bigger and give him useful abilities. Fire flowers let you throw fireballs, stars make you invincible for a brief period, and leaves turn you into a flying raccoon with a killer tail. On the map screen, you’ll visit bonus games that reward you with extra lives, warp whistles, and power-ups that you can bring into the levels. These include the normal power-ups, as well as some unique costumes that can transform Mario into a swimming frogman or a hammer-tossing turtle.

Variety set Super Mario Bros. 3 apart from the other cookie-cutter platformers of the era, and it’s the main reason why the game still feels fresh today. You’ll encounter mushroomlike Goombas, snapping turtles, bulky dudes in football gear, and skeletons that fall apart when you pounce on them. In the castles and airships within each world, you’ll come across different Koopaling bosses that will have you ducking from then jumping over their attacks as you dish out the necessary licks to send them packing. The level designs don’t adhere to one particular style. Instead, they involve a healthy rotation of platform-jumping, forced scrolling, swimming, and switch-based puzzles. One world is packed with giant renditions of normal enemies. Best of all, as you forge ahead, you’ll discover that every level holds optional paths or pipes that lead to shortcuts and caches of extra lives; not to mention the goofy secrets that exist only because Mr. Miyamoto thought they’d be interesting. If you duck down on a white slab, you’ll blend in with the background. If you do it from stages one through three, you might find a warp whistle.

This Virtual Console download is an exact emulation of the original NES version, which means it doesn’t contain the additional levels, the richer 16-bit graphics, or the revamped music that was included with the later Super NES and Game Boy Advance remakes. That’s not a big deal, really, considering the NES game already had plenty of levels and top-notch 8-bit frills. Mario and his enemies are whimsically animated, as well as cute in that cartoonish sort of way. As for the backgrounds, the pastel colors, puffy clouds, and large environmental structures do a good job of rescuing the game from the recycled tile patterns normally found in 8-bit side-scrollers. A large grassy hill here, some smiling clouds there, and a few pyramids or castles go a long way toward making you feel like you’re actually running around in Mario’s world. Of course, the familiar Mario sound effects are present, along with a batch of insidiously memorable musical compositions concocted by Koji Kondo, one of the few people who really knew how to make the NES sing.

Kuribo’s Shoe is a perfect example of how crazy Super Mario Bros. 3 can get.

For the most part, the graphics and audio match what you’d see if you hooked an old NES up to another TV then compared the two versions side-by-side. If you have a HD set, you may have to boost the color saturation to make the graphics pop like they did back in the day. Unfortunately, the default button layout of the Classic Controller forces you to bend your wrist at an uncomfortable angle when you try to press the jump and attack buttons simultaneously. Because of that, the basic Wii Remote is your best option for long play sessions. Because the Virtual Console is basically emulating the original NES code, the game doesn’t provide its own save mechanism. However, thanks to the automatic suspend and restore feature built into the Virtual Console service, you can exit back to the channel menu then pick up right where you left off the next time you start the game.

The only blemish in the emulation is the thin blue or black border that’s always visible on the far left side of the screen. This so-called overscan area wasn’t visible when people played the NES cartridge on old televisions, but now that modern TVs don’t automatically trim away the edges, this tiny strip is there to (potentially) distract you. Realistically, you’ll rarely notice it when you’re playing because you’ll be too busy with the platforms and enemies occupying the main screen area.

Those who already love Super Mario Bros. 3 and have the desire to play the original NES version again will be pleased with this Virtual Console release. It’s like reconnecting with a best friend that you haven’t seen since you were little. Meanwhile, those who haven’t yet immersed themselves in its jump-heavy sweetness have been given a golden opportunity to do so. This is 500 Wii points ($5) well spent.

Origanal post by:Gamespot.com

World in Conflict

World in Conflict Cheat Codes

Cheat Codes

To enter cheats you`ll need the console. Add the -console command-line shortcut to the game. During the game press [~] and enter one of these codes:

Cheat	Effect
cmdlist	List of Commands
UnlockAllMaps	Unlock all maps in campaign mode
CameraFreedom	Free camera
WinGame	Win current mission

My Review:

It goes without saying that it’s a good thing World War III didn’t erupt between the United States and the now-defunct Soviet Union. For many of us who were children during the Cold War, the fear of being annihilated in a nuclear conflict was very real. So it’s a bit strange now that we can look back at that era and have the luxury of imagining what could have been. Or we can play World in Conflict, Sierra and Massive Entertainment’s incredible new real-time strategy game. This isn’t your standard RTS game, as World in Conflict doesn’t follow the familiar model of resource gathering, base building, and swarming armies. Instead, it feels almost like an action game masquerading as a strategy game, and it offers up a relentlessly fun and amazing new approach to the genre, one that works in single-player and even more so in multiplayer.

World in Conflict brings World War III to life on your desktop.

World in Conflict is set in an alternate-history version of 1989. Instead of the Berlin Wall falling and communism collapsing, the Soviet Union launches an assault on Western Europe, and the United States rushes its forces in to aid its Western allies. Four months into the conflict, after the US Navy has been attrited down, the USSR launches a surprise invasion in Seattle and pushes inland. In the 14-mission single-player campaign, you play as a company commander who is part of the meager US defense; there is no campaign from the Soviet perspective, though you can play as the Red Army in multiplayer. However, the campaign twists and weaves, letting you experience a sample of the European conflict, battle in remote areas of the Soviet Union, and bring the fight to New York City.

Yes, the story is a bit far-fetched, but World in Conflict does a great job of making the implausible seem believable. That’s partly due to the excellent storytelling, which is spearheaded by pitch-perfect narrator Alec Baldwin. He’s backed up by a great voice acting cast that brings the principle and secondary characters to life, along with a story that offers up emotional and sometimes humorous vignettes from a world at war. For instance, you’ll hear a soldier’s futile battle against Army bureaucracy, the phone conversation of a husband and wife, and the deliberations of the president and his top military advisors. While there’s a small misstep or two, such as a gospel song in the weirdest of places, the game effectively tugs at your heartstrings, which is rare for a strategy game, especially when it concerns the fate of one character whom you presume to be entirely one-dimensional but isn’t. Some of these vignettes are conveyed through in-game cutscenes, while others are delivered through graphic-novel-style drawings. World in Conflict also features some incredible prerendered cutscenes that are so good you actually wish there were more of them.

This isn’t a hardcore wargame or simulation. There are far too many gameplay abstractions for that, from being able to air-drop reinforcements on the battlefield within seconds to repairing equipment almost instantly. Instead, World in Conflict is thrilling game about destruction. You get to unleash all the firepower of modern military units on an open battlefield, but you also get to experience the challenges of combined arms warfare. That’s because the game has a great rock-paper-scissors combat system that captures the vicious circle of war. Tanks can kill tanks and other vehicles well, but aren’t so good against infantry. Artillery can kill infantry easily, but aren’t so good against tanks. Helicopters can knock out vehicles well, but are vulnerable to infantry and antiaircraft units. It’s a constant chess match about what you need to bring to battle and how you use it. The game is also smart enough to limit the number of units you can control. Instead of commanding the entire battlefield, you’ll have only a relative handful of units. This makes managing your units a lot easier, like when employing their secondary abilities such as popping smoke grenades to create cover when under attack.

Destruction has rarely looked so good.

Then there’s the game’s excellent resource system. You’re given a pool of reinforcement points that you can use to purchase units. Naturally, the powerful units cost a lot more than weaker ones, so you’ve got to choose quantity over quality. But it goes a bit deeper than that, as different classes of units have different abilities. For instance, light helicopters are some of the best scouts in the game, able to locate enemies from a distance, but they’re extremely vulnerable. Medium helicopters are able to shoot down other helicopters with their air-to-air missiles, but they don’t do a lot of damage to armor. Heavy helicopters can eat tanks for breakfast, but aren’t effective against other helicopters. So while your initial inclination might be to load up on heavy choppers and go after enemy armor, a wise player recognizes that there are many roles to play on the battlefield. If your units are destroyed, their cost is slowly refunded back into your reinforcement pool, so you can order up replacements, although veteran units are more effective, giving you an incentive to keep your experienced units alive as long as possible.

The nice thing about this system is that it effectively gives you an unlimited number or resources and units to work with, so it’s fairly forgiving to nontraditional strategy gamers. If that seems a bit easy, don’t worry, because World in Conflict can also ratchet up the pressure by tossing in time limits. For instance, you might have to seize a town in less than 45 minutes, or achieve another objective in far less time. The margins for error are much smaller when you’re working under a deadline.

Aside from reinforcement points, the only other resource in the game is tactical aid points, which are accumulated whenever you perform a vital role on the battlefield. You earn points by killing the enemy, but you also earn points by seizing and fortifying objectives, repairing friendly vehicles, transporting infantry around the battlefield, and so on. Tactical aid is like the icing on the cake, because you can use these points to purchase all sorts of powerful and utterly cool things. You can call in air strikes, napalm strikes, cluster bombers, mortar barrages, artillery barrages, chemical warfare, airborne reinforcements, precision artillery, fighter cover, and much more. The ultimate tactical aid is also the most awesome one: tactical nuclear weapons. World in Conflict features the best-looking mushroom clouds in gaming, and when they go off the screen flashes white and you hear the high-pitched sound of electronics frying. It’s essentially the chilling sound of death.

Dropping a tactical nuclear weapon is worth it just for the blinding flash of light and the mushroom cloud.

All of this takes place on large, dynamic battlefields that come alive with the symphony of destruction. Thankfully, there’s barely any worry about collateral damage in the game, so if you have to destroy a city to save it, then don’t worry about the insurance bill. The destruction isn’t just cosmetic, either. There can be all sorts of tactical implications. Take out a bridge and you force the enemy to go the long way around, or, in a multiplayer game, to call in a tactical aid to erect a new one. If the enemy is hiding infantry in woods and buildings, making them hard to root out, call in napalm and just burn down the trees or use artillery or smart bombs to blow up the structures. Everything blows up so beautifully that there’s no such thing as overkill anymore. The game looks spectacular in DirectX 9, and it’s noticeably better in DirectX 10 thanks to more atmospheric lighting. If you only have a DX9 card, though, don’t worry–you aren’t missing out on any gameplay enhancements aside from the ability to use dual-monitor support in multiplayer games.

Pretty much everything in the game looks good, even up close. Move the camera low to the ground and you can make out all the gear on your individual soldiers. Pull the camera back and you can soak in vast landscapes. One thing the game does especially well is smoke. Drop a smart bomb on a building and it will not only explode in thousands of pieces, but it will send convincing pillars of black smoke skyward. After a heavy battle, the sky will turn black because there’s so much smoke in the air. That’s the incredible level of detail in this game.

As good as the single-player campaign is, though, it pales in comparison to the multiplayer game, which is fast-paced and wonderfully balanced. Imagine the first-person multiplayer action game Battlefield 2 reborn as a real-time strategy game, and you have an inkling of how World in Conflict unfolds online. This is an insanely fun multiplayer game that lets you be part of a team of eight as you attempt to destroy the enemy using teamwork and every tactical weapon in the book.

Everything about multiplayer is designed to get you in a game quickly and keep you there for hours on end. First, when you join a server there’s no wait for the current game to wrap up before you can get into the fight. If there’s a spot open on the server, you’re deposited into the middle of the current battle when you join. Second, there’s no downtime at all. In most RTS games, you spend the first several minutes hurriedly trying to gather resources and build a base and units. In World in Conflict, you order up your first set of troops and watch them parachute or airdrop in seconds later. Fighting unfolds within the first minute of each game, and it doesn’t stop until the very end. Third, thanks to the resource system, if your units are wiped out you can order up some more and be back fighting within seconds.

This is the best PC game of the year, so far.

Team coordination can be handled through a built-in menu system or, even better, the built-in voice-over-IP chat system that lets you communicate vocally with your teammates. All you need is a microphone. Playing in a relatively uncoordinated manner is still a blast, but if you play on a good team against another coordinated team, the gameplay elevates to a whole new level. Victory can be snatched from the jaws of defeat (or vice versa) in intense matches where both teams are hurling all on the battlefield, from air strikes, artillery, multiple tactical nukes, and more. There’s nothing quite more urgent than a team desperately trying to cobble together enough tactical aid points for a last-ditch nuke.

Developer Massive Entertainment has been making real-time strategy games for almost a decade now, but World in Conflict is undoubtedly the studio’s masterwork. Everything about this game is top-notch, from the addicting gameplay to the amazing visuals. More importantly, World in Conflict offers up a refreshingly new approach to strategy gaming. So if you’re a strategy fan, you should definitely try World in Conflict. And even if you’re turned off by standard real-time strategy games, you owe it to yourself to try out what Massive has come up with in this exquisite package.

Origanal post by:Gamespot.com

The Orange Box

The Orange Box Cheat Codes

Half Life 2, Episode 1, 2 and Portal Console Commands

Activate developers code by going to the keyboard options and clicking advance. Then when in game press the ~ button.

Cheat	Effect
sv_cheats 1	Activates cheats
God	God mode
noclip	fly
notarget	Enemies dont target you

Map codes

Enter these with the ‘map’ code in the console. Press ~ to activate the console.

Cheat	Effect
d1_canals_01	Spawns you in the canals.
d1_town_01	Spawns you in Ravenholm
d1_trainstation_01	Spawns you in train station
d1_under_01	Spawns you in lab
d2_coast_01	Spawns you on the coast (Vehicle)
d2_prison_01	Spawns you in Nova Prospekt
d3_c17_01	Spawns you in the city 17 rebellion
d1_canals_02	Spawns you deeper in the canals.
d1_under_02	Spawns you in the lab chapter after the second load point.
d1_trainstation_05	Spawns in the train station after the third load point.
d1_trainstation_03	Spawns in the train station after the second load point.
d1_trainstation_02	Spawns you in train station after the first load point.
d1_town_05	Spawns you near the end of Ravenholm.
d1_town_04	Spawns you in Ravenholm after the third load point area.
d1_town_03	Spawns you in Ravenholm after the second load point area.
d1_town_02	Spawns you in Ravenholm after the first load point area.
d1_canals_end	Spawns you near the end of the canals.
d1_under_03	Spawns you in the lab chapter after the third load point.
d1_under_04	Spawn the lab chapter near the end.
d2_coast_02	Spawns you in the coast area after the first load point.
d2_coast_03	Spawns you in the coast area after the second load point.
d2_coast_04	Spawns you in the coast area after the third load point.
d2_coast_05	Spawns you in the coast area after the fourth load point.
d2_coast_06	Spawns you in the coast area after the fifth load point.
d2_coast_07	Spawns you in the coast area after the sixth load point.
d2_coast_08	Spawns you in the coast area near the end of it.
d2_prison_02	Spawns you in Nova Prospekt after the first load point.
d2_prison_03	Spawns you in Nova Prospekt after the second load point.
d2_prison_05	Spawns you in Nova Prospekt near the end of the level.
d2_prison_04	Spawns you in Nova Prospekt after the third load point.
d2_coast_09	Spawns you in the coast area after the eighth load point.
d2_coast_10	Spawns you in the coast area after the ninth load point.
d2_coast_11	Spawns you in the coast area after the tenth load point.
d2_coast_12	Spawns you near the end of the coast area.
d1_canals_03	Spawns in you in the canals after the second load point.
d1_canals_04	Spawns in you in the canals after the third load point.
d1_canals_05	Spawns in you in the canals after the fourth load point.
d1_canals_06	Spawns in you in the canals after the fifth load point.
d1_canals_07	Spawns in you in the canals after the sixth load point.
d1_canal_08	Spawns in you in the canals after the seventh load point.
d1_canal_09	Spawns in you in the canals after the eighth load point.
d1_canal_10	Spawns in you in the canals after the ninth load point.
d1_canals_11	Spawns in you in the canals after the tenth load point.
d1_canals_12	Spawns in you in the canals after the eleventh load point.
d1_canals_13	Spawns in you in the canals close to the end.
d3_c17_04	Spawns you in City 17 after the third load point.
d3_c17_03	Spawns you in City 17 after the second load point.
d3_c17_02	Spawns you in City 17 after the first load point.
d3_citadel_05	Spawns you at the end of the Citadel.
d3_citadel_04	Spawns you after the third load point in the Citadel.
d3_citadel_03	Spawns you after the second load point in the Citadel.
d3_citadel_02	Spawns you after the first load point in the Citadel.
d3_citadel_01	Spawns you near the beginning of the Citadel.
d2_prison_08	Spawns you near the end of Nova Prospekt.
d2_prison_07	Spawns you in Nova Prospekt after the sixth load point.
d2_prison_06	Spawns you in Nova Prospekt after the fifth load point.
d1_trainstation_06	Spawns you near the end of the train station.
d1_eli_02	Spawns you in Eli’s Lab.
d1_eli_01	Spawns you after the canal, outside of Eli’s Lab.
d3_c17_05	Spawns you in City 17 after the fourth load point.
d3_c17_06	Spawns you in City 17 after the fifth load point.
d3_c17_07	Spawns you in City 17 after the sixth load point.
d3_c17_08	Spawns you in City 17 after the seventh load point.
d3_c17_09	Spawns you in City 17 after the eighth load point.
d3_c17_10	Spawns you in City 17 after the ninth load point.
d3_c18_11	Spawns you in City 17 after the tenth load point.
credits	Starts you at the credits
intro	Starts you at the games Intro.
d1_breen_01	Spawns you at the beginning of Chapter 13.
d3_c17_13	Spawns you near the end of City 17.
d3_c17_12	Spawns you in City 17 after the eleventh load point.

Map codes

Enter these with the ‘map’ code in the console. Press ~ to activate the console.

Cheat	Effect
ep1_citadel_00	Starts you at the intro of the game.
ep1_citadel_01	Spawns you in the Citadel after the first load point.
ep1_citadel_02	Spawns you in the Citadel after the second load point.
ep1_citadel_02b	Spawns you in the Citadel before the lift ride.
ep1_citadel_03	Spawns you in the Citadel after the third load point.
ep1_citadel_04	Spawns you near the end of the Citadel.
ep1_c17_00	Spawns you at the beginning of Chapter 3
ep1_c17_00a	Spawns you in City 17 after the first load point.
ep1_c17_01	Spawns you at the beginning of Chapter 4
ep1_c17_02	Spawns you in Chapter 4 City 17 after the first load point.
ep1_c17_02a	Spawns you in Chapter 4 City 17 after the second load point.
ep1_c17_02b	Spawns you in Chapter 4 City 17 after the third load point.
ep1_c17_05	Spawns you in the last Chapter.
ep1_c17_06	Spawns you in the last Chapter near the end.
ep1_background01	Spawns you looking up at the citadel. (You are unable to move of do anything)
ep1_background01a	Spawns you looking in the car garage. (You are unable to move or do anything)
ep1_background02	Spawns you looking off into the damaged City 17. (You are unable to move or do anything)
credits	Starts you at the credits.

Spawning NPCs

Access the console, type in “npc_create npc_<name>” and replace the name with one of these:

Cheat	Effect
zombie	Spawns a Zombie.
zombine	Spawns a Zombine (Combine Zombie)
zombie_torso	Spawns a Zombie without legs.
fastzombie	Spawns a Fast Zombie.
crow	Spawns a Crow
cscanner	Spawns a Combine Scanner.
combine_s	Spawns a Combine Soldier.
citizen	Spawns a City 17 Citizen.
breen	Spawns Breen.
barney	Spawns Barney.
barnacle	Spawns a barnacle.
antlion	Spawns an Antlion.
alyx	Spawns Alyx.
antlionguard	Spawns an Antlion Guard.
stalker	Spawns a Stalker.
strider	Spawns a Strider.
vortigaunt	Spawns a Vortigaunt.
turret_ceiling	Spawns a Ceiling Turret.
seagull	Spawns a Seagull
pigeon	Spawns a Pigeon.
dog	Spawns Dog.
mossman	Spawns Mossman
monk	Spawns Father Gregori
poisonzombie	Spawns a Poison Zombie.
rollermine	Spawns a Rollermine.
metropolice	Spawns a Combine Metrocop
manhack	Spawns a Manhack
launcher	Spawns a Headcrab Launcher
kleiner	Spawns Kleiner
ichthyosaur	Spawns a Ichthyosaur.
headcrab_poison	Spawns a Poison Headcrab
headcrab_black	Spawns a Poison Headcrab
headcrab_fast	Spawns a Fast Headcrab
headcrab	Spawns a Headcrab.
helicopter	Spawns a Combine Helicopter
gman	Spawns Gman
eli	Spawns Eli
combinegunship	Spawns Combine Gunship
turret_floor	Spawns a Floor Turret.
combinedropship	Spawns a Combine Dropship
crabsynth	Spawns a Crab Synth
mortarsynth	Spawns a Mortar Synth

For Half-Life 2, Episode One and Episode Two

Cheat	Effect
give weapon_alyxgun	Gives you the ‘Alyx Gun’
sk_max_alyxgun #	# is new max ammo for Alyx Gun (default 0)
sk_plr_dmg_alyxgun #	# is new damage for Alyx Gun (default 150)
sk_plr_dmg_357 #	# is new damage value for the .357 Magnum
sk_plr_dmg_crossbow #	# is new damage value for the crossbow
sk_plr_dmg_crowbar #	# is new damage value for the crowbar
sk_plr_dmg_grenade #	# is new damage value for grenades
sk_plr_dmg_pistol #	# is new damage value for the pistol
sk_plr_dmg_ar2 #	# is new damage value for the Pulse Rifle
sk_plr_dmg_rpg_round #	# is new damage value for the RPG
sk_plr_dmg_buckshot #	# is new damage value for the shotgun
sk_plr_dmg_smg1_grenade #	# is new damage value for the SMG’s grenades
sk_plr_dmg_smg1 #	# is new damage value for the SMG
sk_max_357 #	# is new max ammo for the .357 Magnum
sk_max_crossbow #	# is new max ammo for the crossbow
sk_max_grenade #	# is new max ammo for grenades
sk_max_pistol #	# is new max ammo for the pistol
sk_max_ar2 #	# is new max ammo for the Pulse Rifle
sk_max_ar2_altfire #	# is new max ammo for the Pulse Rifle’s energy orbs
sk_max_rpg_round #	# is new max ammo for the RPG
sk_max_buckshot #	# is new max ammo for the Shotgun
ai_disable	Turns Non-Player Characters off. Type again to resume.
sv_cheats 1	Turns cheats on. Type 0 to turn them off. Doing this will turn off achievements, though.
npc_create	This creates Non-Player Characters. Guide to these characters are a bit below.
give item_healthkit	Gives you 25+ healthkit
give item_battery	Gives you 15+ battery
kill	Kills yourself (I hardly see use for this)
sk_max_smg1_grenade #	# is new max ammo for SMG grenades
sk_max_smg1 #	# is new max ammo for submachine gun
weapon_357	Gives you the .357 Magnum.
weapon_shotgun	Gives you the shotgun
weapon_pistol	Gives you the pistol
net_graph 1	a more thorough fps display
viewmodel_fov #	Adjusts size of the weapon you’re carrying (54 = default)
impulse 101	Gives you all weapons
mat_yuv 1	Turn on Black and White mode
mat_yuv 0	Turn off Black and White mode
cl_showpos 1	Brings up position display in top right of screen (0 removes it)
getpos	can be used to get current coords for use with setpos
skill #	change skill level (# = 1, 2, or 3)
air_density #	Change the density of air. (Add number in place of #)
physcannon_maxforce #	Changes how hard you propel objects with the Gravity Gun
physcannon_maxmass #	Changes how large pulled objects can be
physcannon_pullforce #	Changes how quickly objects are pulled
physcannon_tracelength #	Changes the length that objects can be pulled from
physcannon_cone #	Changes the radius of the cone used to pick up objects
host_timescale #	Changes the speed of the game (for slow-mo/fast-mo) (# < 1 = slower, # > 1 = faster)
shake	Creates an earthquake.
npc_create_aimed	Creates an NPC (Aiming away from player)
weapon_crossbow	Gives you the crossbow
weapon_crowbar	Gives you the crowbar
Hurtme #	Damages player by whatever variable you input as #
crosshair 0	Disables Crosshair
crosshair 1	Enables Crosshair
maps	Displays map listing
mat_yuv 0	Enables Color Mode
mat_yuv 1	Disables Color Mode
+mlook	Enables mouse look
cl_ragdoll_collide 1	Enables ragdolls that don’t clip through each other, but stack realistically on one another.
exec #	Execute a script file (Input filename in place of #)
firstperson	First Person View
weapon_frag	Gives you a frag grenade
sv_infinite_aux_power 1	Gives infinite power for sprinting, breating underwater, etc.
sv_infinite_aux_power 0	Takes away infinite power for sprinting, breating underwater, etc.
r_screenoverlay effects/combine_binocoverlay.vmt	Gives you Combine vision during gameplay.
give weapon_annabelle	Gives you Father Gregori’s modified shotgun
give weapon_physcannon	Gives you the Gravity Gun
give item_suit	Gives you the HEV suit
item_healthkit	Gives you the large health kit (25HP)
give item_healthvial	Gives you the small health vial (10HP)
r_screenoverlay effects/tp_eyefx/tp_eyefx.vmt	Gives you weird vision during gameplay.
impulse 76	Creates a human grunt.
buddha	Health never goes below 1
sk_plr_num_shotgun_pellets #	Increases pellets fired from each shotgun shell. 100 works well. 1000+ and it lags.
give item_battery	Increases suit charge by 15 points.
mat_numtextureunits #	Limit the number of texture units. (Add number in place of #) (0=Default)
ch_createjeep	Spawn a Jeep
ch_createairboat	Spawn an airbot
physcannon_megacannon 1	Makes your Gravity Gun a Super Gravity Gun
setpos	Move player to specified origin
sk_npc_dmg_shotgun #	NPC’s do # damage with shotgun
sk_npc_dmg_ar2 #	NPC’s do # damage with the pulse rifle
sk_npc_dmg_smg1 #	NPC’s do # damage with the smg
weapon_ar2	Gives you the Overwatch Standard Issue Pulse Rifle
weapon_bugbait	Spawns a Pherapods.
mat_fullbright 1	removes all shadows (a 0 restores them)
impulse 203	Removes the item or NPC you are pointed at
help $	replace $ with a command to get a brief description of it
weapon_rpg	Gives you the RPG
mat_depthbias_normal 1	See through walls
sv_gravity #	Set Gravity (Add number in place of #)dsp_explosion_effect_duration #
dsp_explosion_effect_duration #	Set length of confusion/ear-ringing effect(Add number in place of #)
give item_rpg_round	Spawns grenades for the RPG
give item_ml_grenade	Spawns grenades for the RPG
sv_stopspeed #	Set Minimum Stopping Speed on ground (Add number in place of #)
sv_waterdist #	Set Vertical View when eyes are near water plane.
sv_friction #	Set World Friction (Add number in place of #)
sv_bounce #	Sets bounce multiplier for physically simulated object collisions
Developer 0	Sets developer mode to off
Developer 1	Sets developer mdoe to on
Developer 2	Sets developer mode to verbose
sv_maxvelocity #	Sets Maximum Velocity of any moving object (Add number in place of #)
cl_showfps 1	Show FPS rate
status	shows some game info, incl. current map
setang	Snap players eyes to a specified pitch yaw
impulse 82	Spawns a Jeep
impulse 83	Spawns an Airboat
give item_ammo_357	Spawns ammo for the .357 magnum
give item_box_srounds	Spawns ammo for the Pistol
give item_ammo_crossbow	Spawns ammo for the Crossbow
give item_ammo_ar2_altfire	Spawns energy grenades for the Overwatch Pulse Rifle
stop	Stops recording the current demo.
play demo_name	Plays demo.(change demo_name to the demo you want to be played)
record demo_name	Records a demo of all the user’s actions within the game until the “stop” command is issued.
sv_unlockedchapters #	Unlocks Chapters 1 through #
cl_drawhud 0	Turns off your HUD
cl_enablehud 0	Turns off your HUD
sv_soundemitter_filecheck	Toggle reporting missing .wav files for sounds
cl_enablehud 1	Turns on your HUD
cl_drawhud 1	Turns on your HUD
prop_debug	Toggle bounding-boxes debug mode on/off red – ignore damage, white – respond to damage, green – health)
thirdperson	Third Person View
weapon_smg1	Gives you the SMG
give item_box_buckshot	Spawns shells for the 12-gauge shotgun
give item_box_mrounds	Spawns primary fire ammo for the SMG
give item_ammo_ar2	Spawns primary fire ammo for the Overwatch Pulse Rifle
give item_ar2_grenade	Spawns grenades for the SMG (strangely enough)

My Review:

It’s hard to talk about what Valve’s The Orange Box offers without immediately falling into an impression of some sort of late-night pitchman for fantasy knives and alternative cleaning products. That’s partially because the name “The Orange Box” sounds more like some kind of citrus-scented bathroom cleanser than a video game, and partially because this five-games-in-one package is the kind of crazy deal that almost forces you to shout “Now how much would you pay?” With three amazing new games and two classics all in one package, it’s impossible to go wrong with The Orange Box.

You’ll need both Alyx and the gravity gun if you want to survive.

With your purchase of The Orange Box, you’ll get Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. They’re all based on the same graphics engine, but they’re all incredibly different games, which ensures that there’s something for everyone. You’ll also get 2004′s Half-Life 2 and 2006′s Half-Life 2: Episode One, which is handy if you aren’t up to speed with what Gordon Freeman’s been doing over the past few years. On the PC, you’ll launch each game separately. On the Xbox 360, the game boots up to a menu where you can easily select any of the five games, and quitting out of a game brings you back to the selection menu.

Let’s start with new stuff. Episode Two is the continuation of the Half-Life 2 story. It picks up right where Episode One leaves off, with Alyx helping Gordon out of the rubble of a train crash. You’ve escaped from City 17, which now looks more like a smoking crater in the ground with a huge, swirling portal floating over it. But you aren’t safe just yet. You’ve escaped with information that the Combine very much wants to get back from you, so the chase is on again. Fortunately, you’ll do much more than just run in Episode Two. The biggest difference here is that Alyx doesn’t directly accompany you through the entire game. You’ll split up much more frequently, so, for example, you’ll find yourself working your way through antlion nests and crushing antlion grubs all by your lonesome. You’ll also negotiate a mine with the help of a vortigaunt who happens to serve as a subtle form of comic relief. It spouts dialogue that plays off of the serious, spiritual tone that most of these aliens take, only applying it to things such as crates full of supplies that just flew down a broken mineshaft and out of reach. These bits alone give Episode Two a much different tone than the previous games, but there are also significant gameplay alterations.

Episode Two marks the return of the lengthy vehicle sequences seen in Half-Life 2. There’s a large block of action that takes place with you moving from spot to spot in what appears to be a stripped-down Dodge Charger. There are also a couple of big set pieces, such as one sequence where you have to defend the center of a mine from relentless antlion attacks. Likewise, the game’s final sequence takes place in a wide-open area and, without getting too specific, feels very different from anything Half-Life 2 has done so far. Although you won’t encounter any new weapons in Episode Two, the developers have at least broken the flashlight power meter out from the same auxiliary power that you use to sprint. This is a smart change that doesn’t make much sense in terms of continuity between episodes, but it’s handy and the sort of thing you wish they’d roll back into the much darker, much more flashlight-oriented action of Episode One. At about four or five hours, Episode Two is also longer than Episode One.

With all that Half-Life, you’d think that the other two parts of this package would be minor additions thrown in to make the deal sound more attractive. But Portal is probably the greatest thing about The Orange Box. It’s a clever mix that combines first-person action with very focused puzzle-solving. It’s also completely hilarious. The premise is simple. You’re a woman who wakes up in a tiny box inside some lab facility run by a mysterious company called Aperture Science. You’re presented with a portal that lets you walk out of the room and into another. From there, the game gradually introduces you to portals and eventually gives you a gun that you can use to fire portals onto walls, ceilings, and floors. Your primary and alternate fire buttons are used to create blue and orange portals, respectively, and walking, jumping, or falling into one portal sends you out of the other one. You can also pick up objects, such as large boxes, which often must be placed on large buttons to open doors so you can proceed through a variety of test chambers.

Portal can be a real mindbender, so stop and think about what you’re doing before you do it.

Along the way, a computerized female voice guides you…and misguides you. The dialogue from the computer supervising your test gets more and more overtly funny as you play and leads to a very satisfying conclusion, including what might be the best end-credit song ever written. Later puzzles force you to pull off some tricky portal maneuvers and require you to consider how much momentum you have when you enter a portal, given that the same momentum is carried with you when you come out the other side. So if you jump down into a floor portal and have the exit portal set on a side wall, you’ll rocket out of that portal with the velocity you had when falling into the hole on the floor.

Upon finishing Portal, which may take you three hours or so if you’re able to quickly grasp the concepts that are presented, you’ll unlock a series of advanced challenges. These include six harder versions of puzzles from the main game, and challenges that ask you to finish levels under certain limits, such as the time it takes you to complete the level, the number of portals you use, or the number of steps you take. The advanced puzzles are tough, but not impossible. However, the challenges are much rougher. There are bronze, silver, and gold medals awarded for each of the three challenge types across six levels. Even after you’ve figured out the puzzles, Portal remains fun and is worth coming back to again and again, just to listen to the dialogue and spend a few fleeting moments with the weighted companion cube. It’s a shame that it had to end this way.

Team Fortress 2 is the multiplayer component to The Orange Box, and it’s been a long time coming. Almost a decade, in fact. But we’ll leave out the history lesson and get right down to business. Like its predecessor, Team Fortress 2 is a class-based multiplayer shooter in which the red team dukes it out with the blue team. There are six maps in the game, each with its own set of objectives. So 2fort is your basic “capture the flag” type of game, wherein each team tries to get into the basement, collect the enemy’s intelligence (a briefcase), and return it home. The rest of the maps deal with the capture and defense of control points in different ways. For example, some maps put both teams on a course to capture the enemy’s base, but require you to control the other points on the map to get a shot at the final objective. Hydro is an interesting map because it takes the control-point concept a little further by breaking each point up into its own specific area of the map. After each capture, the game is reset; a different part of the level is used for the next conflict, which makes it feel like multiple maps in one level. That’s a good thing, too, because the downside of TF2 is that there are only six maps to choose from, and 2fort is the only capture-the-flag map.

Capturing control points is much easier if you work as a team.

Choosing your character class is a vitally important decision. The right answer is a mixture of personal preference and your current situation, because each class has unique weapon loadouts and abilities. The scout can’t take as much damage as other classes, but he’s faster, can double jump, and captures control points twice as quickly as other classes, which makes him a vital but fragile man on the battlefield. The soldier is your standard no-frills class, but his default weapon is a rocket launcher, which is handy. The pyro packs a flamethrower, which is fun to use. Then there’s the demo man as well as the heavy, both of whom are slower-moving, tougher targets that bring heavy firepower along with them. The engineer’s main weapon is a shotgun, but he can also build things such as turrets and teleporters, which can have a huge impact on the game. The medic can heal other players and let out an ubercharge that can turn players invincible for brief periods of time. Teaming up a medic with a heavy can be an incredibly devastating combo. There’s a sniper class for those who like to shoot people in the face from long distances. Finally, there’s the spy class, which you can use to disguise yourself as a member of the opposite team, turn invisible, and place sappers that eliminate pesky engineer turrets. The classes feel as if they’ve been balanced out fairly well, and for each action there’s an appropriate counter. But none of that sounds particularly special, does it?

The thing that makes Team Fortress 2 so special is its graphical style. Rather than going with the ultrarealistic military look that’s still all the rage these days with the kids, TF2 has an over-the-top, cartoonish design to it that starts with the great-looking characters. They’re really well animated, and each class just has a ton of personality. The level design holds up its end of the bargain, with a visual style that occasionally reminds you of old Road Runner cartoons with their rocky, Southwestern styles.

The good doctor’s waiting patiently for your arrival.

In case you haven’t played the two already-released games in the Half-Life 2 saga, they tell the story of Gordon Freeman, your silent protagonist. At the end of the original Half-Life, the scientist was placed into stasis by a mysterious, nameless figure known outside of the HL universe as the G-Man. This governmental-looking guy pops up right at the beginning of HL2 to awaken Gordon and, apparently, place him on a train headed into City 17. This is a very different world than the one Gordon left behind. Time has passed, though it’s unclear how much. The alien invasion from the first Half-Life has resulted in the Seven Hour War, at the end of which humanity surrendered to a force now known as the Combine. But even with the human race under complete lockdown, there’s still a group of rebels out there fighting for freedom. Some of these rebels are scientists that come directly from the Black Mesa facility where the original Half-Life took place. You quickly hook up with the rebels and the “good” aliens, the vortigaunts, all of whom speak of you in hushed tones, as though you were a legendary hero. Half-Life 2 is a very lengthy adventure with somewhat odd pacing. The game contains two very long vehicle sequences that perhaps go on a bit too long, but let’s let sleeping dogs lie. This 2004 game is an absolute classic that should be played and enjoyed by almost anyone that comes into contact with it.

Episode One picks up right after the events of Half-Life 2 and serves as a sort of epilogue to the Half-Life 2 story. Without going too deep into the plot events, City 17 is about to blow up and you are way too close to it to survive the blast. Joining you is Alyx Vance, a girl that pops up to fight alongside you at various points in Half-Life 2. Here, she’s with you for most of the game, for better and for worse. On the one hand, she’s a great computer-controlled gunner who feels almost indestructible, which means that you can sit back and let her do most of the fighting if you feel like it. On the other hand, her excitable nature can be a little grating, and it feels as if she’s along for the ride just to point out stuff that the developers wanted you to see. Most of her speech seems to follow the formula of “Hey, Gordon, look at this [key item you need to interact with to proceed]” or “Whoa, look at this [scripted sequence of things falling down or exploding]!”

The story is probably the weakest point about Episode One, considering that nothing really happens. You start playing, and your goal is to delay the blast; you do that, and then escape. Along the way, though, you’ll experience some neat gameplay, much of which is built around the use of the gravity gun. Compared to the huge adventure in Half-Life 2, Episode One was a weird way to continue the adventure. Now that you can play it as a three- or four-hour chunk of a larger package, it works much better.

Each Team Fortress 2 map has a little intro movie to show you the ropes.

By comparison, the graphics in the Half-Life games and in Portal are vastly different, even though all of these games are running on variations of the same engine. The Half-Life 2 games do a great job of showing you torn-apart human cities and postapocalyptic landscapes, and they still have some of the best facial animation you’ll see in a video game. Portal has a pristine laboratory look to most of its levels that really fits with the game’s premise, and the effects for the portals themselves are pretty cool. TF2′s unique visual style sets it apart from the cookie-cutter military shooters out there and injects some humor into the proceedings at the same time.

The package also has wonderful sound across all of its games. Half-Life 2 and its additional episodes probably have the best (and most) music of the bunch, and the soundtrack in the Half-Life games is really great. Portal and TF2 definitely have some good music, as well. Likewise, there’s a healthy amount of voice acting across the five games, and most of it is quite good. The Team Fortress 2 classes all have specific voice taunts that add to their personalities. Portal’s computer voices are outstanding, and the different characters in Half-Life 2 turn in terrific and believable performances.

With The Orange Box out on both the PC and the Xbox 360, it’s worth noting that there are a handful of differences between them, but it’s hard to go wrong with either version. For starters, the PC version is $10 cheaper and, provided that you have modern hardware, it also looks better than the Xbox 360 version. The 360 version doesn’t run as smoothly, though its frame rate is hardly a problem, either. Furthermore, the textures used throughout Half-Life 2 simply don’t look as good in 2007 as they did in 2004. Consequently, viewing them on a large HDTV doesn’t really do them any favors, though the 360 version utilizes high dynamic range lighting that gives you more realistic-looking effects than Half-Life 2 had on the PC at its time of release.

Of course, the 360 version has achievement points. In fact, it has 99 separate achievements, more than any other game to date, though they still total up to 1,000 points overall. Spreading the 1,000 across five games means that no single achievement is worth very much, even though some of them ask you to do some out-of-the-ordinary things, such as playing through the entire Ravenholm chapter using only the gravity gun, or finishing Episode One and firing exactly one bullet over the course of the entire game. Each game has an achievement browser that shows you the achievements that relate to that specific game, though some of the achievements for the Half-Life 2 games cross over from one game to another.

An achievement browser shows you the tasks that apply to each specific game.

The achievement browser that Valve has built also shows your progress in some cases. For example, there’s an achievement for smashing every single antlion grub in Episode Two. The catch is that there are 333 grubs in all. It’s nice to know how many you have left. On the PC, Valve has rolled an achievement system into Steam, its digital content delivery system. The community side of Steam now lets you look at how long players spend playing each game, and the same achievements used in Team Fortress 2, Portal, and Episode Two are also present in your Steam profile. The difference is that they don’t tie back into your Microsoft-branded gamertag, and there’s no point count associated with each achievement on the PC, either. It’s an interesting addition to the service, which is becoming quite a service these days, though we’re still patiently waiting for a fully digital burrito-delivery system to be implemented.

But that’s beside the point. You don’t need burritos, sealed dealer cases of baseball cards, or fully integrated fitness systems thrown in at no additional charge to make The Orange Box a great deal. It’s practically guaranteed that if you enjoy video games, you’ll find at least one thing to like in this collection, though there’s also a very good chance that you’ll really enjoy all of it.

Origanal post by:Gamespot.com

Daxter

Daxter Unlockables

Extras

Unlockable vides by collecting Precursor Orbs.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Intro Animatic	800 Precursor Orbs
Game in Construction	900 Precursor Orbs
Concept Art	700 Precursor Orbs
E3 2005 Trailer	600 Precursor Orbs
Behind the Scenes	1000 Precursor Orbs

Minigame Unlockables

Unlockable items and codes accessed by getting golds on the minigames.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Website Clue A	Gold on Matrix I Minigame
Website Clue B	Gold on Braveheart Minigame
Website Clue C	Gold on Lord of the Rings I Minigame
Website Clue D	Gold on Matrix II Minigame
Indiana Jones Hat	Gold on Indiana Jones Minigame
Pants	Gold on Lord of the Rings II Minigame

Minigames

Minigames that are unlocked when certain amounts of orbs are collected.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Matrix I Minigame	Collect 1 Orb
Braveheart Minigame	Collect 100 Orbs
Lord of the Rings Minigame	Collect 200 Orbs
Indiana Jones Minigame	Collect 300 Orbs
Matrix II Minigame	Collect 400 Orbs
Lord of the Rings II Minigame	Collect 500 Orbs

Daxter’s Goggles

Connect Daxter to Jak X Combat Racing for the PS2 and you can unlock the option to toggle whether or not Daxter wears his goggles over his eyes.

Modified Scooter

Get 100% in Jak X and when you connect to Daxter you will get a pimped out scooter with different paint job and flames decals.

Daxter Secrets

Jak Mask

The Mask can be found in the prison level, In the socond cell block with 3 guards patrolling it. If you sneak behind the guards, fallowing the guars counter clockwise. You will find the key behind the second pillar. Now the first door you see(northeast) open it and smash the picture on the shelf. The Jak Mask is now yours.

Sly Cooper Mask

The Sly Cooper Mask is in the City Port area. There is a box behind the warp gate to Emerald Isle that you can jump onto. Jump up on it, then go behind it and turn back the way you came. You will see the back of the box has a picture on it. Smash the picture, then go inside the box. Inside is the Sly Cooper Mask.

Human Daxter Mask

The Human Daxter Mask is in the Hotel Level. After the first pipe slide, you run up a slope. When you get to the top, trun around. You should see a ledge. After you get the Flamethrower attachment, you can reach it. On the ledge is the picture. Smash it, and You get the Human Daxter Mask, and the Hat.

Samos Mask

The Samos Mask is in the Lumbermill stage. After the first bug zapper, you have to pass a few saw blades. After that , if you look to your right, you’ll see a tunnel with a saw blade in it. Look towards your left. You’ll see a stream. Jump off the platform to your left, and hover, staying close to the wall. After a few seconds, you’ll come to a small space in the wall. Inside is the picture.Smash it, and you get the Samos Mask.

Ratchet Mask

The Ratchet Mask is in the Subway level. After the part where you jump from train to train, you’ll come to a section where you have to climb up some net, while avoiding the energy going up it. When you reach the top, look down the side closest to the entrance to next part of the level. Drop down onto the ledge, smash the picture, and you get the mask.

Clank Mask

The Clank Mask is in Tanker 1. After Several of the spring pads, you have to climb up a wall. When you get to the top, turn around. there’s another wall you can climb. Hover over to it, climb it, then turn around again. You’ll see the picture on the ledge across from you. Hover over, then smash it.

My Review:

The Good

• Gorgeous, simply gorgeous  
• Outstanding sound and music  
• Wonderful adaptation of the standard Jak gameplay  
• A lot of things to do in the game, and reason to play through again.

The Bad

• Some slight control and camera issues  
• Still using the Jak formula, for better or for worse.

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Daxter may be the fifth game in Sony’s flagship Jak and Daxter franchise, but it’s still responsible for many firsts. It’s the first game in the series that doesn’t star Jak, the once-mute-turned-brooding protagonist. It’s the first game in the series to appear on a system other than the PlayStation 2. And it’s the first time the PSP has ever looked so good. Simply put, fans of Jak and Daxter who were disappointed that the latest console release, Jak X: Combat Racing, strayed from the franchise’s formula need not be disappointed any longer. Daxter is every bit as entertaining as its PS2 counterparts, looks absolutely stunning, and manages to pack the full console experience into a handheld without being dumbed down in the slightest. Frankly, the bar for PSP games, in terms of graphics and gameplay, has just been raised. Though Daxter is a little formulaic, especially for those familiar with previous Jak games, the formula works, and it works surprisingly well on the PSP.

Jak who?

Taking place directly before Jak II, Daxter follows the story of the so-named hero during the years that his buddy Jak was imprisoned, learning how to be an angst machine. Fortunately for you, it appears Daxter had plenty to do during that time: getting to star in an adventure all on his own to save Haven City from nefarious and dastardly…bugs. Yup, bugs. And to nail the point home, Daxter’s primary weapon is a fierce…electric…flyswatter. From the game’s entire premise to some of the more minute details, you’ll experience a lot of the series’ typical brand of irreverent humor, maybe even more so in this game because Daxter has always been the driving force behind it, and now you don’t have to worry about sullen Jak bringing the mood down. It’s in this way that the game is particularly endearing–not because it’s unique or innovative, but because of how cohesively and effectively it takes an existing franchise and gives it a new spin.

If you’ve played either Jak II or Jak 3, you’ll feel quite at home with Daxter, because the layout of Haven City and the mission-based structure of the gameplay are identical to those of the previous games. When the adventure begins, Daxter is…well, he’s telling tall tales in a bar again, but shortly thereafter he begins employment at the Critter-Ridder Extermination Company. Since it’s the only remaining exterminator shop that Haven City has left, and since there’s suddenly a real infestation crisis (two problems which are not unrelated), Daxter has his hands full trying to pull his weight and prove his worth to the Critter-Ridder shop manager, Osmo.

In each level, you have several objectives to complete. There’s the main objective that has been laid out for you, which might consist of killing enemies, destroying insect hives, or collecting objects. As you’re playing through, you can also choose to do two optional secondary objectives, which are reminiscent of Jak games of old, collecting Metal Bug gems and precursor orbs. Though the mission is generally straightforward, completing the secondary objectives can sometimes prove to be a real challenge. Fortunately, you only need to clear the main objective to progress the story, so you can always return to collect all the items later. Playing cleanup is also easier later, since you’ll often have better weapons and moves to get through the level more quickly. In fact, the way this works is done extraordinarily well, giving you quite an incentive to play through again to hunt for all the items.

The two tools at Daxter’s disposal are his previously mentioned (very fierce) flyswatter, and an insecticide sprayer that gets some righteous upgrades in the later levels, to become a flamethrower and then a sonic blaster of sorts. Daxter is also able to do some light platforming, including double-jumping and scaling climbable-looking surfaces. The dynamic that is most interesting, however, is that his sprayer also serves as a propulsion device, allowing Daxter to hover or boost up in the air, giving him more distance and height than merely jumping would allow. Although this is mighty reminiscent of the water pump from Super Mario Sunshine, the mechanic works extremely well, if not better, in Daxter. You’ll spend most of the game switching between the sprayer as a weapon and the sprayer as a platforming device, and it all works quite effortlessly.

There’s a lot of stuff to pick up, and incentive to do it.

Most of the gameplay has you proceeding from one area to the next, fighting, and maneuvering around various enemies and obstacles, and fighting large bosses, but there are some alternate gameplay elements along the way. One is the zoomer, which Daxter uses in a couple of different missions to chase down enemies or objectives that would be out of reach if he were simply on foot. There are a few other great mechanics, like the level that requires you to jump across the tops of moving trains, or the level that is practically taken out of Metal Gear Solid. Though none of these mechanics are particularly original, they’re varied enough to keep you on your toes for the duration of the game. Also, as you collect precursor orbs, you’ll be able to unlock dream sequence minigames. Each dream sequence borrows heavily from well-known movies, a couple more than once, like The Matrix, Indiana Jones (why did it have to be snakes?) and The Lord of the Rings. Though all of the game’s minigames consist of virtually identical gameplay, tasking you to properly time hitting the PSP’s directional pad and face buttons, they’re a nice break from the run-and-gun gameplay, and they offer you the ability to unlock additional moves, like an uppercut, or to increase Daxter’s health meter.

One of the immediately obvious things about Daxter is the game’s stellar presentation. The graphics are simply beautiful. The animation quality both inside and outside of the cutscenes is as rich as it ever has been before. And you’ll wander through several different gorgeous environments, even if most of the game’s later levels are repeats of the earlier ones. The game also manages to run pretty large environments with minimal loading times and almost no loss of frame rate whatsoever. Whatever formula was used to get Daxter working so efficiently on the PSP should be used as the model for PSP games from here on out. If a game like Lumines is the equivalent of peeking through the keyhole of the PSP’s graphic capabilities, Daxter kicks the door in. The sound is equally impressive, not missing a beat (literally) when it comes to detail. When you jump on the scooter, you’ll hear the engine rev up until it reaches a nice steady gurgle. Every aspect of both the sound and music is fine-tuned, so you’ll notice how effective the combination of buzzers, moving doors, and music presents something even as simple as the ambiance in an elevator. The voice acting is also outstanding, and Daxter is once again voiced by Newsies-star Max Casella, who nails Daxter’s humor and awkwardness perfectly.

The game’s most noticeable flaw is that it might take awhile to get used to the control and camera. 3D platformers are notoriously tricky when it comes to both these elements, especially on handheld systems. Both the camera and the control scheme are implemented about as well as can be expected (but not flawlessly) so it might take you a little while to get accustomed to moving around. And though the game is quite linear, sending you directly from one mission to the next, some of the levels are so open that you might backtrack a little more than you’d like. In some respects, this gives the game depth, but in others, you might find the repetition tiresome. For the most part, though, the game is both easy to follow and open-ended, making the gameplay fairly long without being tedious.

Asps. Very dangerous. You go first.

The single-player is rich enough to make the game worthwhile, but there is also a multiplayer mode, bug combat, that makes for a nice diversion. Essentially, as you play through the game, you’ll find additional hidden pickups for use in multiplayer. These pickups are caged bugs, spells that you can assign to them, and boosts that will bump up their stats for the fights. After you’ve collected the items, you can exit out and play the bug combat mode, which is a turn-based version of rock-paper-scissors in which you can fight either the computer or a multiplayer opponent. Aside from collecting the items to make your bug as powerful as possible, there’s little purpose to the bug combat. Still, it’s a nice addition to an already solid game. There are also a few extra unlockables that you’ll get from perfecting the game and/or hooking your PSP up to a copy of Jak X: Combat Racing. The most elusive pickups are a bunch of masks that Daxter can wear. They’re pretty difficult to find, but you’ll probably bump into the Jak mask just in time to rescue him from prison. The addition of all these extras, cheats, and little goodies gives Daxter a richness that many other games in the genre lack.

Daxter follows the Jak formula closely, but in the absence of a Jak game in the end of last year, Daxter plugs the hole almost perfectly, by offering console-rich action-platforming gameplay that is almost better because it’s on the PSP. Setting new standards for what the PSP is capable of, especially when it comes to graphics, Daxter is going to be enjoyable for almost anyone, even people who might not normally be interested in the gameplay. If you’re a PSP owner, platformer enthusiast or not, you simply can’t go wrong with Daxter.

Origanal post by:Gamespot.com

Crysis

Crysis Passwords

Mods

The codes can be entered in the console or in a user-created System.cfg file. The console must be unlocked by using “con_restricted = 0″ before any of the cheats can be used in the console.

Password	Effect
cl_strengthscale = 1 (any number)	Multiplies punch strength by this factor.
g_meleeWhileSprinting = [0, 1]	Disables or enables melee attacks while sprinting.
g_suitCloakEnergyDrainAdjuster = 1 (any number)	Multiplies energy consumption of cloaking by this number.
g_suitRecoilEnergyCost = 15 (any number)	Multiplies energy consumption of each shot fired in strength mode.
g_suitSpeedEnergyConsumption = 110 (any number)	Amount of energy consumed in speed mode while sprinting.
time_scale = 1 (any number)	Affects the rate at which time passes in the game.
g_suitSpeedMult = 1.85 (any number)	Movement speed in speed mode is multiplied by this number.
pl_swimBaseSpeed = 4 (any number)	How fast you can swim.
pl_swimJumpSpeedBaseMul = 1 (any number).	How quickly you jump out of the water.
pl_fallDamage_SpeedFatal = 13.7 (any number)	Fall speed in meters/second at which you die.
pl_fallDamage_SpeedSafe = 8 (any number)	Maximum speed in meters/second at which you take no damage.
v_goliathmode = [0, 1]	Disables or enables infinite health for all vehicles in the game.
g_walkmultiplier = 1 (any number, but if too high, you can’t move)	Multiply player movement speed by this factor.
g_suitarmorhealthvalue = 200 (any number)	How much damage armor mode energy shields can take.
g_godMode = 1	God mode
i_unlimitedammo = 1	Unlimited ammunition
g_playerSuitArmorModeHealthRegenTime = 0	Instant health regen
g_playerSuitArmorModeHealthRegenTimeMoving = 0	Instant health regen while moving
g_playerSuitHealthRegenTime = 0	Set health regen time to zero
g_playerSuitHealthRegenTimeMoving = 0	Set regen time while walking to zero
g_playerSuitHealthRegenDelay = 0	No waiting until regen starts
g_playerSuitEnergyRechargeTimeArmor = 0	Instant energy
g_playerSuitEnergyRechargeTimeArmorMoving = 0	Instant energy while moving
g_playerSuitEnergyRechargeTime = 0	Set energy regen time to zero
g_playerSuitEnergyRechargeDelay = 0	Do not wait until energy regen starts
g_playerHealthValue = 900.0	Extra health
g_difficultyLevel = 1	Set difficulty; “1″ is easy “4″ is most difficult
ai_IgnorePlayer = 1	AI ignores player
i_noweaponlimit = 1	No weapon limit

My Review:

It was hard not to be completely impressed when the first images and videos of Crysis appeared about 18 months ago. Scenes of lush jungles and towering alien war machines looked light-years beyond what seemed possible. Of course, the two questions that revolved around Crysis since its announcement were whether it would deliver on those visuals and whether it would deliver a game worthy of those fancy graphics. It turns out that the answer to both those questions is a resounding yes, as Germany’s Crytek has proven that its 2004 hit Far Cry was no fluke. In fact, it was just the beginning from this studio. With its sophomore effort, Crytek has managed to deliver an incredibly advanced and exciting first-person shooter that practically rewrites the rules for the entire genre.

Welcome to the prettiest jungle that you have ever seen in a game. Notice that it’s starting to snow?

Crysis is an alien invasion game set in the year 2020. An archeological team on a remote Pacific island is captured by an invasion force of North Koreans, and your US Special Forces team is dispatched to investigate and rescue the scientists. Clad in high-tech nanosuits capable of boosting your strength, speed, and armor, as well as cloaking you temporarily to the enemy, you’re parachuted into a tropical paradise that’s crawling with intelligent enemies and something else that’s tearing both the North Koreans and US forces to shreds.

Like Far Cry, the first half of Crysis is essentially a “sandbox” game where you’re put in the middle of incredibly large levels and tasked with an objective. How you get the job done is pretty much entirely up to you, which is part of the brilliance of the game’s design. For instance, the environments are big enough to give you a wide range of latitude. Do you have to get to a certain point on the map? You can take a meandering route that avoids patrols and go stealthy, or try the up-front approach and try to blast your way through, with the danger of enemy reinforcements showing up. Need to infiltrate a North Korean-held village? You can try the front gate, or maybe explore and find a quieter way in.

Couple these huge environments with the powers of the nanosuit, and you have a ton more options. You can play like the eponymous character from the movie Predator and use your cloaking abilities to stalk North Korean patrols, picking them off one by one and watching the survivors react in confusion. That could be via a silenced rifle, or simply coming up from behind a guard and grabbing him by the throat and hurling him off a cliff, or through the roof of a building, or against a tree, or whatever catches your fancy. Enhanced speed and strength give you an amazing amount of mobility, so you can vault atop buildings and come down behind someone, or run up against a North Korean vehicle next to a cliff and push it over the side. In a heartbeat you can switch between different roles, from stealthy assassin to seemingly unstoppable death dealer. It’s a game that makes you feel like a superhero, though not an invincible one, because you simply can’t run roughshod over the enemy. Crysis rewards smart, fast thinking.

The firefights are stunning, as well as challenging, whether you’re tackling North Korean soldiers or alien war machines.

It helps that the game features a high degree of advanced physics and destructibility in a highly dynamic world. Getting caught in a firefight in the jungle is a cinematic treat, thanks to the way the bullets will chop down trees, while branches sway from impacts. This isn’t just a visual effect, either, as falling timber can kill if it lands on someone. There’s all sorts of emergent behavior like that throughout the game, events that spring up completely unintended or unforeseen. In one instance, the flaming wreckage of a chopper landed on a hut, crushing it and killing all those inside.

Meanwhile, the gunplay and ballistics modeling make this shooter feel as if you’re handling real weapons. Trying to hit a target at long engagement ranges is challenging thanks to weapon recoil and other factors. The North Koreans are encased in body armor, so they take some time to gun down, unless you aim for the head, which usually puts them on the ground. At your disposal is a variety of firearms, like shotguns and assault rifles. One of the neat aspects of the game is that you can fix up your weapons on the fly, adding scopes, silencers, and grenade launchers, provided you’ve found them. There are trade-offs for each add-on. Silencers let you take down guys quietly, though they reduce bullet damage, meaning you’ve got to make every shot count. Or flashlights mounted on your weapons might help you out in dark levels, but will give you away.

It’s not just infantry combat, as you can hop into almost every vehicle in the game, as well as take part in an incredible tank battle.

Crysis gives you all of these toys and ratchets the action higher and higher the deeper you get into it. The first level of the game introduces you to the sandbox combat and the nanosuit. From then on, the battles become larger and more intense as the action escalates. You’ll storm North Korean-held villages and bases; encounter their counter to your nanosuit; take part in a chaotic assault on a North Korean harbor; and from there the game accelerates. Next is a wild tank battle in a tropical mountain valley, with helicopters and jet fighters roaring overhead. There’s a sheer rush as your tank plows through vegetation and knocks down trees as missiles and tank fire erupt all around you. Meanwhile, the vehicle explosions are convincing, right down to the way ammunition cooks off and sends spirals of smoke outward. It’s visual poetry of destruction. You’re not confined to your tank the entire time, either. You can jump out at any time and use your suit powers and rifle to take on enemy infantry. When they’re dead, pick up their dropped rocket launchers and engage vehicles in a cat-and-mouse-style game.

As events in the game continue to ramp up, you’ll find yourself inside the alien ship, the zero-gravity environment delivers a visually strange and yet wondrous setting. As you navigate through the environment and engage the aliens you have to figure out your way through the level. Escape the alien ship and you’re tossed into a frozen environment against the alien foe. After the alien vessel, the game becomes less free form and more linear, but it also amps up the action along the way, reflecting the way that the stakes are being raised. Now you’re trying to fight your way out of the alien sphere, which means dodging war machines that look like something from The Matrix. There are a few more surprises in store from that point before you get to the ultimate showdown.

The alien environment feels appropriately otherworldly, and it feels like you’re under the sea.

The one criticism that can be leveled on the story is that it leaves you screaming for more. While there’s an adrenaline-packed finale, you still don’t want the game to end on the note that it does. The single-player campaign is around eight to 10 hours long, which is a healthy amount for a shooter. There’s a lot of replay here, too, as you can experiment with a multitude of different approaches. Plus, it’s fun to go back and try out the large, set-piece battles again and again, since they can unfold in different ways thanks to the dynamic nature of the combat and the artificial intelligence.

Speaking of which, the AI is generally excellent in a fight, as enemy soldiers use cover and concealment effectively. They also know how to lay down suppressing fire and are great at tossing grenades to flush you out of hiding. Getting in a firefight in the jungle with these guys is always fun, because they’ll make you work for it at the default normal difficulty setting. (However, the AI can suffer from the same problem all shooters seem to have; mainly that bad guys sometimes don’t know what’s going on down the road from them.) When you take damage, find cover and your armor and health will regenerate. If you die, you reload to the last checkpoint or quick save. Meanwhile, Crysis includes a special hard mode called delta, which is a lot of fun, because rather than making the game tougher by cheating and giving the bad guys more powerful weapons, delta takes away some of the gameplay crutches that help you at lower difficulty levels. For instance, incoming grenades are no longer highlighted, so you’ve got to pay attention now, and your health regeneration is slower. And the best part about delta is that all enemy soldiers speak fully in Korean, so unless you understand Korean, you’re going to have a much harder time trying to figure out what they’re planning to do.

The single-player game is a considerable accomplishment by itself, but Crytek has also included a full-featured multiplayer mode called power struggle that combines the best of the Battlefield games and Counter-Strike. The goal in power struggle is that each 16-man team (for 32 players total) must destroy the opposing team’s base, but to do so they have to construct alien weaponry at a central prototype facility. To power the prototype facility, though, both teams need to seize and hold power stations throughout the map. In addition, there are bunkers and factories that can be captured; capturing a bunker allows your team to spawn in forward positions, while capturing a factory allows you to purchase vehicles that can help your side. Whenever you help your team by killing the enemy or seizing an objective, you gain points that can be used to purchase more advanced weapons, vehicles, and gear. It’s an excellent multiplayer mode, and it comes with five large maps to support it. Keep in mind that everyone has their suit powers as well, so in addition to all the running and gunning and vehicle driving, there’s plenty of leaping and speed running and cloaking going on.

Power struggle is Battlefield meets Counter-Strike meets the powers of the nanosuit.

Then there’s instant action, which is essentially deathmatch with nanosuit powers. This is a chaotic mode set in some stunning levels, including what feels like a fully modeled Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. You can run around the flight deck, a good chunk of the hanger deck, and many of the corridors. Weapons are strewn about everywhere in instant action, so it’s just a crazy melee of shotguns, snipers, rocket launchers, or nanosuit-enhanced fists. However, a team deathmatch mode is missing, which seems odd. Team deathmatch would have been a welcome addition, since it would have instilled some kind of teamwork into an otherwise free-for-all frenzy. Finally, Crysis multiplayer features built-in voice support, which means that all you need is a microphone to talk to your fellow players and teammates in power struggle.

Graphically, Crysis looks photorealistic at times–it’s that amazing. Crytek has managed to achieve a visual fidelity that blows away anything seen to date, and there are countless moments when you’ll just stop and gape at what you’re seeing. Sometimes it’s just the ordinary, like the setting sun casting all sorts of shadows and rays through the jungle canopy. Other times, it’s something epic, like watching a huge alien war machine stomping toward you. The impressive aspect of the graphics is just how it manages to render huge, open, dynamic, interactive levels. Everything looks amazing up close or far away. Interacting with your squadmates lets you gaze upon the mechanical sinews of their nanosuit, or the incredible facial animation that brings them to life. They’re capable of the subtlest of facial gestures to help convey emotion. Then you can sit on a ridge and peer down using binoculars to a village a kilometer away, scouting the location of the patrolling guards and machine gun posts. The sheer fact that many of the trees and buildings are destructible just adds a level of realism that’s staggering.

You’ll need a fairly high-end system to make the game look its best. In that regard, Crysis really does embody everything that’s both exciting and daunting about PC gaming. A dual-core CPU and the latest generation of video card can run the game at maximum detail settings capably, though you have to lower the resolution a bit to do so. It’s doubtful that a system has been built yet that can run the game at ultra-high resolutions with all the graphical sliders maxed out. Dial down the detail settings to high, which is the next-lower setting, and Crysis still blows contemporary games out of the water. Results are a bit mixed at medium and low settings, though. At the lowest detail settings, objects pop in and out with a fair degree of consistency. It’s annoying at best and frustrating at worst, as it can impact gameplay. Crysis does support both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10, though the latter requires you run the game using Windows Vista. The visuals in DX9 are impressive, but they really come to life in DX10, provided you have the hardware.

This is a backwoods redneck’s worst nightmare: North Koreans, aliens, and a tornado.

The game also sounds fantastic, from the primordial “moans” that the island periodically releases, the soft crunch of dirt and branches under your feet, and all the background sounds that you’d expect in the middle of the jungle. Turn on your suit’s cloak, and everything sounds muffled. The music, by composer Inon Zur, feels inspired by the scores from epic Hollywood action movies, while the voice acting is also excellent, helping to deliver some distinct characters and even a little humor.

If you put it all together, Crysis is just remarkable. This is a game that pushes the envelope in terms of both technology and gameplay and does so with aplomb. Crysis raises the expectations for every shooter to follow when it comes to graphics, interactivity, environments, immersiveness, AI, and gameplay. Quite simply, Crysis represents the first-person shooter at its finest, most evolved form.

Origanal post by:Gamespot.com

Gears Of War

Gears of War Unlockables

Achievements

Complete each achievement to get the allotted gamerscore.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
I Spy with My Little Eye (20)	Kill 100 enemies in ranked matches with the Longshot.
The Nuge (20)	Kill 100 enemies in ranked matches with the Torque Bow.
Fall Down Go Boom (20)	Kill 100 enemies in ranked matches with the Boomshot.
Pistolero (20)	Kill 100 enemies in ranked matches with a pistol.
Don’t You Die On Me (10)	Revive 100 teammates in ranked matches.
I Can’t Quit You Dom (30)	Complete all acts in co-op as Dominic Santiago on any difficulty.
Domination (20)	Complete 10 different co-op chapters as Dominic Santiago on any difficulty.
Dom-Curious (10)	Complete 1 co-op chapter as Dominic Santiago on any difficulty.
A Series of Tubes (20)	Host and complete 50 ranked matches.
Clusterluck (20)	Kill 3 enemies at once 10 different times (on any difficulty).
Zen and the Art Part 2 (20)	Perform 5 perfect active reloads in a row (on any difficulty).
Zen and the Art of Reloading (10)	Perform 25 perfect active reloads (on any difficulty).
A Dish Best Served Cold (30)	Defeat General RAAM on Hardcore Difficulty.
Broken Fingers (30)	Defeat a Corpser on Hardcore Difficulty.
My Love for You Is Like a Truck (30)	Defeat a Berserker on Hardcore Difficulty.
For the Fallen (30)	Recover all of the COG tags (on any difficulty).
Honor-Bound (20)	Recover two-thirds of the COG tags (on any difficulty).
Time to Remember (10)	Recover one-third of the COG tags (on any difficulty).
Commando (30)	Complete all acts on Insane Difficulty.
Completed Act 5 on Insane (30)	Complete Act 5 on Insane Difficulty.
Completed Act 4 on Insane (30)	Complete Act 4 on Insane Difficulty.
Completed Act 3 on Insane (30)	Complete Act 3 on Insane Difficulty.
Completed Act 2 on Insane (30)	Complete Act 2 on Insane Difficulty.
Completed Act 1 on Insane (30)	Complete Act 1 on Insane Difficulty.
Soldier (20)	Complete all acts on Hardcore Difficulty.
Completed Act 5 on Hardcore (20)	Complete Act 5 on Hardcore Difficulty.
Completed Act 4 on Hardcore (20)	Complete Act 4 on Hardcore Difficulty.
Completed Act 3 on Hardcore (20)	Complete Act 3 on Hardcore Difficulty.
Completed Act 2 on Hardcore (20)	Complete Act 2 on Hardcore Difficulty.
Completed Act 1 on Hardcore (20)	Complete Act 1 on Hardcore Difficulty.
Mercenary (10)	Complete all acts on Casual Difficulty.
Completed Act 5 on Casual (10)	Complete Act 5 on Casual Difficulty.
Completed Act 4 on Casual (10)	Complete Act 4 on Casual Difficulty.
Completed Act 3 on Casual (10)	Complete Act 3 on Casual Difficulty.
Completed Act 2 on Casual (10)	Complete Act 2 on Casual Difficulty.
Completed Act 1 on Casual (10)	Complete Act 1 on Casual Difficulty.
Prison Breakout (10)	Completed tutorial level on any skill level.
Seriously … (50)	Kill 10,000 people in versus ranked match total.
Can’t Touch Me (20)	Win 10 ranked matches without losing a round.
Around the World (30)	Win a ranked match on every versus map.
Mix It Up (20)	Win a ranked match in every versus game type.
Don’t Hate the Player (10)	Finish with the highest points in a ranked match.
Always Remember Your First (10)	Finish playing a versus ranked match.
The Money Shot (20)	Kill 100 enemies in ranked matches with a headshot.
Is It a Spider (30)	Kill 100 enemies in ranked matches with grenade tag.
Capital Punishment (20)	Kill 100 enemies in ranked matches with an execution.
Don’t Hurt ‘Em (20)	Kill 100 enemies in ranked matches with the Hammer of Dawn.
It’s a Massacre (10)	Kill 100 enemies in ranked matches with the Chainsaw.
Curb Appeal (20)	Kill 100 enemies in ranked matches with the curb stomp.

Insane Difficulty

Complete the game on either Casual or Hardcore difficulty to unlock Insane difficulty.

Secret Gamer Pic

Complete the game on Insane difficulty to unlock a secret gamer picture. It has the Red Gear’s Symbol behind Marcus Fenix.

Secret Gamer Pic #2

Unlock the “Seriously …” achievement by getting 10,000 kills in ranked multiplayer matches to get that respective GamerPic

New 250 points Achievements

These new achivements requires the new update and is only for Annex mode and the Hidden Font. Maps

Unlockable	How to Unlock
All That Juice (30)	Win 20 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in any game type on the Process multiplayer map
Green Thumb (30)	Win 20 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in any game type on the Garden multiplayer map
Inconceivable (30)	Win 20 rounds of multiplayer matches in Annex by fewer than 5 points
Mind the Gap (30)	Win 20 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in any game type on the Subway multiplayer map
Nub Pwn3r (30)	Win 20 rounds of multiplayer matches in Annex by shutting out the opposing team
Purdy Mouth (30)	Win 20 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in any game type on the Bullet Marsh multiplayer map
THIS! IS! ANNEX! (40)	Complete 100 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in Annex and capture 3 objectives in each match
You Down With E.P.I.C? (30)	Win a multiplayer match of 3+ rounds in any game type on 6 different downloadable maps

Gears of War Easter Eggs

Gears Cereal!

On Act 5, when you are on the train and press the very first button you see, the berserker will magically appear. It will be expressed through a cut scene where it busts through a couple of box, and a lot of objects “explode” from these boxes.If you manage to make it around the berserker, go to the very last car on the train, (the one the berserker appears on,) You will find a cereal box, I believe to be called “Gears Crunch.” On the backside of these boxes, there is a fictional prize you could win (which happens to be a small fluffy pillow!)My  Review:

The Good

• Stellar graphics reset the bar for what consoles can do visually  
• great soundtrack and killer sound effects  
• satisfying gameplay in single-player mode  
• very addictive online play  
• best use of a chainsaw in any game, ever.

The Bad

• Story could have been a bit more fleshed out  
• difficulty could have used some slight tuning.

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In Gears of War, a slab of concrete is your best friend. And if that slab of concrete isn’t around, you can always make do with burned-out cars, piles of metal, huge columns, or even the ever-popular wall next to a doorway. Why are these inanimate objects so friendly? Because if you aren’t hiding behind something in Gears of War, you might as well be dead. Microsoft and Epic have teamed up to create this wicked game of hide-and-seek with high-powered future guns, which delivers one of the most heart-pounding and graphically thrilling experiences of the year. If its exciting campaign doesn’t rope you in, chances are the team-based multiplayer will–either way, Gears of War is downright amazing.

Marcus Fenix disobeyed orders and got locked up, but in tough times, even a traitorous soldier is better than nothing.

The game’s campaign tells the tale of a man named Marcus Fenix. He, like the other soldiers around him, is an extremely thick dude that very clearly doesn’t have time to bleed. The game immediately sets an action movie-like tone, complete with an interesting post-apocalyptic world that’s been overrun by a mysterious force called the Locust. Marcus is a former soldier for the Coalition of Organized Governments, or COG. Their soldiers wear ridiculously huge, bulky armor, but can’t be bothered to wear helmets. They’re just that tough. Or stupid. Either way, Fenix is a former soldier that’s been branded a traitor and locked away, but he’s busted out of prison at the opening of the game, to help in the fight against the Locust. After a brief tutorial level where you and Dom, the soldier that busted you out, make your way out of the Locust-infested prison and, yes, get to the chopper, you’re connected with the other members of Delta Squad and sent out to find Alpha Squad, which is both missing and supposedly in possession of a device that could turn the tide of the war. The game’s story isn’t very deep, and aside from a very brief mention in the front of the manual, it doesn’t really bother to fill you in on the details behind the conflict or the main character’s incarceration. The lack of exposition feels like a missed opportunity to make the characters and the setting even more compelling, and there are parts of the game that seem like they were built specifically to make room for some kind of flashback sequence, but the gameplay is so sharp that you probably won’t care.

You’ll fight a decent variety of enemies in Gears of War. Most of the Locust are humanoids, with minor visual distinctions between the standard troops, ones with shotguns, and so on. Later on, you’ll fight some different-looking humanoid-style enemies that are armed with explosive torque bows, and there are plenty of other critters to face–some small, some screen-filling. They all use slightly different tactics, but the same basic rule applies: Wait for them to pop their heads (or other weak points) out and attempt to shoot it off. The enemy response to your actions has its great moments, but it also has its problems. Enemies hiding behind cover tend to not react when they get hit. From time to time, you might catch the back of an enemy peeking just over a piece of cover, and if you start shooting it, he’ll usually just sit there and let you drill him to death. But in spite of its few problems, the action is tense and extremely enjoyable.

Gears of War consists of a large series of pitched battles between your squad and the enemy forces. If you leave your fool head popped up for too long, it’ll get shot off every single time, so the proper place for you is tucked behind a wall or some other piece of cover. The cover mechanics work very naturally, making it easy to stick to a wall, pop up or around to take shots at the enemy, and get back down safely. Moving between nearby pieces of cover is also very easy to manage.

This isn’t the first time that taking cover has been a focus of gameplay–the mechanics work very similarly to a fairly obscure PlayStation 2 game from Namco called kill.switch. But no game has made this sort of gameplay quite so exciting. One of the greatest feelings in this game is that when you pop out to take a shot, you immediately feel like you’re taking your life into your own hands, because the enemy is very good at opening fire the second they see you and you’ll see those bullets heading your way. This formula remains thrilling from start to finish, though boss fights and a pretty neat vehicle section help to break up the action.

Thankfully, one shot won’t kill you, in most cases. The health meter takes the form of a skull and gear icon that appears onscreen in pieces as you take damage. If it’s completed, that means you took one hit too many and you’re history. But if you can avoid getting shot for a few seconds, the gear fades away and you’re restored to full health. It’s a much quicker recharge than something like Halo’s energy shields, and this helps keep the action moving while reinforcing that you really need to play cautiously.

You’ll usually have three other guys in your squad, but they usually aren’t much help. They’re good for distracting enemies, and they’ll take down a few here and there, but they also tend to get dropped a lot. You can revive them, if you can get over to them and hit the X button, but usually it’s easier to just finish the fight yourself, which brings them all back without exposing you to the same enemy fire that took them down in the first place.

Gears of War is all about ducking, covering, and blasting your enemies whenever they give you an opening.

Gears of War offers two difficulty settings right off the bat, and a third unlocks when you beat the game. The game defaults to the easiest setting, called casual. On this setting, taking cover only becomes important when you’re up against heavy odds or later in the game, when the enemies get tougher. The middle setting, hardcore, feels just right at first–you need to take cover, but you can usually pop up and take shots without immediate punishment. But near the tail end of the game, both difficulties ramp up quite a bit. Hardcore starts to get a little unmanageable. Casual gets to be about as hard as the hardcore setting is near the beginning of the game. And once you unlock insane, you’ll find that it’s aptly named, though not impossible. Overall, the difficulty feels like it could have used a bit more tuning, or another setting that finds the sweet spot between casual and hardcore. But since you can select your difficulty each time you load up your game, it’s easy to set it down to casual if you get stuck at a certain checkpoint, then raise it back up once you’ve made progress. Making your way through the campaign should take most players somewhere from about 10 to 12 hours, depending on the difficulty.

The game has achievements for finishing each of the five acts on each of the three difficulties, and they stack, so if you beat an act on hardcore, you get the casual points, as well. It only seems to keep track of what difficulty setting you’re on when you finish the act, so all this switching around won’t cause any trouble on that front, either. The game’s achievements are pretty good, with a smart mix of points you’ll get for simply playing through the game and some more esoteric ones, like points for playing as Dom in co-op, points for perfectly reloading your weapon many times in a row, doing well online, and so on. None of the points seem that far fetched, but you also won’t have the full thousand during your first couple of days with the game, either.

While the campaign is fine and good alone, it’s even better when you’re playing with another player. You can do so via a split-screen or over Xbox Live, and the good news is that you can continue the campaign from where you’ve played in the single-player, so you can use any mix of single or cooperative play to get through without having to replay missions. The second player takes on the role of Dom, and the game is both more entertaining and significantly easier when playing with a partner. That’s because when players die in co-op, they can be revived, provided they haven’t been blown to bits or their deaths don’t take place during one of the few times when the team splits up, separating the two human players. Online, the co-op behaves quite smoothly, and the graphics in split-screen mode appear to be just as good as they are when you’re playing alone. About the only negative aspect of co-op play is that if a player drops out of an online game, the other player is forced to quit back to the main menu. A more seamless drop-in/drop-out setup would have been cool.

The game’s online options make for some really exciting team-based gameplay.

A big part of making any shooter memorable is the design of its weapons. Gears of War has some very satisfying weaponry that really make the game stand out. The machine gun you’re going to use for most of the game is the Lancer, and in addition to it being a fast-firing death dealer, it also has a unique melee attack in the chainsaw bayonet. Yes, a machine gun with a chainsaw mounted to the bottom of it is just as awesome as it sounds, though since most of the enemies are content to hide behind cover and mow you down if you attempt to get close, you don’t get to use it as often as you might like. But when you do, it’s a terrific display of great, splashy blood effects. The other weapons in the game aren’t quite as flashy, as you’ll get a standard sniper rifle, shotgun, rocket launcher, some grenades, and so on. But you’ll also get to use something called the Hammer of Dawn, which is an orbital satellite that beams down hot, fiery death from above when you paint a target. But the catch is that the satellites have to be lined up above your position and you have to be outside for it to work, so it’s only available in a few very specific situations during the campaign. You can carry four different weapons, but you’ll always have slots reserved for a pistol and for grenades, so you have to make choices about which two main weapons you’ll carry around with you.

Another really cool facet of the gameplay is that there’s a trick to reloading your weapon. By default, reloads take a set amount of time and aren’t anything flashy. But if you look just below the gun indicator on the screen, you’ll see a line sweeping across a bar with a couple of different colors on it. That’s the trick. A button press stops the meter. If you stop it in the gray area, the weapon reloads faster. If you stop it in the tiny white zone, you’ll reload and all the bullets you just fed into your weapon will do more damage. But if you miss and hit it in the black, the gun jams and takes even longer to reload. It’s a fascinating risk-versus-reward scenario that isn’t difficult to master, but when you’re under fire in a tense situation, you’re still likely to screw it up now and then.

In addition to the single-player and co-op play, Gears of War has a team-based multiplayer mode for up to eight players. The four-on-four action is also round-based with no respawns, though like in the co-op game, you can revive other players when they go down. On the other side, though, that means you need to pump a lot more rounds into your enemies after they go down, just to make sure they stay down. Or, alternately, you can run up on their downed body and hit the X button, which delivers a very satisfying life-ending boot to your foe’s head. For as much fun as the weapons are in single-player, they’re actually more exciting here. The Hammer of Dawn becomes a pretty hilarious addition to the game, and you’ll get to use that chainsaw more frequently against unsuspecting players thanks to the way the maps offer multiple ways to get to the same location. The key to multiplayer is to never work alone so that you can always have someone around to revive you and vice versa. Two players rolling up on one player usually (though certainly not always) results in the single player getting decimated. One of the other players may go down, but that’s nothing a revival won’t fix. The game’s 10 maps offer a good variety, and you can mix the action up a bit by changing out the weapons that appear in the map. You can play in three different modes. Warzone is a standard team deathmatch. Assassination puts one player in the leader role and the other three players must fight as protectors. Execution forces you to kill opposing players yourself–if you let them sit there and bleed, they can hammer the A button to revive themselves. With a good number of maps and exciting action, this game appears to have some longevity to it online. If you like, you can also play over a LAN via system link, or locally–though local multiplayer is limited to two players, which isn’t too exciting.

A shooter is only as good as its weapons, and Gears of War has a couple of really outstanding guns in it.

Consider Gears of War to be the game that raised the bar for how console games should look from here on out. The character models are thick and look outstanding. The gray, war-torn environments are nicely varied throughout the game, and the game is full of amazing standout visual moments, such as a train sequence where you see that the sky is full of ink left behind by flying Locust enemies, blocking your view of the stars just enough to prevent you from busting out the Hammer of Dawn. Or, when you get to an underground mine and see a lot of molten, glowing lava all around you. Or, anytime you get to use the chainsaw on anything, ever. Or, the way the camera gets down low and starts shaking like a wartime documentary whenever you start running. It all looks absolutely amazing, from the animation to the game’s over-the-top blood effects.

The game also runs at a very steady frame rate during gameplay. The cutscenes, however, are rendered in real time, and when the action really gets heated in some of the sequences, the visuals chop up. The music in Gears of War is appropriately cinematic and really helps carry the action-movie style that the game is shooting for. The dialogue also gives off an action-movie vibe, mainly because most of it is totally meatheaded. The COG soldiers aren’t scientists–they’re dumb, strong soldier boys that are at home when they’re behind the trigger. As a result, almost all of the dialogue is appropriately gruff and filled with the sort of “let’s rock!” enthusiasm that you’d expect from a team of hardcore shooters. The weapons are also enhanced by great sound effects. The squish of flesh being ripped apart by the chainsaw, in particular, is outstanding.

Gears of War is a game that capitalizes on all of the promises made by the next generation of gaming. It looks more than a few steps beyond what consoles have been doing to this point, and the gameplay is supremely fulfilling from start to finish in all of its various modes. While there have certainly been plenty of similar shooters before it, the game’s great weapons, amazing graphics, and absolutely thrilling action make it stand out from the pack in a big, big way.

Origanal post by:Gamespot.com

Super Paper Mario

Paper Mario Easter Eggs

Luigi’s Secret Basement

First, get the Super Boots. Then, go to Mario’s house via Toad Town and stomp the ground inside Mario and Luigi’s bedroom. Eventually, you’ll see a tile on the floor going up when you stomp. Stomp on that tile and the floor will bust open Luigi’s secret basement, and inside is his own secret diary!

Original NES Mario

In Boo Mansion, go through the door across the hall from the entance, the one with a large jar in it. Jump in the jar and NES Mario pops out! Leave the room or jump back in to change back.

Shocked Luigi

To give Luigi a real scare, exit Boo’s Mansion BEFORE getting Lady Bow. Return to Toad Town (You still have to fight Jr. Troopa, darn it), jump into your Pipe, and return home. Enter Mario’s room and look for a strange-looking part of the floorboards (Entrance to Luigi’s Diary). Go through and Luigi will be writing in his diary. He sees you, becoming stunned for a moment, then fleeing.
For fun only. Does NOT affect storyline or Luigi’s Diary entries.

Paper Mario Secrets

Original Mario music

When a new chapter begins, wait a little while and the original ”Super Mario Bros.” music will play.

Free unlimited hearts

While in toad town, from the post office head to the right. Eventualy you will see 3 blue creatures. The one on the left moves its eyes, and the other two dont. Walk in circles around the one with moving eyes to recive more and more hearts!

Unlimited levelling up and easy exp

Normally all enemies stop giving you star points when you pass a certain level and you\’re forced to visit a new area to be able to build any levels. However, there is one hidden enemy in the game you can fight repeatedly regardless of your level and will give you over 40 star points, the equivalent of fighting 40 easy enemies.In the flower fields, take the bottom right hand path and cross the spikes with lakilister. A glowing amayzee dayzee will randomly appear with 1/4 odds. It may run away, so try a dizzy spin attack to daze it before the battle starts and kill it in two turns for massive star points. Travel two screens away and repeat the battle to hit the max level easily.

Avoid using FP

If you can pull off a FP-consuming attack outside of battle (Such as a Spin Jump) and get a First Strike, you will automatically use that attack in battle without using any FP. This also works for Mario’s partners’ attacks.

Avoid fighting the buzzard

On Mt. Rugged, when you encounter the Buzzard enemy, tell it that your name is Luigi, and you won’t have to fight it.

My Review:

The specific balance between platforming action and RPG convention that Intelligent Systems struck with Super Paper Mario earlier this year was revelatory, and it made for one of those genuinely unique game experiences. As good as it was, there was a certain contingency that lamented the change of pace from the first two Paper Mario games. So, for those who wish to relive the good old days, or just want to see what all the fuss is about, Nintendo has brought the original Paper Mario to the Wii Virtual Console. This was regarded as an incredibly well-crafted and ambitious RPG when it hit the N64 in 2001. The ways it played with 2D and 3D visuals, along with its use of real-time combat elements, made for a great Mario experience and a great RPG experience, though the sum of its parts made it suitable for those who didn’t care for one, the other, or even both.

If only our paper-thin protagonist were armed with scissors!

Of course, it’s the unique presentation that gives Paper Mario its name and a certain measure of its personality. The world itself appears polygonal, while Mario and the rest of the characters have the look of paper cutouts. It makes for a ridiculously charming look and feel, and that charm partially excuses some of the boxy environments and fuzzy textures that give the game an aged look in 2007. The music follows suit–the quality of the N64 synthesizers doesn’t always do justice to the quality of the compositions.

The story seems like typical Mario business involving Bowser kidnapping Peach, though this time he’s armed with a powerful artifact called the Star Rod that, in an uncharacteristically dark turn, enables him to give Mario a swift beating at the beginning of the game and toss his limp body off Bowser’s floating castle. Mario, scrapper that he is, pulls himself back together, and goes on a quest to rescue a bunch of power-wielding star spirits before he can juice up and get a rematch with Bowser himself. A strong story is the lynchpin to any good RPG, and Paper Mario’s is a joy. The writing is sharp and funny, the game teems with likeable, memorable characters, and it takes you to virtually every known corner of the Mushroom Kingdom, putting its own spin on all of them.

While Super Paper Mario pitched the balance more towards a platformer peppered with RPG elements, the original Paper Mario went the other way. You’ll explore an overworld, taking on tasks and solving puzzles, but when you encounter an enemy, the game cuts away to a separate, RPG-style battle stage. The combat might be turn-based, but it’s definitely informed by Mario’s platforming roots. When you see an enemy, you can take the initiative by jumping on their head or whacking them with Mario’s massive, Donkey Kong-era hammer. During combat you’ll select your attacks from a menu, but when it comes to executing the attack or defending against one, a well-timed button press can increase or decrease the damage.

Mario is your regular point-man during combat, though you’ll meet a whole lot of interesting side characters during your adventure that will join your party and who can back you up during a fight. These secondary characters can also be critical in solving specific puzzles in the overworld. There are hit points to concern yourself with, as well as flower points, which are used to execute special attacks. Equipment comes into play most prominently with badges, which, when equipped, can give you new abilities or infer all kinds of crazy bonuses. The tricky thing about badges is that they require badge points to equip, and though you regain used badge points whenever you un-equip one, this limits the number and the quality of badges you can have equipped at any time.

The visuals are still charming, even if they’re showing their age.

Every time you earn an experience level, you have to choose whether to boost your hit points, your flower points, or your badge points. It’s a choice you’ll often struggle with, since you can almost always stand to have more of all three at your disposal. A lot of Paper Mario’s core feels pretty typical of Japanese RPGs, but it’s also been streamlined in such a way as to not feel too obtuse or slow-paced. While there are moments when it feels like enemy encounters are coming more often than would be ideal, the combat stays pretty fresh throughout.

This is an epic RPG experience, and for all the hours you’ll spend tearing through Paper Mario, it is a downright steal for the $10 Nintendo is asking. Aside from some visual fuzz inherent to the game’s age, Paper Mario feels as fresh and fun as when it first came out.

Origanal post by:Gamespot.com

BioShock

BioShock Unlockables

Achievements (MAJOR SPOILERS WITHIN)

Complete each achievement to get the allotted gamerscore.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Completed Welcome (10)	Successfully complete the Welcome To Rapture Level.
Maxed One Track (20)	Purchased every slot in one of the Plasmid or Tonic tracks.
Maxed All Tracks (50)	Purchased every slot in all four Plasmid and Tonic tracks.
Bought One Slot (5)	Purchase one slot in any Plasmid or Tonic track.
Upgraded a Weapon (5)	Acquire at least one weapon upgrade.
One Fully Upgraded Weapon (5)	Fully upgrade one weapon.
Two Fully Upgraded Weapons (5)	Fully upgrade two weapons.
Three Fully Upgraded Weapons (10)	Fully upgrade three weapons.
Four Fully Upgraded Weapons (10)	Fully upgrade four weapons.
Five Fully Upgraded Weapons (10)	Fully upgrade five weapons.
Weapon Specialist (20)	Acquire all upgrades for all weapons.
Fully Researched Thug Splicer (10)	Fully research the Thuggish Splicer.
Fully Researched Gun Splicer (10)	Fully research the Leadhead Splicer.
Fully Researched Spider Splicer (10)	Fully research the Spider Splicer.
Fully Researched Houdini Splicer (10)	Fully research the Houdini Splicer.
Fully Researched Nitro Splicer (10)	Fully research the Nitro Splicer.
Fully Researched Rosie (10)	Fully research the Rosie.
Fully Researched Bouncer (10)	Fully research the Bouncer.
Fully Researched Little Sister (10)	Fully research the Little Sister.
Prolific Photographer (5)	Take at least one photo in every research group.
Research PhD (20)	Max out all possible research.
Quality Research Photo (20)	Take a Research Photo of the highest grade.
Researched a Splicer (5)	Take at least one Research Photo of a Splicer.
One Successful Hack (5)	Perform at least one successful hack.
Hacked a Security Bot (10)	Successfully hack a security bot.
Hacked a Security Camera (10)	Successfully hack a security camera.
Hacked a Turret (10)	Successfully hack a turret.
Hacked a Vending Machine (10)	Successfully hack a vending machine.
Hacked a Safe (10)	Successfully hack a safe.
Skilled Hacker (40)	Successfully complete 50 hacks.
Basic Inventor (5)	Successfully invent at least one item.
Avid Inventor (10)	Successfully invent at least 100 items.
Ammo Inventor (25)	Successfully invented all possible ammo types.
Little Sister Savior (100)	Complete the game without harvesting any Little Sisters.
Tonic Collector (50)	Collect or Invent 53 Tonics in the Physical, Engineering and Combat tracks.
Historian (50)	Find every audio diary.
Seriously Good At This (40)	Complete the game on the hardest difficulty setting.
Dealt with every Little Sister (40)	Either Harvest or Rescue every Little Sister in the game.
Lucky Winner (10)	Hit the jackpot at a slot machine.
Toaster in the Tub (10)	Shock an enemy in the water.
Defeated Dr. Steinman (15)	The player has defeated the crazed Dr. Steinman.
Defeated Peach Wilkins (15)	The player has defeated Peach Wilkins.
Irony (10)	The player has taken a picture of Sander Cohen’s corpse.
Became a Big Daddy (30)	The player has become a Big Daddy.
Defeated Atlas (100)	The player has defeated Atlas.
Broke Fontaine’s Mind Control (30)	The player has broken Fontaine’s mind control.
Defeated Andrew Ryan (30)	The player has defeated Andrew Ryan.
Completed Cohen’s Masterpiece (30)	The player has completed Sander Cohen’s great masterpiece.
Restored the Forest (15)	The player has restored the forests of Arcadia.
Found Cohen’s Room (10)	The player has entered Sander Cohen’s personal quarters.
Brass Balls (100)	Beat the game on Hard difficulty without using a Vita Chamber.

My Review:

While on the surface it might look like little more than a very pretty first-person shooter, BioShock is much, much more than that. Sure, the action is fine, but its primary focus is its story, a sci-fi mystery that manages to feel retro and futuristic at the same time, and its characters, who convey most of the story via radio transmissions and audio logs that you’re constantly stumbling upon as you wander around. All of it blends together to form a rich, interesting world that sucks you in right away and won’t let go until you’ve figured out what, exactly, is going on in the undersea city of Rapture.

Rapture is an amazing city that sits at the bottom of the ocean, but something’s gone horribly wrong down there.

BioShock opens with a bang, but the overall plot focuses more on making an emotional impact than an explosive one. The year is 1960, and you’re flying over the Atlantic Ocean. One mysterious plane crash later, you’re floating in the water, apparently the lone survivor, surrounded by the flaming wreckage of the aircraft. But there’s a lighthouse on a tiny island just at the edge of your view. Who in their right mind would put a lighthouse this far out? You swim closer and discover a small submersible called a bathysphere waiting to take you underwater. After catching a breathtaking view of what’s below, you’re sent into the secret underwater city of Rapture. Masterminded by a somewhat megalomaniacal businessman named Andrew Ryan, this city is driven by its own idea of total freedom, with capitalism completely unhindered by governmental meddling and science unhinged from the pesky morals of organized religion. Sounds like the perfect society, right? Well, even before you step out of your bathysphere and into the city, it becomes obvious that everything has gone horribly wrong down here. The city is trashed, and genetic freaks called splicers roam around, attacking anything that gets in front of them. At the heart of the matter is a powerful, corrupting substance called ADAM, which makes all this genetic tinkering possible and allows you to get your first plasmid power, the ability to shoot lightning out of your fingertips.

Character customization is a key trait in BioShock. You have a limited but increasable number of spaces in various customization categories, and you can totally reconfigure all of your different plasmids and tonics at will, at no charge, at specific locations in-game. Plasmids are the active, weaponlike genetic enhancement. Many of these are very straightforward. Incinerate lets you burn things and melt ice. Telekinesis lets you use your left hand as if it were Half-Life 2′s gravity gun. But others are a little more subversive. Security bullseye is a little ball you can toss at enemies, causing any nearby security cameras, turrets, or sentry bots to point in his direction. Enrage can cause enemies to fight one another. Insect swarm causes your arm to shoot bees at your enemies, which unfortunately is far less cool-looking than it sounds. You can also place decoys, plant swirling wind traps for enemies, and so on. While it’s fun to mess around with a lot of the indirect attacks, facing your enemies head-on with the more direct plasmids feels a bit more effective.

Tonics are skills that are slotted just like plasmids, but they have passive effects, like sportboost, which increases your movement and melee attack speed, or natural camouflage, which makes you turn invisible if you stand still for a few seconds. So if you want to make your swinging wrench attacks more powerful, you can slot up things like wrench jockey and wrench lurker, which increase your wrench damage on all attacks and when catching opponents off-guard, respectively. Add bloodlust, which gives you some health back every time you club someone with your wrench, and you’re a melee master with health and plasmid energy (called EVE) to spare. You can also slot some defensive stuff, like static field, which zaps anyone who touches you with a electric radius effect, and armored shell, which reduces the damage you take from physical attacks. There are more than 50 tonics to collect, giving you plenty of options to play around with.

ADAM and EVE combine to let you shoot fire, lightning, ice, wind, bees, and more out of your fingertips.

Most of those plasmids and tonics will have to be purchased using the raw ADAM that you collect from harvesting vessels called little sisters. They’re little girls with a big needle that they use to collect the sought-after stuff from dead bodies, and they’re protected by the baddest enemies in the entire game, hulking armored monsters called big daddies. This is where the game makes you decide to be selfless or selfish. If you harvest the girls, they die, but you get 160 ADAM from them. If you free them and return them to normal, you get only 80 ADAM. There are a limited number of girls to deal with in the entire game, making it very possible that you won’t be able to collect every single purchasable plasmid and tonic, so choose wisely. Either route has benefits and consequences, and there are story considerations as well.

Before you start thinking this is some kind of role-playing game or something, let’s stop right here and say that in addition to all the toys that plasmids and tonics for you to play around with, you’re also going to be carrying around some more conventional firepower. Your melee weapon is a wrench, and you quickly collect a pistol and machine gun. Being that this is 1960 filtered through the isolation of an undersea world that has the art deco style of the first half of the century, the weapons aren’t nearly as high-tech as the genetic code in your body. The machine gun is your basic tommy gun, and the grenade launcher appears to have been cobbled together from coffee cans and other spare parts. You’ll also get a shotgun, a crossbow, and so on. You can also collect different types of ammunition, such as exploding buckshot for your shotgun or missiles for your grenade launcher, and upgrades that increase damage, speed up reloads, and so on. The weapons are functional and the upgrades are pretty good, but the firing action isn’t nearly as exciting as a combat-focused first-person shooter would be. The weapons are loud but don’t feel especially right, and seeing shotgun blasts not even do 50 percent damage to an unarmored human target (on the default difficulty setting) just feels wrong. But that might also say something about the general lack of enemy variety.

There are five types of splicers to deal with, and these are your primary enemies. The splicers are humans who have messed around with ADAM too much and have essentially lost their minds. Now they wander around the city like junkies in need of a fix. The only real difference among them is what they’re carrying. Leadheads have guns, thugs have blunt objects, nitros toss explosives, Houdini splicers can teleport and shoot fireballs, and spider splicers can crawl on ceilings and toss hooks at you. As you go through the game, they get tougher to kill, but there’s no real visual indicator as to why that’s so, leading to some of the weapons feeling a bit weak. Headshots simply shift from killing enemies immediately to not killing enemies immediately. This makes smart use of a combination of plasmids and conventional weapons the best tactic, though even those tactics don’t involve much. The same one-two punch of shocking enemies to stun them and following up with a whack with the wrench is a perfectly viable tactic throughout the entire game, depending on how you’ve placed your tonics.

Though the story is full of heavy-handed homage to Ayn Rand, you don’t need a head full of freshman philosophy to enjoy BioShock.

You’ll find more important human characters at certain points in the story, and though these are set up like boss fights, these guys are just more powerful and resilient versions of existing splicers. You’ll also have to deal with security robots, turrets, and cameras, though these can all be hacked via a neat little hacking minigame to bring them over to your side, allowing for more indirect combat options.

Then there’s the big daddy, which comes in two configurations. The bouncer has a huge drill arm that is used to, you know, drill into people. The rosie likes to launch explosives in your general direction. Both of them are fairly nasty, because they move quickly and dish out a lot of damage while not taking very much from most of your attacks. They protect the little sisters, who are invulnerable to your attacks and can only be dealt with once their protecting big daddy is dead. The big daddy is hardly unbeatable, though you may die a few times while facing your first few. Death in BioShock is barely even a setback. When you die, you’re reconstituted at the nearest vita-chamber and sent on your way with your inventory intact and most of your health.

This isn’t a reload, so everything is as you left it, even the damage that you’ve already done to any surviving enemies. So you can wear down a big daddy by just running at it again and again with little or no care for your health. That, of course, can get tedious, but having that possibility is a blessing–and a curse. On one hand, you’re free to try out new things, like plasmid and tonic combinations, with no penalty if you equip some bum techniques. On the other, there aren’t any real gameplay consequences, so playing with skill isn’t rewarded. You could fumble your way through the 15 or 20 hours it’ll probably take to properly explore Rapture and still see everything there is to see. This, along with three selectable difficulty settings, leaves you with the impression that the game was made to cater to a wide audience, but the hard difficulty setting doesn’t actually impact things like artificial intelligence or force you to play any more skillfully to succeed. The enemies still mostly run at you mindlessly while attacking, occasionally getting into scraps with one another or breaking off to find a healing machine, but they take longer to kill and hurt you more when they hit.

While the world of Rapture is rich and filled with interesting little tidbits, the game does a tight job of keeping you on track. Aside from two cases where you must collect a certain amount of specific items in order to proceed, you always know exactly what to do and where to go to do it, thanks to a handy map screen and an onscreen arrow that points you directly at the next objective. These helping hands feel almost a little too helpful, but in the event that you get really stuck, you’ll appreciate the additional hint system that very plainly explains what you need to do and where you need to go to move forward.

You won’t miss a ton of locations by sticking to exactly where the arrow points you, but the story fills out a lot more when you find and listen to as many audio diaries as possible. Hearing various characters talk about the problems leading up to Rapture’s current disheveled state really fills in the blanks nicely and should be considered mandatory if you intend to play the game. Hearing the voices of these wide-eyed idealists as their world falls apart makes the whole game feel more human. Playing through without listening to any of these optional audio clips would make the game quiet and, actually, fairly confusing, as you’d be proceeding with no sense of backstory about Andrew Ryan, fish magnate Frank Fontaine, and the bit characters who comment on their increasingly hostile struggle.

It certainly helps that the environments you find throughout the game look amazing and practically beg to be explored. For something as potentially dingy as an underwater city, you sure do get a lot of different looks as you move along, from the boiler rooms and workshops of the city’s core to the forest that helps keep the entire thing oxygenated. You’ll also get a lot of great views of the sea through windows. In addition to a terrific artistic design that ties the visuals together, the game has a very strong technical side. Unreal Engine 3 is under the hood, and all the requisite bells and whistles are along for the ride. If there’s one thing you need to know about BioShock’s graphics, it’s that the water looks perfect. As an underwater city that’s slowly falling apart, it’s no surprise that you’ll find plenty of leaks. Whether it’s standing water on the floor or sea water rushing in after an explosion, it’ll blow you away every time you see it.

But the visuals aren’t without flaw–the game has an annoying seizure problem that almost looks like a correctable bug. On some consoles, the game hitches up and totally freezes for anywhere from one to five seconds at a time, then proceeds as if nothing happened. It doesn’t seem to be tied to any particularly noteworthy parts of the game, and it happened only after playing the game for hours; but once it started, it didn’t stop happening–even after we began an all-new game–and it can freeze up two or three times a minute. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s extremely frustrating and one of the few knocks this game has against it.

Electric buck in your shotgun makes the big daddies shimmy and shake.

In addition to some nice period music that plays from jukeboxes or record players, you’ll get some terrific music that helps set the creepy, uncertain mood. The weapons sound good and loud, and everything else just sounds right. The voice acting, which you’ll hear plenty of throughout the game from both living characters and their posthumous audio recordings, really brings the story together and helps give it all an emotional impact that most games lack. You’ll also hear splicers mumbling, humming, and singing to themselves as they scavenge the environment, which helps give the game a creepy vibe. The quality and depth of things like this are what set BioShock apart from other games and make it something really special overall.

If you’re the kind of player who just wants yet another action-packed shooter, BioShock probably isn’t for you. Its weak link is its unsatisfying no-skill-required combat, which might aim this one just over the head of the average Halo fan. But if you want to get a little fancy, there’s a lot of fun to be had with some of the game’s more indirect fighting methods. It builds an amazing atmosphere by using terrific graphics and sound to set a creepy mood. But BioShock’s real strengths are as a compelling work of interactive fiction, and as a unique ride through a warped world with some great payoff built into its mysterious plot. If that description has you even the least bit interested, you won’t be disappointed one bit.

Origanal post by:Gamespot.com

Assassin’s Creed

Assassin’s Creed Unlockables

Achievements

Complete each achievement to get the allotted gamerscore.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Absolute Symbiosis (45)	Have a complete Synchronization bar.
Blade in the Crowd (30)	Kill one of your main targets like a true assassin.
Conversationalist (20)	Go through every dialog with Lucy.
Defender of the People: Acre (20)	Complete every free mission in Acre.
Defender of the People: Damascus (20)	Complete every free mission in Damascus.
Defender of the People: Jerusalem (20)	Complete every free mission in Jerusalem.
Disciple of the Creed (30)	Assassinate all your targets with a full DNA bar.
Eagle’s Challenge (20)	Defeat 25 guards in a single fight.
Eagle’s Dance (10)	Perform 50 leap of faith.
Eagle’s Dive (20)	Perform 50 Combo Kills in Fights.
Eagle’s Eye (15)	Kill 75 guards by throwing knives.
Eagle’s Flight (20)	Last 10 minutes in open conflict.
Eagle’s Prey (20)	Assassinate 100 guards.
Eagle’s Swiftness (20)	Perform 100 Counter Kill in Fights.
Eagle’s Talon (15)	Perform 50 stealth assassinations.
Eagle’s Will (20)	Defeat 100 opponents without dying.
Enemy of the Poor (5)	Grab and Throw 25 Harassers.
Fearless (25)	Complete all Reach High Points.
Gifted Escapist (5)	Jump through 20 merchant stands.
Hero of Masyaf (20)	You’ve protected Masyaf from the Templar invasion.
Hungerer of Knowledge (20)	See 85% of all the memory glitches.
Keeper of the 8 Virtues (10)	Find All Hospitalier Flags in Acre.
Keeper of the Black Cross (10)	Find All Teutonic Flags in Acre.
Keeper of the Creed (10)	Find All Flags in Masyaf.
Keeper of the Crescent (20)	Find All Flags in Damascus.
Keeper of the Four Gospels (20)	Find All Flags in Jerusalem.
Keeper of the Lions Passant (25)	Find All of Richard’s Flags in the Kingdom.
Keeper of the Order (10)	Find all Templar Flags in Acre.
March of the Pious (5)	Use Scholar blending 20 times.
Personal Vendetta (40)	Kill every Templar.
The Blood of a Corrupt Merchant (25)	You’ve slain Tamir, Black Market Merchant in Damascus.
The Blood of a Doctor (25)	You’ve slain Garnier de Naplouse, Hospitalier Leader in Arce.
The Eagle and The Apple – 1191 (100)	Complete Assassin’s Creed.
The hands of a Thief (15)	Pickpocket 200 throwing knives.
The Punishment for Treason (20)	You have found the traitor and have brought him before Al Mualim.
Welcome to the Animus (20)	You’ve successfully completed the Animus tutorial.
The Blood of a Slave Trader (25)	You’ve slain Tatal, Slave Trader of Jerusalem.
Visions of the Future (50)	After the credits roll, walk back into Desmond’s bedroom and activate Eagle Vision by pressing the Y button and look at the wall above the bed.
The Blood of the Merchant King (25)	You’ve slain Abul Nuqoud, Merchant King of Damascus.
The Blood of a Liege-Lord(25)	You’ve slain William of Montferrat, Liege-Lord of Acre.
The Blood of a Scribe(25)	You’ve slain Jubair, the Scribe of Damascus.
The Blood of a Teutonic Leader(25)	You’ve slain Sibrand, the Teutonic Leader of Acre.
The Blood of a Nemesis(25)	You’ve slain Robert de Sable, but there is one more.
The Blood of a Regent (25)	You’ve slain Majd Addin, Regent of Jerusalem. Kill people without penalty After you beat the game go on story mode and kill people and you won’t lose life.

My Review:

Assassin’s Creed will stay with you long after you finish it. Here is one of the most unique gameworlds ever created: beautiful, memorable, and alive. Every crack and crevasse is filled with gorgeous, subtle details, from astounding visual flourishes to overheard cries for help. But it’s more than just a world–it’s a fun and exciting action game with a ton of stuff to do and places to explore, rounded out with silky-smooth controls and a complex story that will slowly grab you the more you play. Make no mistake: Assassin’s Creed is one of the best efforts of the year and a must-own game for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners.

The citizens of Damascus have a lot of secrets to hide.

Not enough can be said about the living, breathing world that you’ll inhabit in Assassin’s Creed. As assassin extraordinaire Altaïr, you’ll explore three major cities of the Holy Land in the 12th century: Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre. Each city is beautifully rendered from top to bottom and features meticulously crafted towers that reach for the sky, bustling market squares, and quiet corners where citizens converse and drunks lie in wait to accost you. As you wander the streets (and rooftops), you’ll push your way through crowds of women carrying jars on their heads, hear orators shout political and religious wisdom, and watch town guards harass innocent victims. Altaïr has a profound effect on this world, but the cities are entities all their own, with their own flows and personalities.

The visual design has a lot to do with how believably organic everything feels. The cities are absolutely huge, and though you don’t get full exploration privileges in the first few chapters, they eventually open up to let you travel seamlessly from one side to another. Everything is beautifully lit with just the right amount of bloom effect, and almost everything casts a shadow, from tall pillars to Altaïr’s cloak. In fact, sometimes the shadows get to be a bit much and may make you think for a moment that there is artifacting on your screen, when in fact it’s a character’s head casting a shadow on his or her own neck. Every object, from scaffolds to pottery, is textured so finely you feel as if you could reach out and touch it. Animations are almost as equally well done. Altaïr scales walls, leaps majestically from towers, and engages in swashbuckling swordfights that would make Errol Flynn proud. And he does it all with fluid ease, generally moving from one pose to another without a hitch. Minor characters move gracefully as well, though one of the game’s few visual drawbacks is the occasional jerky animation on the part of a citizen. However, it’s easy to forgive, considering that the cities are populated with thousands and thousands of individuals. In fact, these tiny blemishes are noticeable only because everything else looks so incredible.

What you hear is even more impressive than what you see. At the top of a temple, you hear little but the rush of wind, the twittering of birds, and the barking of a far-off dog. In the most populated areas, your ears will fill with the din of street vendors, the pleas of beggars, and the occasional humming. It’s never too much, though, and the game does a good job of making sure you hear what you need to hear (for example, the cries of citizens who need your help), without filling your ears with pointless noise. All these effects, along with the clangs of swords and groans of assassinated foes, are outstanding. The voice acting of the supporting cast is similarly remarkable. Conversations are completely believable and delivered with the perfect amount of solemn dignity. Oddly, the weakest link is Altaïr himself. Actor Philip Shahbaz does an all right job, but he isn’t up to par with the first-rate acting of his fellow troupe. Rounding it all out is a beautiful orchestral score that is most notable for its subtlety. Many of the game’s most impressive moments are accompanied by lovely musical themes that add even more threads to the game’s rich living tapestry.

Climb to the pinnacle of a tower for a bird’s-eye view.

Fortunately, the story that binds it all together rises to the occasion. Actually, there are two related stories in play. The unfolding drama of Crusades-era Palestine is a mere memory, forcibly pulled from a modern-day bartender named Desmond by a resolute researcher using a machine called an animus. The memories aren’t Desmond’s own–they are Altaïr’s, stored safely in the hapless subject’s genetic code. We follow Altaïr as he assassinates nine public figures at the command of his master, and as the common thread that ties these men comes into focus, so does the true identity of Desmond’s captors. There are no cutscenes in the traditional sense; every bit of story exposition and dialogue flows smoothly from the gameplay and takes place entirely within the game engine. The ending is confusing, and it blatantly leaves open the possibility of a sequel, but it’s a small blemish on an otherwise stirring tale. Altaïr’s world is not one of absolutes. His assassination targets aren’t always evil, and Altaïr isn’t always likable. As he is fond of reminding us, “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”

Of course, such an authentic world would be meaningless without a lot of fun things to do in it. Thankfully, Assassin’s Creed is endlessly entertaining in that it features a fine mix of stealthy exploration, tight platforming, and exciting combat. To discover the whereabouts of your assassination targets, you must first follow up on possible leads. There are several different mission types in this regard. In some cases, you sit on a bench and listen in on secret conversations. At other times, you will closely follow someone carrying an important letter that you’ll pickpocket. Alternately, you can beat the information out of your target. Most missions are relatively easy to pull off in the early stages of the game. But once the guards and townspeople start recognizing you (or you alert them to your presence too close to the scene of one of your crimes), they get a little tougher.

There are also some optional tasks, such as rescuing innocent townspeople from the clutches of guards. The reward for doing so is a group of vigilantes who will hang out in the area afterward and hinder any foes chasing you. It’s also a good way to try out Assassin’s Creed’s combat, which is surprisingly satisfying, considering the game’s focus on sneaking around. You can pounce on enemies using your hidden blade (an incredibly rewarding one-stab kill), or use throwing daggers to take enemies down from a distance. However, your sword is your melee mainstay, and though the hack-and-slash combat may seem simple at first, it gets more challenging once you unlock the various countermoves. Often, you’ll have a dozen or more attackers to fend off at once, but though these fights can be a little tricky, you’ll never feel as if you’re in over your head. In fact, the few circumstances in which you are forced into combat–such as a late-game boss fight against a seemingly endless crowd of attackers and their leering leader–are challenging and require some pitch-perfect timing to counter every strike and lunge.

Combat is a whole lot of bloody fun.

Nevertheless, brute force is rarely the best way to handle a situation. You want to slink unnoticed through the crowds, but you can draw attention to yourself in a number of ways–whether it be galloping past a guard station on a horse, knocking pottery off of someone’s head, or getting so frustrated by the various beggars that you fling them away from you. (And trust us–these are the most aggressive panhandlers you’ll ever meet.) If you antagonize the guards, they’ll give chase. Yes, you can stick around and fight, and though it’s never the easiest option, breaking stealth does not damn you to death like it does in other sneaking games. But why not lure them to a rooftop? Once up there, you can grab them and fling them to the street below. Or if there are too many of them, you can jump across the rooftops gracefully until you find a hiding place, such as a nice bale of hay or a curtained garden. Once you’re hidden, they’ll break chase and you’ll be free to roam about.

You can also seek refuge in small groups of scholars who serve as mobile hiding places. It’s a bit contrived to walk into a stationary cluster of scholars and have them suddenly start moving simply because you’re there, but it gets the job done. Actually, if there’s any drawback to the usually excellent gameplay, it’s how synthetic certain elements feel. Vigilantes are always in the same spot, missions reset if you don’t get them right the first time, and those same guards will be harrassing that citizen, an hour after you pass by. It’s easy to forgive these quirks though, given the easygoing flow of the world surrounding these pockets of gameplay.

Climbing up buildings and jumping around the rooftops is fun and breezy, thanks to effortless controls that strike a great balance between ease of use and player input. You can leap across alleys and scale walls with the pull of a trigger and the press of a button, and though it’s possible to launch yourself from a wall or hurtle through a vendor’s booth by accident, these moments aren’t very common. You’d think that a city specifically designed to let you climb structures and caper about the roofs would look overly artificial, yet there’s never a moment when you will think to yourself, “Wow, that looks like a place where I’m supposed to jump.” The architecture looks completely natural, which makes Altaïr’s abilities all the more exciting to pull off. The environments don’t look as if they were created for him to climb around on; he just uses the hand he’s been dealt, as any good assassin should.

Eavesdropping will reveal a wealth of information.

In Assassin’s Creed, the greatest joy comes from the smallest details, and for every nerve-racking battle, there’s a quiet moment that cuts to the game’s heart and soul. Climbing towers to uncover portions of the map is a simple mechanic but forever satisfying, thanks to the beautiful vistas and soft musical themes that accompany the view. Even the drunks that pester you are amusing and fun, though their constant shoving is more than annoying, especially if you are trying to pickpocket a pedestrian or eliminate a target without a fuss. It all makes your missions that much more compelling, and you’ll be inclined to explore every nook and cranny and take on every optional task, just for the fun of it. There’s a ton of stuff to do, and even when you’ve exhausted your official tasks, you can search for the collectible flags and crosses strewn around the cities and countryside. You could probably plow through the main quest in 20 hours if you’re lucky, but completists might spend close to 50 hours finishing every quest and gathering every collectible.

There are few differences between the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions. PS3 owners are blessed with a slightly more solid frame rate, although the 360 version features a little more contrast in the lighting, so it’s pretty much a wash. But regardless of which platform you go with, you’ll have an amazing and unforgettable game. Assassin’s Creed is the kind of game you tell your friends about, and one that should be in your collection.

Origanal post by:Gamespot.com

Rock Band

Unlock All Cheat

Enter quickly at the “Rock Band” title screen (Press START button is at the bottom of the screen).

Cheat	Effect
Red, Yellow, Blue, Red, Red, Blue, Blue, Red, Yellow, Blue	Unlock All Songs(disables saving)

Achievements

Complete each achievement to get the allotted gamerscore.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Riding on Coattails (5)	Play with a “Platinum Artist”
Big In Amsterdam (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in Amsterdam (Band World Tour)
Big In Berlin (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in Berlin (Band World Tour)
Big In Boston (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in Boston (Band World Tour)
Big In Chicago (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in Chicago (Band World Tour)
Big In Japan (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in Tokyo (Band World Tour)
Big In LA (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in Los Angeles (Band World Tour)
Big In London (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in London (Band World Tour)
Big In Moscow (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in Moscow (Band World Tour)
Big In NYC (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in New York (Band World Tour)
Big In Paris (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in Paris (Band World Tour)
Big In Reykjavik (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in Reykjavik (Band World Tour)
Big In Rio de Janeiro (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in Rio de Janeiro (Band World Tour)
Big In Rome (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in Rome (Band World Tour)
Big In San Francisco (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in San Francisco (Band World Tour)
Big In Seattle (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in Seattle (Band World Tour)
Big In Stockholm (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in Stockholm (Band World Tour)
Big In Sydney (10)	Finish the last remaining gig in Sydney (Band World Tour)
Breakthrough Act (10)	Unlock a Big Club in Solo Tour on Easy, Medium, Hard or Expert
Flawless Drumming (10)	Score 100% notes hit as a drummer on Expert
Flawless Fretwork (10)	Score 100% notes hit as a guitarist on Expert
Flawless Groove (10)	Score 100% notes hit as bassist, up-strums only, on Expert
Flawless Singing (10)	Score a 100% rating as a vocalist on Expert
Hot Artist (10)	Unlock a Theater in Solo Tour on Easy, Medium, Hard or Expert
Killer Performance (10)	Five Star a song on Easy, Medium, Hard or Expert
One Million Fans (10)	Reach 1 million fans in Band World Tour
Top Artist (10)	Unlock an Arena in Solo Tour on Medium, Hard or Expert
Vinyl Artist (10)	Finish the Endless Setlist in Band World Tour on Medium
Gold Artist (20)	Finish the Endless Setlist in Band World Tour on Hard
Got Wheels (20)	Unlock the Van in Band World Tour
Howler (20)	Finish Vocal Solo Tour on Easy
Jet Setter (20)	Unlock the Jet in Band World Tour
Open Road (20)	Unlock the Bus in Band World Tour
Rhythm Rocker (20)	Finish Drum Solo Tour on Easy
Score Duel Streak (20)	Win 5 Score Duel ranked matches in a row
String Shredder (20)	Finish Guitar Solo Tour on Easy
Tug of War Streak (20)	Win 5 Tug of War ranked matches in a row
Platinum Artist (25)	Finish the Endless Setlist in Band World Tour on Expert
Fret Ripper (30)	Finish Guitar Solo Tour on Medium
Groove Technician (30)	Finish Drum Solo Tour on Medium
Score Duel Champ (30)	Win 20 Score Duel ranked matches
Screamer (30)	Finish Vocal Solo Tour on Medium
Hall of Fame Inductee (100)	Finish the Hall of Fame Induction in Band World Tour
Virtuoso (50)	Finish Vocal Solo Tour on Expert
Lord of the Strings (50)	Finish Guitar Solo Tour on Expert
AN-I-MAL!!! (50)	Finish Drum Solo Tour on Expert
Heavy Hitter (40)	Finish Drum Solo Tour on Hard
Crooner (40)	Finish Vocal Solo Tour on Hard
Axe Assassin (40)	Finish Guitar Solo Tour on Hard
Tug of War Champ (30)	Win 20 Tug of War ranked matches

Unlockable Instruments

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Silver Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster HSS	Complete Bonus Tour on Solo Tour with guitar.
Gold Kit	Complete Solo Tour with Drums.
Silver Kit	Complete Bonus Tour on Solo Tour with Drums.
Transparent Microphone	Enter Hall of Fame Status on Vocal
Transparent Drum Kit	Enter Hall of Fame Status on Drums
Transparent Fender Stratocaster	Enter Hall of Fame Status on Guitar
Transparent Fender Bass	Enter Hall of Fame Status on Bass
Silver Microphone	Complete Bonus Tour on Solo Tour with Vocals
Gold Microphone	Complete Solo tour with Vocals.

My Review:

Rock Band is every wannabe musician’s dream. A game that takes the four key instruments one needs to make a band a rock band (guitar, bass, drums, vocals), and builds a highly playable and intensely addictive game around them. To a degree, developer Harmonix got a head start on the process of creating Rock Band when it developed the first two Guitar Hero games, but whereas those games were all about the decidedly solo act of severe simulated shredding, Rock Band goes in an entirely different direction. The solo play has taken a backseat to cooperative multiplayer. This game is all about the act of performance as a band, getting a group of four people together and working together to get the highest score bonuses possible as a group, all while fake guitaring and realistically singing and drumming your way through more than 40 different licensed rock hits. The steep $170 price tag for the game and bundled hardware might prove to be a barrier for entry for some, and in addition, the hardware itself comes with a few flaws. But if you’re willing to make the investment, Rock Band is a guaranteed good time for any music lover, and one of the best party games you’ll ever play.

Get some friends, shove some fake instruments into their hands, and prepare to rock.

In a sense, Rock Band is a little like three distinct games built into one. First, there’s the guitar game, which lets you play approximately the same sort of game as Guitar Hero on guitar and bass, but with a few key differences. For one, the guitar itself is built quite differently from the Guitar Hero guitars. It’s bigger, with a longer neck, and its body feels more solid. The fret buttons are larger, and are flush against the neck of the guitar, and there is a second set of narrower fret buttons all the way down the neck that you can tap on for solos. The guitar even comes with a built-in effects switcher, which puts effects like echo, flange, and wah-wah over the in-game guitar track. The only difference between guitars in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game is the fact that people who buy the 360 version get a wired guitar, whereas PS3 owners get a wireless one. On the flip side, PS3 owners don’t get a USB hub to connect all the instruments to, whereas 360 owners do. That shouldn’t be an issue if you have an older PS3, but if you have a newer one with the two USB ports, you’ll need to buy one of those hubs separately. It’s also worth noting that you only get one guitar with the bundle on either platform, but if you own a Guitar Hero guitar for the 360, you can use it with the 360 version of Rock Band.

The actual guitar gameplay isn’t much different from Guitar Hero, with you strumming along and periodically tilting the guitar to engage “overdrive” (the game’s equivalent of star power), but a couple of neat twists do add some flavor. For one thing, solos are given their own scoring section in each song, and the game tracks the percentage of notes hit during a solo. The higher the percentage, the higher the score bonus you get at the end of the solo.

The guitar game is of good quality, though a couple of things about it might drive a few longtime Guitar Hero fans batty. For one, the difficulty of the game is a good deal less challenging than what the hardcore Guitar Hero fan base is probably accustomed to at this point. The goal with Rock Band seems to be more about bringing in newcomers, so as a result, the difficulty level sits somewhere between Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero II overall. Not a bad thing if Guitar Hero III gave you conniption fits, but potentially less exciting for some of the hardcore guitar gamers out there. Also of note is that the note charts for guitar are handled a bit differently, with notes that can be pulled off via hammer-ons and pull-offs appearing as half-sized notes on the chart. It’s not quite as easy to see these notes as in, say, Guitar Hero III, so you might end up screwing up a few solos until you get used to this new methodology.

Lastly is the guitar itself. It’s a good guitar, but it does some things differently than the standard GH model guitars. The strummer doesn’t click when you strum up or down, and the fret buttons seem a bit less forgiving in terms of timing in solos and other, tougher sections. It’s not that it’s bad or wrong–it’s just different, and it takes some getting used to. Also, you’re not going to get a ton of mileage out of things like the second set of buttons and the effects switch. Most people will probably forget the switch is even there until they accidentally turn on wah-wah, and sliding down to the second button set is a bit vexing to do just as you’re about to head straight into a solo, since it takes a while to get accustomed both to the smaller buttons and to finding exactly where they are on the neck without staring at the guitar for a few seconds. Fake-guitar virtuosos will probably dig it, but most people will likely stick to the standard method.

Next there’s the singing game, which closely emulates the mechanics of Karaoke Revolution and SingStar, but, again, with a couple of specific differences. You sing along as the lyrics display on the screen, trying to match your vocal pitch to the meter that moves up and down with the original vocal track. The key thing about singing is that the number of sections where a singer actually gets to do his or her thing is somewhat limited. But even those down moments aren’t left for pure silence. Sometimes the vocal area of the screen will turn yellow, indicating for you to “make some noise,” which then engages overdrive. There are also sections where you can simply tap the microphone to the rhythm of the song to get a tambourine or cowbell section going.

If you’ve ever played a Karaoke Revolution game, the singing mechanics should be immediately familiar.

Beyond these wrinkles, the core of the vocal game design is to just sing, sing, sing…and occasionally rap. If there is any complaint to be made about the vocals, it’s that it doesn’t leave a lot of room for interpretation. On the higher difficulty settings, the game is extremely intent on you hitting the mapped pitches as closely as possible, even in situations where it seems like the mapped pitches aren’t quite exact to what the original vocalist is doing. The same goes for the timing of each word. In some songs vocalists will trail off, but you can’t really do that and still get the max score, which makes the vocals feel a bit robotic. Still, most vocal pieces are quite fun regardless, and in a nice touch to help middling vocalists everywhere, you can adjust the original vocal track volume via the controller as you play, so you can use it for as much or as little of a guide as you prefer.

Finally there are the drums, easily the most intense and enjoyable instrument of the bunch. The kit consists of a collection of four color-coded pads and a kick pedal, along with a pair of drum sticks. There’s really no reference point for the drums portion of the game except for, well, real drums. You hit the pads in time as you would with a realistic drum kit, and on expert, the game practically maps out each song’s drum part note for note. Make no mistake: When you are playing on expert, you are playing the drums. If you can do well on expert, you can probably pull out a decent beat on a real drum set at will. The good news for novices is that easy difficulty does a pretty good job of easing you into the act of drumming. The number of notes is much more limited, kick pedal usage is rare, and drum fills are eased back quite a bit.

Speaking of fills, one really cool thing about the drum portion of the game is that it allows for some improvisation. The way the drums handle overdrive is to give you some blocked-out sections where you can just bust out any kind of drum fill you want. The pads act as a snare, two tom-toms, and a crash cymbal. Go nuts, but just be sure you hit the last crash cymbal note at the end of the fill, at which point you will engage overdrive.

If there is any issue to be taken with the game’s hardware, it’s its reliability. For instance, one of our pre-release kick pedals from the drum kit, which is made up of a somewhat thin piece of plastic hooked into a spring underneath it, actually snapped in half during a particularly heated rendition of The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” The other pedals we used for testing held up despite some extreme thrashing, but all the same, our suggestion is that if you’ve got a Mr. Heavyfoot in your band, tell them to go shoeless and ease up on the pedal slammage a smidge. Another issue is the USB microphone. One of our retail boxes came with a broken mic that cut in and out and wouldn’t register our vocals properly. Any supported USB headset mic will apparently work in a pinch on the PS3, and the standard Xbox 360 headset works on there as well, but regardless, that’s still a concerning issue. At least EA seems to be aware of potential hardware issues, as a big flyer inside the box explains the 60 day hardware warranty that comes with the game and directs you to an EA Web site. You might want to keep that URL handy if you run into any issues.

Those are all the technicals of the instrumental gameplay, but none of that quite emphasizes how excellent the game is at emulating the act of band play. By themselves, each instrument is basically fun, but when you get four people together playing at once, something spectacular emerges. Part of it is the way in which scoring has been designed for cooperative play. Overdrive can be turned on by anyone, but the more people you have in overdrive at once, the higher the score bonuses. By the same token, if one person in your band fails out of a song, another can simply engage overdrive (provided enough is stored up at that point) and come to the rescue, bringing the player back into the fold. But it goes beyond even the scoring mechanics. There’s just something intangibly brilliant about the way having everyone play together feels. For instance, because the drums emulate the real-life instrument so closely, having a good drummer is paramount for success. If your drummer gets off beat, it can badly screw everyone up. Along the same lines, when your drummer is in a solid groove and the rest of the band is able to lock into that groove, the feeling that you’re actually performing a song as opposed to simulating one is palpable, and it is quite the exhilarating feeling.

The hardware the game comes with is all fun to play with, though there are some reliability concerns.

The game’s song list goes a long way toward making that multiplayer even more enjoyable. Though the game includes only 45 licensed songs (along with 13 bonus tracks from lesser-known bands), many of these 45 are big-name tracks that are immediately recognizable and span multiple rock genres. Alternative rock fans will find such ’90s delights as Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So,” Smashing Pumpkins’ “Cherub Rock,” and Nirvana’s “In Bloom.” Modern rockers will find The Killers’ “When You Were Young,” Foo Fighters’ “Learn to Fly,” and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps.” Classic rock fans will delight in being able to rock their way through Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” and KISS’s “Detroit Rock City.” Other, less specifically denominational yet altogether awesome songs include The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop,” Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”

The vast majority of these songs are original tracks from the artists, with only a few covers scattered throughout the tracklist. Only a few of the covers really stick out much. The Geddy Lee on “Tom Sawyer” is a bit overblown, and the singer of Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” is a bit odd sounding as well. But by and large, the covers blend in nicely, and whoever did the vocals for Steven Tyler and Bruce Dickinson on the Aerosmith and Iron Maiden songs respectively deserve some kind of vocalist soundalike merit badge.

The only real problem with the tracklist is that some of the songs aren’t the kind of immediately recognizable stuff you would expect in a game that’s all about a bunch of people getting together and making elaborate band karaoke. Quick, off the top of your head, immediately think up the melody to The Police’s “Next to You,” or Molly Hatchet’s “Flirtin’ With Disaster.” None of these songs are unpleasant to play or anything, but they don’t quite fit into the scheme of songs anyone can just pick up and rock to, especially on vocals. Heck, just about anyone can probably whine their way through “Cherub Rock” or snarl through “Enter Sandman” on the lower difficulty levels. But Aerosmith’s “Train Kept a Rollin’”? Maybe not so much, but perhaps that just depends on you and your friends’ personal tastes in music.

Clearly Rock Band’s focus and ultimate strength is as a multiplayer game, specifically a cooperative one. This is also evidenced by the game’s somewhat less captivating single-player element, at least compared with its multiplayer game. You can play solo in quick play, or in one of the three solo career modes, one for guitar, one for vocals, and one for drums. These all follow the basic formula laid down by Guitar Hero, with tiers that unlock in order of increasing difficulty. One nice thing is that each instrument’s career offers a totally different track order, scaled to the difficulty for that specific instrument. The other cool thing is the fact that you can customize your own rocker for each instrument. You start out with some basic edits, and then as you go, the cash you earn in the career mode lets you buy all sorts of wicked rock garb, tattoos, haircuts, and the like. But as far as the progression of the career itself is concerned, it’s pretty boilerplate. Nothing of note really happens during the course of the career, and it ultimately lacks the dynamism of the band world tour mode.

The character customization element is actually pretty awesome.

Band world tour is the co-op career mode. Two to four players can create their own rockers and start rocking right away, and band members can jump in or drop out at any time, so long as the profile of the band founder is always signed in and playing. The mode is essentially a much more fleshed-out version of the same sort of tiered career mode as the solo tour. You start out as a nobody band, playing the teensiest club in your hometown. As you play gigs and perform well, you’ll earn more fans, which helps propel your band ever forward toward rock stardom. You also earn stars in each gig, and the more stars you collect, the more gigs that will unlock in each available city.

This mode is, in a word, addictive. Working to gather as many fans and stars as you can becomes almost compulsive after a while. If you’ve got friends with you willing to stick it out, you could potentially lose a lot of hours of your life touring the world. Another thing that makes band world tour so cool is the presentation of it all. As you grow your fan base, you’ll earn the opportunity to get a crappy van, then a tour bus, and even a jet. You’ll have the chance to win another band’s roadies, hire a sound guy, get signed to a label, and eventually work your way into the hall of fame. It’s an awesome experience, to be sure.

The mode itself never actually ends, letting you continue to earn fans and keep playing gigs, though after a while you will forced into the higher difficulty settings, which potentially spells trouble if you start running into songs you don’t really know yet, and you eventually start to run into a fair amount of song repetition, especially if you haven’t already unlocked all the game’s songs in the solo tour. Starting out fresh guarantees you’ll be playing a lot of the same songs again and again from the very beginning. If you unlock everything in solo, the tour opens up a great deal. While 58 songs might seem like a lot to pick from, you’re still going to end up repeating songs a fair amount, especially when you do the special challenges, which automatically pick random songs for you.

It is perhaps a good thing, then, that Rock Band is supported with lots of downloadable content. Several song packs (including artist packs for bands like Queens of the Stone Age and Metallica), single-song downloads, and full-album downloads (The Who’s “Who’s Next” will be the first) have been announced thus far. Pricing on these songs is slightly cheaper than the Guitar Hero song packs, but not so much cheaper that you won’t notice the hurt on your wallet if you start splurging for every song that comes along. Still, the idea of getting regular downloadable content is great (Harmonix and MTV are apparently going to start out by releasing songs on a weekly schedule), and the full-album download idea is awesome. Even better, any song you download makes its way into the rotation in the band world tour, which should alleviate some of the repetition over the long haul.

The one truly unfortunate thing about the band world tour mode is that it isn’t online. That might be a dicey prospect for those without regularly available friends with a similar love of music games. The good news is that there is an online co-op quick play option, so if you and your buddies just want to get together and play single songs as a band for fun and high scores, you can. The online also includes competitive options, such as a basic score duel (same instrument, same difficulty, play the entire song) and a tug-of-war mode (same instrument, any difficulty level, trade off sections of the song, try to win the crowd over to your side by performing the best). These modes are about as enjoyable as Guitar Hero III’s online component, so if you dug that stuff, you’ll definitely dig this. The online modes also performed well across the board, with no noticeable lag while playing.

Perhaps one of the best things about Rock Band is its presentation. The in-game visuals are of very high quality, with great character modeling, top-notch animation work on each musician, and lots of neat lighting and visual effects during the course of the performance. And the best thing about all of that? None of it causes the game to slow down whatsoever. The note charts stay steady no matter how much craziness is going on in the background. If there’s any flaw to be found in the visuals at all, it’s that the notes on the note charts are a little on the small side. It’s not a big deal in one- or two-player play, but when you have both guitars and drums going at once, it can sometimes be tough to make out whether you’ve hit a note or not. Also, if you’re trying to figure out which version of the game to get, visuals won’t make much difference. Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game look pretty much identical to one another.

Seriously, if you’re able to get good at hard and expert drumming in this game, and you still can’t play a solid 4/4 rock beat on a real drum kit, seek professional help.

The presentational quality goes well beyond the visuals. Everything about Rock Band just feels authentic. It’s the little details, like how some arenas will put your band’s name in big lights behind you on stage, or how when you’re performing well the crowd will start singing along with the vocalist. Awesome stuff. Heck, even the game’s loading screens are cool, offering up some neat band trivia, as well as dynamically generated band photos featuring your created musicians in a variety of delightfully exaggerated rock poses.

All told, Rock Band turns in an absolutely stellar performance. And much like any real band worth its salt, it’s not just because of one or two things that it does well while the rest fall by the wayside. Each individual component of the game is good on its own, but it’s when you put those things together into a collective whole that the game truly shines. Ultimately, the $170 investment is bound to be a sticking point for some, especially those who don’t have readily available friends who can come over and rock whenever the itch needs to be scratched. But even with that caveat in mind, Rock Band is easily one of the most ambitious music games ever produced, and that it is so successful in its ambition makes it something really special.

Origanal post by:Gamespot.com

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Achievements

Complete each achievement to get the allotted gamerscore.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Make the Jump (20)	Infiltrate a cargo ship
Earn a Winged Dagger (20)	Complete F.N.G.
Win the War (40)	Complete the game on any difficulty
Dancing in the Dark (20)	Kill the power
Save the Bacon (20)	Protect War Pig, the Abrams tank
Death From Above (20)	Operate an AC-130 gun ship
Wrong Number (20)	Find Al-Asad’s safehouse
Piggyback Ride (20)	Carry Cpt. MacMillian to safety
Desperate Measures (20)	Corner Zakhaev’s Son
Look Sharp (20)	Find 15 enemy intel items
Eyes and Ears (20)	Find 30 enemy intel items
Down Boy Down (20)	Survive a dog attack
New Squadron Record (20)	Complete the cargo ship mockup in less than 20 seconds
Rescue Roycewicz on the stairs (20)	Save Pvt. Roycewicz on the stairs
Your Show Sucks (20)	Destroy all the TVs showing Al-Asad’s speech
Man of the People (10)	Save the farmer
Straight Flush (20)	Kill 5 enemies with 1 shot while in the AC-130 gunship
Ghillies in the Mist (20)	Complete ‘All Ghillied Up’ without alerting any enemies
Mile High Club (20)	Sky dive to safety on Veteran difficulty
No Rest for the Weary (10)	Stab an injured crawling enemy
Deep and Hard (90)	Complete the game on Hardened or Veteran difficulty
The Package (40)	Complete ‘Crew Expendable’ on Veteran difficulty
The Rescue (40)	Complete ‘Blackout’ on Veteran difficulty
The Search (40)	Complete ‘Charlie Don’t Surf’ on Veteran difficulty
The Bog (40)	Complete ‘The Bog’ and ‘War Pig’ on Veteran difficulty
The Escape (40)	Complete ‘Hunted’ and ‘Death From Above’ on Veteran difficulty
The First Horseman (40)	Complete ‘Shock and Awe’ on Veteran difficulty
The Second Horseman (40)	Complete ‘Safehouse’ on Veteran difficulty
The Shot (40)	Complete ‘All Ghillied Up’ and ‘One Shot, One Kill’ on Veteran difficulty
The Third Horseman (40)	Complete ‘Heat’ and ‘The Sins of the Father’ on Veteran difficulty
The Ultimatum (40)	Complete ‘Ultimatum’, ‘All in’ and ‘No Fighting in the War Room’ on Veteran difficulty
The Fourth Horseman (40)	Complete ‘Game Over’ on Veteran difficulty
Daredevil (10)	Kill an enemy while blinded by a flashbang in the single player campaign
Roadkill (10)	Kill 2 enemies by blowing up a car in the single player campaign
Bird on the Ground (20)	Shoot down an enemy helicopter with an RPG in the single player campaign
Four of a Kind (20)	Kill 4 enemies in a row with headshots in the single player campaign
Three of a Kind (10)	Kill 3 enemies in a row with your knife in the single player campaign

Unlock Arcade and Cheat Option

These Unlock automatically for completing Call of Duty 4: modern Warfare on and difficulty level. Cheat menu can be found during gameplay in the options menu.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Arcade Mode	Complete game on any difficulty
Cheat Menu	Complete game on any difficulty

Cheats

Cheats are unlocked by collecting enemy intel, which look like laptop computers, that are hidden throughout the campaign. Note: Using cheats disables Achievements.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
CoD Noir: Simply turns all gameplay turns black and white, giving the game a classic war movie feel.	Collect 2 pieces of enemy intel.
Photo-Negative: Inverses all of the colors of the game.	Collect 4 pieces of enemy intel.
Super Contrast: Dramatically increases the game’s contrast, making the darks much darker and the lights much lighter.	Collect 6 pieces of enemy intel.
Ragtime Warfare: Gameplay goes black-and-white, dust and scratches fill the screen, it plays at 2x speed, and the music becomes piano music.	Collect 8 pieces of enemy intel.
Cluster Bombs: After one of your frag grenades explodes, four more explode in a cross-shape pattern.	Collect 10 pieces of enemy intel.
A Bad Year: When you kill enemies, they explode into a bunch of old tires!	Collect 15 pieces of enemy intel.
Slow-Mo Ability: By using the melee button, you can change the game to slow-mo and play at half-speed.	Collect 20 pieces of enemy intel.
Infinite Ammo: Wepaons have unlimited ammo, you don’t even need to reload! Doesn’t work with single-shot weapons like C4 and Claymores.	Collect 30 pieces of enemy intel.

Golden Weapons

Golden weapons are a special camo that you get when you fully complete their respective weapon challenges.You can access them by choosing the camo of the respective weapon.The weapons don’t get a boost or anything alike,it’s purely cosmetic.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Golden Desert Eagle	Get to Lv.55.
Golden Ak-47	Complete all Assault Rifle challenges.
Golden M60	Complete all LMG challenges.
Golden Mini-Uzi	Complete all SMG challenges.
Golden Dragonuv	Complete all Sniper challenges.
Golden M1014	Complete all Shotgun challenges.

Ranks – Unlocks

Rank up

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Demolitions Class Weapon Class	Get rank 01
Sniper Class Weapon Class	Get rank 02
Create a Class	Get rank 03
Gun Challenges	Get rank 04
New playlists	Get rank 05
M40 Sniper Rifle	Get rank 06
Last Stand Perk Class 3	Get rank 07
Boot Camp Challenges 1	Get rank 08
M4 Carbine Assault Rifle	Get rank 09
UAV Jammer Perk Class 2	Get rank 10
Clan Tag	Get rank 11
Mini Uzi Submachine Gun	Get rank 12
Bomb Squad Perk Class 1	Get rank 13
Boot Camp Challenges 2	Get rank 14
M1911 Pistol	Get rank 15
Martyrdom Perk Class 2	Get rank 16
Boot Camp Challenges 3	Get rank 17
M60E4 Light Machine Gun	Get rank 18
Sleight of Hand Perk Class 2	Get rank 19
Operations Challenges	Get rank 20
Operations Challenges	get rank 21
Dragunov Sniper Rifle	get rank 22
Claymore Perk Class 1	get rank 23
Operations Challenges 2	get rank 24
G3 Assault Rifle	get rank 25
Iron Lungs Perk Class 3	get rank 26
Operations Challenges 3	get rank 27
AK-74U Submachine Gun	get rank 28
Double Tab Perk Class 2	get rank 29
Killer Challenges	get rank 30
M1014 Shotgun	get rank 31
Bandolier Perk Class 1	get rank 32
Killer Challenges 2	get rank 33
R700 Sniper Rifle	get rank 34
Eavesdrop Perk Class 3	get rank 35
Killer Challenges 3	get rank 36
G36C Assault Rifle	get rank 37
Overkill Perk Class 2	get rank 38
Killer Challenges 4	get rank 39
P90 Submachine Gun	get rank 40
Frag x 3 Perk Class 1	get rank 41
Frag x 3 Perk Class 1	get rank 41
Humiliation Challenges	get rank 42
Desert Eagle Pistol	get rank 43
Dead Silence Perk Class 3	get rank 44
Humiliation Challenges 2	get rank 45
M14 Assault Rifle	get rank 46
Humiliation Challenges 3	get rank 47
Humiliation Challenges 4	get rank 48
Barret Sniper Rifle	get rank 49
Humiliation Challenges 5	get rank 50
Elite Challenges	get rank 51
MP44 Assault Rifle	get rank 52
Elite Challenges 2	get rank 53
Elite Challenges 3	get rank 54
Commander Prestige Mode	get rank 55
Golden Desert Eagle	get rank 55

Prestige Mode

This is a multiplayer-only mode, and to get it you must reach experience level fifty-five.Instead of capping out at level fifty-five, Prestige Mode allows you to start again from level one. This can be done a total of ten times.My Review:

It took awhile, but Infinity Ward finally got the message that World War II is played out. With modern times and international affairs becoming more and more, shall we say, interesting in recent years, the 1940s just don’t carry as much weight as they used to. Perhaps that’s why Call of Duty 4 has a new subtitle, Modern Warfare. By bringing things into a fictionalized story that still seems fairly plausible, the developer has made a much heavier game. But COD 4 is more than just an updated setting. It’s also an amazing multiplayer first-person shooter and a great but brief single-player campaign with the visual chops to make it a standout shooter in an era filled with seemingly dozens of standout shooters.

While the game may feel short, it covers a lot of ground.

The only real catch is that the single-player is almost shockingly short. If you’ve been keeping up with this style of game, you’ll probably shoot your way to the credits in under five hours. While you can raise the difficulty to give yourself more of a challenge, the main thing this does is make the enemies frustratingly deadly, which sort of detracts from the fun.

While it may have a lack of single-player quantity, it makes up for most of it with its quality. The game tells its story from multiple perspectives, and you’ll play as a new British SAS operative as well as a US Marine. The campaign takes you from a rainy night out at sea on a boat that’s in the process of sinking to a missile silo where it’s on you to save millions from an unsavory nuclear-powered death. Along the way, there are plenty of jaw-dropping moments where you’ll look around the room for someone to whom you can say, “I can’t believe that just happened.” In a world filled with war games in which the good guys come out unscathed and the world is left at total peace, Call of Duty 4 will wake you up like a face full of ice water.

The action in the campaign is usually very straightforward. You have a compass at the bottom of your screen, and the direction of your current objective is very plainly marked. But getting from point A to point B is never as simple as running in a straight line, as you’ll be conducting full-scale assaults in Middle Eastern countries by moving from house to house, taking out what seems like a never-ending stream of enemy troops along the way. You’ll also get an opportunity to raid Russian farmhouses in search of terrorist leaders, disguise yourself as the enemy, and, in one sequence, don a brushlike ghillie suit and crawl through the brush as enemy troops and tanks roll right past you. It’s a breathtaking moment in a campaign filled with breathtaking moments. Unfortunately, it’s about half as long as the average shooter, and there are plenty of sequences where you wish there were just one or two more hills to take.

Of course, if you’re looking for longevity, that’s where the multiplayer comes in. Up to 18 players can get online and get into a match on one of 16 different maps. Many of the levels are taken from portions of the single-player and they offer a healthy mix of wide-open, sniper-friendly areas and tight, almost cramped spaces where grenades and shotguns are the order of the day. There are six game modes to choose from. The old standby is team deathmatch, though you can also play in a free-for-all deathmatch, which isn’t as much fun as the team modes. The other modes are more objective-oriented, and a couple of those have you lugging bombs across the map to blow up enemy equipment, or preventing the enemy from blowing up your base. Others have you capturing control points. Lastly, you can change up the game rules a bit with a hardcore setting that makes weapons more realistically damaging or an old-school mode that puts weapons on the ground as pickups and generally moves away from the simulation side of things.

The campaign takes you to multiple locales, but they’re all full of guys who are begging to be shot in the face.

In addition to just firing your weapon or tossing grenades, you earn some more interesting tactical moves for skilled play. If you can shoot three opponents without dying, you’re able to call in a UAV drone, which basically is an upgraded radar that makes enemy positions show up on your onscreen map for 30 seconds at any time. Normally, enemies blip up onto the map only if they fire their weapon to make their location known. If you can go on a five-kill streak, you can call in an air strike, which brings up a shot of the entire level map and lets you place the air strike wherever you like. When combined with a UAV sweep, this can be really devastating. If you can make it all the way to seven kills–which is actually easier than it sounds–you can call in a helicopter for support. It’ll buzz around the map and automatically open fire on enemies, though enemies can shoot it down, too. These additions to the normal first-person shooter gameplay really open up the game a lot and make it superexciting to play.

You’ll also always have something to work toward, regardless of mode, because in standard, public matches, you earn experience points for just about everything you do. Capturing control points, getting kills, calling in support, all of these things give you points that go toward your rank. Ranking up unlocks most of the game’s multiplayer content.

The class system in Call of Duty 4 is also very interesting. Each class has a different weapon loadout and different traits, called perks. As you rank up, you eventually unlock all five of the preset classes and the ability to create your own class. This lets you pick your own main weapon, your sidearm, attachments for both weapons, what sort of special grenades you want to carry, and three perks. The perks are broken up into three groups to help keep things balanced, and as you continue to level, you’ll unlock additional perks. These class traits are one of the game’s neatest tricks and, again, really helps to set COD 4 apart from the pack.

We’re pretty sure that real war doesn’t look quite as cool as Call of Duty 4 does.

Perks in the Perk 1 group are more focused on explosives, letting you get more flashbangs if you like, or letting you lug around a rocket launcher, which is great for taking out enemy choppers. The other two perk groups have traits like juggernaut, which increases your health. There’s also last stand, which activates when you are killed by dropping you to the ground and switching you to a pistol, giving you a moment to kill the guy who took you out before he realizes you’re still squirming around and finishes the job. Our current favorite is martyrdom, which causes you to drop a live grenade when killed. It adds a healthy dose of mayhem to the proceedings. The perks and other unlockables feel nicely balanced, too, so you probably won’t run into situations where one class is just better than the other. As it should be, your ability to point the red dot at the head of your enemy and squeeze the trigger before he does the same is still the deciding factor.

While there are a ton of compelling gameplay reasons to play Call of Duty 4, it also has top-notch presentation. The graphics are fantastic throughout, and they do a great job of rendering wide-open fields, tight buildings or houses, smoke-belching silos, and lots more. Some of the multiplayer maps look like they’ve already seen a lot of action, with blast craters, destroyed tanks, and other things that you can hide in or behind. It also has terrific lighting, so everything looks as it should. Everything sounds right, too. When you hear a battle raging in the distance, it sounds appropriately muffled, and up close, the crack of an M16 or the full-auto barrage from an AK-47 are appropriately loud and angry sounding. There is also quite a bit of voice work throughout the game, and it’s all nicely done. The music, for the most part, is the typical sort of action-movie music you’ve come to expect from a first-person shooter, except for a rap over the end credits that seems to simultaneously detail the game’s story while also acting as a subliminal diss record with some slick talk about how this is the third chapter by Infinity Ward, perhaps lightly inferring that you should ignore Treyarch’s contribution to the series, Call of Duty 3. It’s great.

There are plenty of things to unlock in the game’s multiplayer mode.

COD 4 is available on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, and each version holds up admirably. The differences between the two console versions feel mostly negligible. Both systems deliver good frame rates and have good, easy-to-use multiplayer setups that most closely resemble Halo 2 and 3′s party system and matchmaking playlists. The PC version of the game uses a more traditional server browser to get you into games. Both systems work just fine on their respective platforms. The PC version has the ability to run in a higher resolution, if you’re equipped with a PC that can handle it, but it seems to scale quite well. You can also create servers that allow up to 32 players to play at once on the PC, as opposed to a limit of 18 in the console versions, but given the size of the multiplayer maps, putting 32 players in them makes things a little too crowded. Despite listing 1080p support on the back of the box, COD 4 appears to prefer 720p on the PlayStation 3. The only way to get it to run in 1080p is to tell your PS3 that your TV doesn’t support 720p or 1080i, but the difference seems minor. Either way, you’d be hard-pressed to tell it apart from its Xbox 360 counterpart. And all versions control just fine, making the decision over which version to buy totally dependent on which controller you like the most.

It’s a shame that the single-player is so brief, but you should only skip out on Call of Duty 4 if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t appreciate great first-person shooter multiplayer. The quality of the content in the campaign is totally top-shelf, and the multiplayer is some of the best around, making this a truly superb package.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma

5 extra missions in Mission Mode.

On the mission mode screen Press:

Cheat	Effect
UP, DOWN, LEFT, DOWN, RIGHT, UP, SQUARE	It will unlock 5 extra missions that are also in Collectors Edition.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma Unlockables

Unlock Mission Mode

To unlock mission mode, beat the normal difficulty setting in story mode.

Extra Costumes

You can unlock Extra Costumes by beating the game on various difficulties.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Classic Ryuken costume	Beat story mode on the Normal difficulty setting.
Ashtar Ryu costume	Beat story mode on the Hard difficulty setting.

Golden Scarab Rewards

By collecting a certain amount of hidden Golden Scarabs, Muramasa (shop owner) will reward you with items and weapons that will help you in the game.There is a total of 50 Golden Scarabs in the game.Note: There are NO Golden Scarabs when playing as Rachel.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Life of Gods	Collect 1 Golden Scarab
Armlet of Potency	Collect 5 Golden Scarabs
Lives of the Thousand Gods	Collect 10 Golden Scarabs
Spirit of the Devils	Collect 15 Golden Scarabs
Dabilahro	Collect 20 Golden Scarabs
The Armlet of Celerity	Collect 25 Golden Scarabs
The Armlet of Benediction	Collect 30 Golden Scarabs
Great Spirit Elixir	Collect 35 Golden Scarabs
Armlet of Fortune	Collect 40 Golden Scarabs
Jewel of the Demon Seal	Collect 45 Golden Scarabs
Plasma Saber MkII	Collect 50 Golden Scarabs

Difficulties

When you beat the game on any difficulty, you unlock a higher difficulty.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Ninja Dog	Die 3 times
Hard	Beat the game on Normal
Very Hard	Beat the game on Hard
Master Ninja	Beat the game on Very Hard

Golden Scarab Rewards – Hard Mode

Collect the golden scarabs throughout the game and trade them at Muramasa shops for the
following items.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Technique Scroll – Counter Attacks	01 Scarab
Technique Scroll – Izuna Drop	05 Scarabs
Technique Scroll – Guillotine Throw	10 Scarabs
Windmill Shuriken	15 Scarabs
Wooden Sword	20 Scarabs
Dabilahro	25 Scarabs
Armlet of Celerity	30 Scarabs
Spear Gun	35 Scarabs
Armlet of Benediction	40 Scarabs
Armlet of Fortune	45 Scarabs
Plasma Saber Mark II	49 Scarabs
Dark Dragon Blade	50 Scarabs

Golden Scarab Rewards – Master Ninja difficulty

Collect the Golden Scarabs throughout the game and speak with Muramasa to earn your item rewards.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Smoke Bomb	Collect 1 Golden Scarab
Elixir of Spiritual Life	Collect 5 Golden Scarabs
Great Spirit Elixir	Collect 10 Golden Scarabs
Elixir of the Devil Way	Collect 15 Golden Scarabs
Great Devil Elixir	Collect 20 Golden Scarabs
Smoke Bomb	Collect 25 Golden Scarabs
Ayane’s Ration	Collect 30 Golden Scarabs
Fragrance of Dayflower	Collect 35 Golden Scarabs
Ayane’s Ration Bundle	Collect 40 Golden Scarabs
Fragrance Hydrangea	Collect 45 Golden Scarabs
Plasma Saber MkII	Collect 49 Golden Scarabs
Dark Dragon Blade	Collect 50 Golden Scarabs

Golden Scarab Rewards – Very Hard difficulty

Collect the Golden Scarabs throughout the game and speak with Muramasa to earn your item rewards.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Art of the Inferno	Collect 1 Golden Scarab
Spirit of the Devils	Collect 5 Golden Scarabs
Art of the Ice Storm	Collect 10 Golden Scarabs
Jewel of the Demon Seal	Collect 15 Golden Scarabs
Spirit of the Devils	Collect 20 Golden Scarabs
Jewel of the Demon Seal	Collect 25 Golden Scarabs
Armlet of Fortune	Collect 30 Golden Scarabs
Jewel of the Demon Seal	Collect 35 Golden Scarabs
Art of Inazuma	Collect 40 Golden Scarabs
Spirit of the Devils	Collect 45 Golden Scarabs
Plasma Saber MkII	Collect 49 Golden Scarabs
Dark Dragon Blade	Collect 50 Golden Scarabs

My Review:

Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox was a true modern classic. It featured smooth, challenging gameplay and amazing production values. It was, in short, one of the finest games of its generation. In 2005, its gameplay was reworked and expanded for a second release, Ninja Gaiden Black. And incredibly enough, the third time’s the charm. No, Ninja Gaiden Sigma isn’t a true next-gen sequel, nor is it a simple port of the Xbox release. But it does add a good deal of new content, both subtle and obvious. If you’re a Ninja Gaiden enthusiast, you’ll want to see the new chapters, reworked levels, and slicker graphics. And if for some reason you missed it before, this is a must-play game. The action is intense, focused, and certainly not for the faint of heart. It’s also among the most satisfying in all of gaming and remains as awe-inspiring as ever, three years after its original release.So what’s changed? The biggest addition is that Rachel the fiend hunter is a new playable character. She’s a badass buxom babe who gets three chapters of her own, and a few levels in mission mode, too. She may be top-heavy, but she still manages a good number of terrific moves. Her minicampaign isn’t as expansive as Ryu’s: She’s limited to using the warhammer and has only a single magic attack (called sorcery, rather than ninpo). The chapters are remarkably refreshing though, particularly because Rachel isn’t as agile as Ryu–though a swing of her hammer does a huge amount of damage. Playing her requires you to adjust because her levels are interspersed among the others, so as the game’s groove shifts, so must yours. Along with her chapters come new cutscenes, new bosses, and even a few feminine touches that humanize a story that was (and still is) more summer blockbuster than art house drama.

Rachel appreciates her unique talents. And so should you.

Her chapters aren’t just disconnected additions, however. Ryu’s chapters are shifted and reworked to give greater context to Rachel’s. In fact, every level offers unexpected surprises, both big and small. In some cases, it’s as simple as different items found in treasure chests. In others, the significance of the adjustments will catch you off guard, but pleasantly so. For example, one of the central chapters of the original Ninja Gaiden featured a straightforward puzzle to end the sequence. Now, a replica of an earlier boss returns, complete with a few new attacks to round out the surprise. Throughout the game, you’ll find new enemies to uncover, such as glowing spirits and soldiers on motorcycles. You’ll even get to play with a new set of weapons: Dual swords called Dragon’s Claw and Tiger’s Fang.

The changes are great, and they do more than throw in stuff for the sake of stuff. In some cases, they refine the pace and address frustrations of the original to make for an even tighter, more centered experience. One such change is the addition of a shop near the final save point before a major, difficult boss fight. It sounds insignificant, but it soothes a large frustration from the original and keeps the difficulty level steady without removing any real challenge from the boss encounter itself. Needless to say, there are countless additions, subtractions, and modifications, and they run the gamut from superficial to substantial. For the most part, all of them are for the better. The only questionable one is the ability to shake the Sixaxis controller to give more power to your ninpo skills. It feels needlessly tacked on, and shaking the controller doesn’t really jibe with the general slickness of the other controls. Thankfully, it’s the only element that stands out as unneeded among legions of improvements.

And if you haven’t played Ninja Gaiden? Well, there’s no better time than the present, and you won’t need any previous experience with the series to understand what makes it excellent. Ninja extraordinaire Ryu Hyabusa is on a quest to recover the legendary Dark Dragon Blade and avenge the destruction of his peaceful village. Along the way, he meets Rachel, who is on a vision quest of her own. Their two stories mesh nicely in a single-player campaign that may take you 25 or more hours the first time through, depending on your skill level and prior experience with Ninja Gaiden Xbox.

The story never takes center stage, though it has the proper over-the-top sensibilities to frame what the game is really about: kick-ass action in the form of throws, slashes, wall-running, and acrobatic tumbling. If you think a ninja should be able to do it, you can do it in Ninja Gaiden Sigma. The controls for doing so are smooth and seamless, and aside from a few camera angle issues, at no point will you feel you have to struggle with the controller to pull any of these moves off. They result in astounding sequences of somersaulting, swordplay, offensive magic (called ninpo), and countermoves that are as gratifying as anything found in gaming. And as you progress through the game, you can upgrade your weapons, add new attacks, and earn other enhancements.

As you may have heard, Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox was a difficult game, and it’s no different here. That isn’t to say it’s as tough as Ninja Gaiden Black, nor does it ever reach punishing levels. But it is no walk in the park, and newcomers may find it initially intimidating. If you’ve already cut your teeth on the series, you may be inclined to think that Sigma is a little easier, though that is due more to certain level design tweaks than it is to a reduction in challenge. In particular, Rachel’s first chapter may strike fans as a little too easy thanks to a nice smattering of health potions, but the impression won’t last once you reach her later appearances. As it is, you’ll encounter armies of strong, agile opponents of all sorts, both human and, well, not so human–and you’ll fight them in a variety of environments, from winding city streets to subterranean caverns.

The boss fights are as challenging and invigorating as ever.

Some of the most touted improvements in Ninja Gaiden Sigma over the original release are in the visual department. That isn’t to say that it looks exactly next-gen, because there are signs of porting in the form of some bland textures and a few other blemishes. But it looks great, and a side-by-side comparison reveals a lot of nice enhancements in elements like shadows and color saturation. Animations are particularly spectacular, and Rachel’s movements are as sleek as any of Ryu’s. The sound effects and soundtrack remain the same as before. Still, as with the visuals, the audio additions are beautifully woven into the rest of the design, so nothing seems out of place or glued on.

And once you’re done with the tour de force the first time around, you’ve got new difficulty levels to try out, stand-alone combat missions to play, and in-game leaderboards to peruse. There’s simply a lot of game here, and the fact that this is a retooling of a three-year-old title for a new audience shouldn’t dissuade you from playing it. Whether you’re a series veteran or a newcomer, the in-your-face action of Ninja Gaiden Sigma is as exhilarating now as it ever was, and the new, slickly embedded content is surprisingly meaty. Play this game.

Heavenly Sword

Extra Modes

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Hell Mode	Beat The Game

“Making of Heavenly Sword” videos

“Making of Heavenly Sword” videos are unlocked by collecting the required amount of glyphs throughout your adventure.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Introduction	Obtain 03 glyphs
Bringing design to life	Obtain 37 glyphs
Capturing performance	Obtain 42 glyphs
The sound of combat	Obtain 77 glyphs
Creating the music	Obtain 86 glyphs

The Animation Series

Heavenly Sword contains the first two parts of a five-part animated prologue that tells the history behind the sword. Both of these animated videos are unlocked by collecting glyphs throughout your adventure.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
The legend of the sword	Obtain 07 glyphs
Gaurdians of the sword	Obtain 47 glyphs

Art Gallery

There are 107 pieces of concept and pre-production art to be unlocked in Heavenly Sword. All of the art can be unlocked by collecting the required amount of glyphs throughout your adventure.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Snowy Fort concept art	Obtain 01 glyph
Back of Snowy Fort	Obtain 02 glyphs
Shen concept art	Obtain 04 glyphs
Shen with staff	Obtain 05 glyphs
Kai concept	Obtain 06 glyphs
Kai early concept art	Obtain 08 glyphs
Nariko color sketch	Obtain 09 glyphs
Swordsman concept	Obtain 11 glyphs
Nariko pencil sketch	Obtain 12 glyphs
Nariko early cover	Obtain 13 glyphs
Young Kai concept art	Obtain 15 glyphs
Bohan armor concept art	Obtain 17 glyphs
Ch. 5 Port concept art	Obtain 19 glyphs
Nariko promo screenshot	Obtain 20 glyphs
Bohan weapon concept art	Obtain 21 glyphs
Nariko costume concept art	Obtain 23 glyphs
Flying Fox costume concept art	Obtain 25 glyphs
Andy Serkis as Bohan	Obtain 26 glyphs
Nariko with Heavenly Sword	Obtain 27 glyphs
Kai with bow concept art	Obtain 29 glyphs
Flying Fox facial concept art	Obtain 30 glyphs
Nariko promo screenshot (2nd)	Obtain 31 glyphs
Bohan early concept art	Obtain 33 glyphs
Kai early concept art (2nd)	Obtain 34 glyphs
Axeman concept art	Obtain 35 glyphs
Whiptail Eel concept art	Obtain 36 glyphs
Whiptail early concept art	Obtain 38 glyphs
Bohan promo screenshot	Obtain 39 glyphs
Andy Serkis as Bohan (2nd)	Obtain 40 glyphs
Roach concept art	Obtain 41 glyphs
Throne Room concept art	Obtain 43 glyphs
Bohan early concept art (2nd)	Obtain 44 glyphs
Whiptail early concept art (2nd)	Obtain 45 glyphs
Kai promo screenshot	Obtain 46 glyphs
Bohan promo screenshot (2nd)	Obtain 49 glyphs
The Sword early concept art	Obtain 50 glyphs
Swordsman concept art (2nd)	Obtain 51 glyphs
Bazooka concept art	Obtain 52 glyphs
Central Hall early concept art	Obtain 53 glyphs
Enviornment early concept art	Obtain 55 glyphs
Prison Approach concept art	Obtain 56 glyphs
Forest Patch concept art	Obtain 57 glyphs
Nariko early concept art	Obtain 80 glyphs
Oraguman sketch	Obtain 79 glyphs
Oraguman concept art	Obtain 78 glyphs
Whiptail promo screenshot	Obtain 76 glyphs
Whiptail costume art	Obtain 75 glyphs
Cover art – Nariko	Obtain 73 glyphs
Early packaging concept art	Obtain 72 glyphs
Cover art – Bazooka	Obtain 71 glyphs
Cover art – Ranged Attack	Obtain 70 glyphs
Arena balcony concept art	Obtain 69 glyphs
Arena concept art	Obtain 67 glyphs
Chainman concept art	Obtain 66 glyphs
Nariko imprisoned concept art	Obtain 64 glyphs
Clansmen concept art	Obtain 63 glyphs
Natural Bridge concept art	Obtain 62 glyphs
Heavenly Sword concept art	Obtain 60 glyphs
Enviornment early concept art (2nd)	Obtain 59 glyphs
Desert Battleground concept art	Obtain 81 glyphs
Young Nariko sketch	Obtain 82 glyphs
Roach weapon concept art	Obtain 83 glyphs
Assassin weapon concept art	Obtain 84 glyphs
Crossbowman concept art	Obtain 104 glyphs
Back of Snowy Fort (2nd)	Obtain 102 glyphs
Encampment concept art	Obtain 103 glyphs
Nariko approaching cage	Obtain 101 glyphs
Rain Battle concept art	Obtain 100 glyphs
Packaging artwork	Obtain 98 glyphs
Desert Buildings concept art	Obtain 99 glyphs
Cover Art – Bohan	Obtain 97 glyphs
Water Temple Interior	Obtain 95 glyphs
Andy Serkis as Bohan (3rd)	Obtain 96 glyphs
Commander concept art	Obtain 94 glyphs
Desert Fort concept art	Obtain 93 glyphs
Tower Interior concept art	Obtain 92 glyphs
Water Lift concept art	Obtain 91 glyphs
Decrepit temple concept art	Obtain 89 glyphs
Bohan and Raven concept art	Obtain 90 glyphs
Anime character concept art	Obtain 88 glyphs
Nariko early concept art (2nd)	Obtain 87 glyphs
Assasin concept art	Obtain 85 glyphs
Bohan Armor concept art (2nd)	Obtain 105 glyphs
Early Bohan weapon concept art	Obtain 106 glyphs
Funeral Landscape Painting	Obtain 126 glyphs
Funeral Boat concept art	Obtain 124 glyphs
Funeral Landscape concept art	Obtain 125 glyphs
Bohan early concept art (3rd)	Obtain 123 glyphs
Raven God concept art	Obtain 121 glyphs
Raven God early concept art	Obtain 122 glyphs
Heaven and Hell concept art	Obtain 118 glyphs
Raven God facial sketch	Obtain 120 glyphs
Andy Serkis facial sketch	Obtain 119 glyphs
Raven concept art	Obtain 117 glyphs
Desert Level concept art	Obtain 116 glyphs
Enviornment early concept art (3rd)	Obtain 115 glyphs
Prison Exterior concept art	Obtain 112 glyphs
Prison Interior concept art	Obtain 113 glyphs
Encampment concept art (2nd)	Obtain 114 glyphs
Early Pond concept art	Obtain 111 glyphs
Cover Art – Power Stance	Obtain 110 glyphs
Nariko early concept art (3rd)	Obtain 109 glyphs
The Sword Landscape painting	Obtain 108 glyphs
The Sword Landscape concept art	Obtain 107 glyphs
Kai promo screenshot (2nd)	Obtain 127 glyphs
Nariko promo screenshot (2nd)	Obtain 129 glyphs
Shen promo screenshot	Obtain 128 glyphs

Unlockable Combo’s [Speed Stance]

These are the unlockable speed stance combos, combo’s can be unlocked by obtaining the required amount of glyphs throughout your adventure.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Heaven’s Ascent – Square, Triangle, Triangle, when landing Triangle	Obtain 10 glyphs
Angel’s Grave – Square, Triangle, Triangle, when landing Square	Obtain 10 glyphs
Twin Angels – Triangle, Square, Square	Obtain 22 glyphs
Angelic Fury – Triangle, Square, Triangle	Obtain 22 glyphs
Angel’s Smite – Square, Square, Triangle, Square	Obtain 58 glyphs
Heavenly Storm – Square, Square, Triangle, Triangle, Triangle	Obtain 58 glyphs
Heaven’s Spiral – Square, Square, Triangle, Triangle, Square	Obtain 58 glyphs
Angel’s Harvest – Suqare, Triangle, Triangle, Square, Triangle	Obtain 68 glyphs
Angel’s Crop – Square, Triangle, Triange, Square, Square	Obtain 68 glyphs

Unlockable Combo’s [Power Stance]

These are the unlockable power stance combo’s, combo’s can be unlocked by obtaining the required amount of glyphs throughout your adventure.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Hell’s Envy – Triangle, Square, Square	Obtain 14 glyphs
Hell’s Wrath – Triangle, Square, Triangle	Obtain 14 glyphs
Striking Hell – Triangle, Triangle, Square, Square	Obtain 24 glyphs
Laughing Devil – Triangle, Triangle, Square, Triangle	Obtain 24 glyphs
Raising Hell – Square, Triangle, Square, Triangle	Obtain 65 glyphs
Blade of the Devil – Square, Triangle, Square, Square, Square	Obtain 65 glyphs

Unlockable Combo’s [Ranged Stance]

These are the unlockable ranged stance combos, combo’s can be unlocked by obtaining the required amount of glyphs throughout your adventure.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Violent Tempest -Triangle, Triangle, Triangle, Triangle, Triangle, Triangle, Triangle	Obtain 33 glyphs
Twisted Soul – Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square	Obtain 33 glyphs
Divine Storm – Triangle, Triangle, Triangle, Triangle, Triangle, Triangle, Triangle, Triangle, Triangle	Obtain 74 glyphs
Unfurling Wrath – Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square	Obtain 74 glyphs

Unlockable Combo’s [Aerial]

These are the unlockable aerial combos, combo’s can be unlocked by obtaining the required amount of glyphs throughout your adventure.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Flying Angel – L1+Triangle, Shake controller, R1+Triangle, Triangle Triangle Triangle	Obtain 16 glyphs
Bladed Downfall – L1+Triangle, Shake controller, Hold R1 and press Triangle, Square, Square	Obtain 28 glyphs
Soaring Embrace – L1+Triangle, Shake controller, Hold L1 and press Square Square, Square	Obtain 54 glyphs
Falling Blossom – L1+Triangle, Shake controller, Square Triangle Triangle, Square and then R1+Square	Obtain 61 glyphs

Unlockable Superstyles [Lvl. 2]

These are the unlockable level 2 superstyles, superstyles can be unlocked by obtaining the required amount of glyphs throughout your adventure.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Startled Lover – Circle	Obtain 18 glyphs
Compassion – R1+Circle	Obtain 18 glyphs
Lingering Touch – L1+Circle	Obtain 18 glyphs

Unlockable Superstyles [Lvl. 3]

These are the unlockable level 3 superstyles, superstyles can be unlocked by obtaining the required amount of glyphs throughout your adventure.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Stolen Kiss – Circle	Obtain 48 glyphs
Adoring Traveler – R1+Circle	Obtain 48 glyphs
Whirling Passion – L1+Circle	Obtain 48 glyphs

My Reveiw:

Ever since it was first shown, Heavenly Sword has drawn comparisons to God of War. Like SCEA’s flagship franchise, Heavenly Sword has great production values, exciting combat, and an enjoyable story with interesting characters. What it doesn’t have is length, clocking in at just six-and-a-half hours from start to finish. So while it’s a great game, it’s a great game you can beat in one sitting.Like God of War, Heavenly Sword starts off with what appears to be the death of the game’s main character, so the story is told via flashbacks. In this case it’s a young woman named Nariko, an outcast who was thought before she was born to be the one to fulfill her peoples’ prophecy surrounding the Heavenly Sword. The titular sword is a dangerous weapon that grants tremendous power to whomever wields it, but at the cost of that person’s life. Nariko’s clan has protected the ancient weapon, but they’ve grown weak and find themselves under attack from King Bohan, an evil despot who wants the sword for his own use. In this desperate hour Nariko’s people and even her father are finally forced to admit that she is their only hope. The game’s story is well written (if a bit predictable), and the characters are brought to life by some fine performances by the actors who portray them.

That’s kind of a lot of dudes to kill.

There are a few rudimentary door-opening puzzles and a handful of situations where you’ll have to quickly press a button that appears onscreen as you make your way through the linear levels. But most of your time with Nariko will be spent killing thousands of enemies in her quest to keep the Heavenly Sword from falling into Bohan’s hands. Nariko has three different types of attacks that she can perform by standing in a specific stance. Speed attacks are performed by pressing the square or triangle buttons. Her ranged and power stances are done by pressing the L1 or R1 buttons respectively. Attack combos can be strung together by pressing square and triangle in specific patterns or by switching from one stance to the next midattack.

Using combos and attacking with style are important not only because they’re the quickest way to defeat an enemy, but also because they’re the key to unlocking more combinations and even bonus content. Each consecutive attack you perform without getting hit fills a meter that’s divided into thirds. Perform enough combos and you’ll earn a new combo; reach the second and third level and you’ll unlock making-of movies, artwork, and more. You’ll also gain access to superstyle attacks along the way. When you’ve earned enough style points you can hit the circle button and trigger a short cutscene where Nariko finishes off a foe with creative flair. It’s certainly beneficial to learn a few combos, but you can get through the game just fine doing the same few over and over again.

However, you’ll need to vary the position you attack from. Some enemies are only vulnerable to certain attack styles and some can be attacked only with a successful block or counter, both of which are tied to the three different stances. As bad guys attack, they’ll flash a color that indicates what kind of attack is coming. If it’s a speed attack you don’t have to do a thing; Nariko will block it on her own. If it’s a power attack though, you’ll have to quickly press the R1 button to block. If it’s red, it’s an unblockable attack and you’ll need to roll out of the way by moving the right analog stick. Counters are performed by quickly pressing the triangle as an attack is imminent. They’re a great way to quickly dispatch an enemy, though they’re tough to time when you’re surrounded by a few dozen people, all attacking at different moments.

Heavenly Sword keeps things fresh by mixing in a second playable character and a few different play styles. For some of the game you’re placed in the role of the lovably quirky Kai, a bizarre catlike girl whose favorite “game” is to shoot bad guys with her crossbow. She can’t fight at close range, and can only create separation between herself and the enemy by pushing them off of her. The awkward switch from one camera angle to another that occurs when you go from running to aiming makes it tough to get a shot off, so the levels where Kai’s on foot and fighting aren’t her best moments. It’s good, then, that most of your time spent as Kai has you simply shooting bad guys with the game’s enjoyable motion controls. By continuing to hold the fire button you can control Kai’s arrow midflight in slow motion by tilting the Sixaxis left, right, up, and down. Nariko has a few levels like this where she mans a cannon and wields a rocket launcher as well. Kai’s sections are sometimes a tad too long, but it’s quite satisfying to guide an arrow across a level and then land it in a soldier’s groin or head.

Overall the game’s combat is a good mix of being easy to learn but deep enough that you don’t feel like you’re just hitting the same two buttons and seeing the same attacks over and over. This is an impressive feat considering how shallow the game’s enemy artificial intelligence is. Rather than challenging you with smart bad guys with a wide range of moves, the game simply tries to overwhelm you with numbers. Sure, some are fast, some are strong, and some shoot arrows at you, but none of them exhibit any sort of creativity in their attacks. Even the bosses, who at least attack in new ways, aren’t particularly clever and are challenging only because their life bars are seemingly endless. Slightly repetitive or not, it’s hard not to have a blast when you’re controlling a lone heroine against more than a thousand enemies, all of which are onscreen at once.

Heavenly Sword is elevated by its top-notch presentation. Nariko’s attacks are beautifully animated and flow seamlessly from one to the next with only a little slowdown here and there. It’s a little disappointing that there’s not more visual variety to the soldiers, but the few types featured are all well designed and easy to tell apart. This is important when you’re trying to use a certain fighting style to take out a specific enemy in a crowd. The levels are gorgeous and have an almost hand-painted look to them–especially when viewed from afar.

Great production values and interesting characters make Heavenly Sword feel like a summer blockbuster.

Many games come to a screeching halt when telling their story via cutscenes, but this is where Heavenly Sword excels thanks to is its main characters, which are all wonderfully designed and animated: beautiful, compassionate Nariko; oafish, sympathetic Roach; evil-yet-funny King Bohan (portrayed by Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in Lord of the Rings); and the curious, catlike Kai. The cutscenes are gorgeous, marred only by some lip-synching issues and a frame rate that sometimes stutters at the start. You really get a sense of the characters’ personalities just by looking at them and watching them move. A well-written and often surprisingly funny script is brought to life by Hollywood-quality performance from the actors, who fit their respective characters perfectly. The inclusion of English, Spanish, German, French, and Italian voice options ensures that just about everyone can enjoy the performances, too. The music is a mix between orchestral movie-style tracks and more modern-sounding instrumental pieces with an ethnic flair to them.

Add it all up and Heavenly Sword is a fantastic game from start to finish. It’s just a shame that it’s not longer. The developer made the wise decision to keep the action tight by not including any fetch quests or backtracking, but skilled players will probably finish the game in a little more than six hours, and it probably won’t take longer than eight hours for anyone else. There are some DVD-style extras to unlock and you can play it again on “hell mode” once you’ve beaten it; just don’t expect to get much more than a great weekend for your $60. If you’re OK with that, you won’t be disappointed in Heavenly Sword.

Origanal post by:Gamespot.com

Halo 3

Halo 3 Cheat Codes

Hide Weapon, Show Coordinates & Camera Modes

The following cheats can be performed during a local match or replay only. You must simultaneously PRESS & HOLD the following buttons for 3 SECONDS to toggle the effect on / off.KEYS:
LB = Left Bumper
RB = Right Bumper
LS = Click in on Left Analog Stick
RS = Click in on Right Alalog Stick

Cheat	Effect
LB + RB + LS + A + DOWN [D-PAD]	Toggle Hide Weapon
LB + RB + LS + A + UP [D-PAD]	Toggle Show Coordinates / Camera Mode
[HOLD LS + RS] Press Left on D-Pad	Toggle Pan-Cam / Normal while Show Corrdinates is enabled.

Achievements

Complete each achievement to get the allotted gamerscore.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Landfall (20)	Finish the first mission of the Campaign on Normal, Heroic, or Legendary.
Holdout (20)	Finish the second mission of the Campaign on Normal, Heroic, or Legendary.
The Road (20)	Finish the third mission of the Campaign on Normal, Heroic, or Legendary.
Assault (30)	Finish the fourth mission of the Campaign on Normal, Heroic, or Legendary.
Cleansing (30)	Finish the fifth mission of the Campaign on Normal, Heroic, or Legendary.
Refuge (30)	Finish the sixth mission of the Campaign on Normal, Heroic, or Legendary.
Last Stand (40)	Finish the seventh mission of the Campaign on Normal, Heroic, or Legendary.
The Key (40)	Finish the eigth mission of the Campaign on Normal, Heroic, or Legendary.
Return (50)	Finish the final mission of the Campaign on Normal, Heroic, or Legendary.
Campaign Complete: Normal (125)	Finish the Campaign on Normal.
Campaign Complete: Heroic (125)	Finish the Campaign on Heroic (normal is unlocked as well).
Campaign Complete: Legendary (125)	Finish the Campaign on Legendary (normal and heroic are unlocked as well).
Iron (10)	Find and claim this skull when playing on Normal, Heroic or Legendary difficulty.
Black Eye (10)	Find and claim this skull when playing on Normal, Heroic or Legendary difficulty.
Tough Luck (10)	Find and claim this skull when playing on Normal, Heroic or Legendary difficulty.
Catch (10)	Find and claim this skull when playing on Normal, Heroic or Legendary difficulty.
Fog (10)	Find and claim this skull when playing on Normal, Heroic or Legendary difficulty.
Famine (10)	Find and claim this skull when playing on Normal, Heroic or Legendary difficulty.
Thunderstorm (10)	Find and claim this skull when playing on Normal, Heroic or Legendary difficulty.
Tilt (10)	Find and claim this skull when playing on Normal, Heroic or Legendary difficulty.
Mythic (10)	Find and claim this skull when playing on Normal, Heroic or Legendary difficulty.
Graduate (10)	Earn 5 EXP or finish 10 games to complete the requirements for basic training (Online).
UNSC Spartan (15)	Earn your Sergeant rating to be recognized as a true Spartan (Online).
Spartan Officer (25)	Advance to the Spartan Officer ranks (Online).
Two for One (5)	Score a Double Kill with a single spartan laser shot in a ranked free for all playlist (Online).
Too Close to the Sun (5)	Destroy an enemy banshee with the spartan laser or missile pod in a ranked playlist or in campaign.
Triple Kill (5)	Kill 3 enemies within 4 seconds of one another in a ranked free for all playlist (Online).
Overkill (5)	Kill 4 enemies within 4 seconds of one another in a ranked free for all playlist (Online).
Lee R Wilson Memorial (5)	Score 5 grenade sticks in any ranked free for all playlist (Online).
We’re in for Some Chop (5)	Destroy an enemy vehicle with equipment in a ranked playlist or in campaign.
Killing Frenzy (5)	Kill 10 enemies without dying in any ranked free for all playlist (Online).
Steppin’ Razor (5)	Score a Triple Kill with the sword in a ranked free for all playlist (Online).
Mongoose Mowdown (5)	Splatter an enemy with the mongoose in a ranked free for all playlist (Online).
Up Close and Personal (5)	Kill 5 enemies by melee or assassination in a ranked free for all playlist (Online).
Fear the Pink Mist (5)	Kill 5 enemies with the needler in a ranked free for all playlist or in campaign.
Headshot Honcho (5)	Kill 10 enemies with headshots in a ranked free for all playlist or in campaign.
Used Car Salesman (5)	Destroy a vehicle that has three enemies in it in a ranked playlist or in campaign.
Marathon Man (40)	Locate and access all Terminals in the Campaign.
MVP (5)	Earn the MVP in any ranked playlist (Online).
Maybe Next Time Buddy (5)	Board the same vehicle within 10 seconds after being boarded in any free for all playlist (Online).
Guerilla (10)	Score over 15,000 points in the Campaign meta-game on the first mission.
Demon (10)	Score over 15,000 points in the Campaign meta-game on the second mission.
Askar (10)	Score over 15,000 points in the Campaign meta-game on the fourth mission.
Exterminator (10)	Score over 15,000 points in the Campaign meta-game on the fifth mission.
Ranger (10)	Score over 50,000 points in the Campaign meta-game on the sixth mission.
Vanguard (10)	Score over 50,000 points in the Campaign meta-game on the seventh mission.
Orpheus (10)	Score over 15,000 points in the Campaign meta-game on the eigth mission.
Reclaimer (10)	Score over 15,000 points in the Campaign meta-game on the final mission.
Cavalier (10)	Score over 15,000 points in the Campaign meta-game on the third mission.

Armor Permutations Unlockables

Body Pieces: Spartan marked with (S) and Elite marked with (E).

Unlockable	How to Unlock
(S) EVA Body	Complete Tsavo Highway on Normal or higher
(S) EOD Body	Complete Tsavo Highway on Legendary
(S) Scout Body	Unlock “Too Close to the Sun” Achievement
(E) Flight Body	Complete Tsavo Highway On Herioic or Legendary
(E) Ascetic Body	Unlock “Up Close and Personal” Achievement
(E) Commando Body	Unlock “Triple Kill” Achievement
(S) EVA Shoulders	Complete The Ark on Normal difficulty or higher.
(S) EVA Head	Complete Campaign mode on Normal
(S) EOD Shoulders	Complete The Ark on Legendary difficulty
(S) EOD Head	Complete Campaign mode on Legendary Difficulty
(S) Security Shoulders	Currently glitched, no 100% working method to obtain or keep
(S) Security Head	Earn 1000 Gamerscore points.
(S) Scout Shoulders	Unlock “Mongoose Mowdown” Achievement
(S) Scout Head	Unlock “Used Car Salesman” Achievement
(S) Mark V Head	Unlock “UNSC Spartan” Achievement
(S) ODST Head	Unlock “Spartan Graduate” Achievement
(S) Rogue Head	Unlock “Spartan Officer” Achievement
(E) Flight Shoulders	Complete The Ark on Heroic difficulty or higher.
(E) Flight Head	Complete Campaign mode on Heroic difficulty.
(E) Ascetic Shoulders	Unlock “Overkill” Achievement
(E) Ascetic Head	Unlock “Steppin’ Razor” Achievement
(E) Commando Shoulders	Unlock “Killing Frenzy” Achievement
(E) Commando Head	Unlock “Overkill” Achievement
(S) Hayabusa Shoulders	Collect 9 hidden skulls
(S) Hayabusa Helmet	Collect 13 hidden skulls
(S) Hayabusa Chest	Collect 5 hidden skulls
(S) Katana	Complete all Achievements (1000/1000)

Multiplayer Ranks

A list of the Skill and Experience needed to advance in rank. Note: you can skip ranks once there is a set skill requirement. For example, many people go from Lieutenant Grade 2 (Skill:10 EXP:85) straight to Captain (Skill:20 EXP:100)

Unlockable	How to Unlock
01 Recruit	Skill Needed: 0 EXP:1
02 Apprentice	Skill Needed: 0 EXP:2
03 Apprentice Grade 2	Skill Needed: 0 EXP:3
04 Private	Skill Needed: 0 EXP:5
05 Private Grade 2	Skill Needed: 0 EXP:7
06 Corporal	Skill Needed: 0 EXP:10
07 Corporal Grade 2	Skill Needed: 0 EXP:15
08 Sergeant	Skill Needed: 0 EXP:20
09 Sergeant Grade 2	Skill Needed: 0 EXP:30
10 Sergeant Grade 3	Skill Needed: 0 EXP:40
11 Gunnery Sergeant	Skill Needed: 0 EXP:50
12 Gunnery Sergeant Grade 2	Skill Needed: 0 EXP:60
13 Gunnery Sergeant Grade 3	Skill Needed: 0 EXP:150
14 Gunnery Sergeant Grade 4	Skill Needed: 0 EXP:300
15 Lieutenant	Skill Needed: 10 EXP:70
16 Lieutenant Grade 2	Skill Needed: 10 EXP:85
17 Lieutenant Grade 3	Skill Needed: 10 EXP:200
18 Lieutenant Grade 4	Skill Needed: 10 EXP:400
19 Captain	Skill Needed: 20 EXP:100
20 Captain Grade 2	Skill Needed: 20 EXP:150
21 Captain Grade 3	Skill Needed: 20 EXP:300
21 Captain Grade 4	Skill Needed: 20 EXP:600
22 Major	Skill Needed: 30 EXP:200
23 Major Grade 2	Skill Needed: 30 EXP:300
24 Major Grade 3	Skill Needed: 30 EXP:600
25 Major Grade 4	Skill Needed: 30 EXP:1,200
26 Commander	Skill Needed: 35 EXP:300
27 Commander Grade 2	Skill Needed: 35 EXP:450
28 Commander Grade 3	Skill Needed: 35 EXP:900
29 Commander Grade 4	Skill Needed: 35 EXP:1,800
30 Colonel	Skill Needed: 40 EXP:400
31 Colonel Grade 2	Skill Needed: 40 EXP:600
32 Colonel Grade 3	Skill Needed: 40 EXP:1,200
33 Colonel Grade 4	Skill Needed: 40 EXP:1,800
34 Brigadier	Skill Needed: 45 EXP:500
35 Brigadier Grade 2	Skill Needed: 45 EXP:1,000
36 Brigadier Grade 3	Skill Needed: 45 EXP:2,000
37 Brigadier Grade 4	Skill Needed: 45 EXP:4,000
38 General	Skill Needed: 50 EXP:600
39 General Grade 2	Skill Needed: 50 EXP:1,200
40 General Grade 3	Skill Needed: 50 EXP:2,500
41 General Grade 4	Skill Needed: 50 EXP:5,000

Multiplayer Medals

If you do the following things you will get the medal while playing multiplayer. When you do the task usually it will show you by a little icon of the said medal appearing in the corner of the screen. Also at the end of each match you can check what medals you got. You can also check your overall medal count on bungie’s official website. A very small amount of these are secret medals in that they don’t tell you right when you get them but they will appear in your medal history. (One example of such a medal is the Steaktacular! Medal)

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Assassin!	Hit and kill an opponent with a melee attack from behind.
Killing Spree!	Kill 5 opponents in a row without dying.
Killing Frenzy!	Kill 10 opponents in a row without dying.
Running Riot	Kill 15 opponents in a row without dying.
Death from the Grave!	Kill an opponent after you have died.
Laser Kill!	Kill an opponent by using the Spartan Laser.
Grenade Stick!	Kill an opponent by sticking him/her with a Plasma Grenade or a Spike Grenade.
Incineration!	Kill an opponent by using the Flamethrower.
Killjoy!	End an opponent’s killing spree—any spree.
Steaktacular!	Beat the opposing team by over 20 kills; (Luke owes you a steak dinner) (Secret Medal)
Beat Down!	Hit and kill an opponent with a melee attack.
Extermination!	Get an overkill on the opposing team, wiping out all of the members.
Bulltrue!	Kill an opponent who is in the act of a sword lunge.
Rampage!	Kill 20 opponents in a row without dying.
Untouchable!	Kill 25 opponents in a row without dying.
Invincible!	Kill 30 opponents in a row without dying.
Double Kill!	Kill 2 opponents within 4 seconds of each other.
Triple Kill!	Kill 3 opponents within 4 seconds of each other.
Overkill!	Kill 4 opponents within 4 seconds of each other.
Killtacular!	Kill 5 opponents within 4 seconds of each other.
Killtrocity!	Kill 6 opponents within 4 seconds of each other.
Killimanjaro!	Kill 7 opponents within 4 seconds of each other.
Killtastrophe!	Kill 8 opponents within 4 seconds of each other.
Killapocalypse!	Kill 9 opponents within 4 seconds of each other.
Killionaire!	Kill 10 opponents within 4 seconds of each other.
Sniper Kill!	Kill an opponent by using a sniping weapon.
Sniper Spree!	Snipe 5 opponents in a row without dying.
Sharpshooter!	Snipe 10 opponents in a row without dying.
Shotgun Spree!	Gun down 5 opponents with a Shotgun in a row without dying.
Open Season!	Gun down 10 opponents with a Shotgun in a row without dying.
Sword Spree!	Cut down 5 opponents with the Plasma Sword in a row without dying.
Slice ‘N Dice!	Cut down 10 opponents with the Plasma Sword in a row without dying.
Splatter!	Hit and kill an opponent with a vehicle.
Splatter Spree!	Splatter 5 opponents in a row without dying.
Vehicular Manslaughter!	Splatter 10 opponents in a row without dying.
Wheelman!	Be the driver of a vehicle when a passenger kills an opponent.
Highjacker!	Board an enemy ground vehicle.
Skyjacker!	Board an enemy aircraft.
Killed VIP!	Kill the opposing VIP in a VIP Gametype.
Bomb Planted!	Plant the bomb in a Assault Gametype.
Killed Bomb Carrier!	Kill the opposing bomb carrier in a Assault Gamtype.
Flag Score!	Capture the opposing team’s flag in a CTF gametype.
Hell’s Janitor!	Kill 10 zombies in a row as a human without dying in an Infection gametype.
Zombie Killing Spree!	Kill 5 zombies in a row as a human without dying in an Infection gametype.
Mmmm Brains!	Kill 10 humans in a row as a zombie without dying in an Infection gametype.
Infection Spree!	Kill 5 humans in a row as a zombie without dying in an Infection gametype.
Last Man Standing!	Be the last human of the game in an Infection gametype.
Unstoppable!	Kill 10 consecutive opponents in a single run as the Juggernaut in a Juggernaut gametype.
Juggernaut Spree!	Kill 5 consecutive opponents in a single run as the Juggernaut in a Juggernaut gametype.
Killed Juggernaut!	Kill the Juggernaut in a Juggernaut gametype.
Perfection!	Win a slayer game with 15+ kills without dying.
Oddball Kill!	Get a melee kill when holding the ball in a Oddball gametype.
Hail to the King!	Kill 5 consecutive opponents in a single life from inside the hill before it moves in a King of the Hill gametype.
Flag Kill!	Get a melee kill with the flag in a CTF gametype.
Killed Flag Carrier!	Kill the opposing flag carrier in a CTF gametype.
Linktacular!	Play in a matchmade game comprised of all Bungie.net users. (Secret Medal)

Halo 3 Secrets

Grunt Birthday Party skull

Effect: Headshots on grunts cause heads to explode with confetti.Where to find: Crow’s NestHow to find: Right after the first objective, while en route to the barracks, you will fall down onto a pipe. At the end of this pipe, look over the edge to see a small space a few feet below you. You must simply drop over and as quicly as you can, pull back to land under the floor you were just on. After that, the skull will be at the end.

Black-Eye Skull

Effect: Melee hits instantly recharges your shield.Where to find: Crow’s NestHow to find: As soon as you start the level, head straight up to the higher level. Head toward the door with the red light, then turn around. Jump onto the racks, onto the red metal light holders, then onto the ventilation tube. The skull will spawn at the end.

Blind Skull

Description: “Shoot from the hip”Stage: First StageHow To Find: When you get to the area where you see the Phantom overhead (one of the marines will point it out) jump over the rocks and keep following the path on the right. When you get to the cliff there will be a rock over of the side. The skull is on the end of the rock.Note: This skull has to be Activated before you start a Campaign map.

Iron Skull

Effect: When either player dies in Co-Op on any difficulty both players will restart at last check point or in single player if you die you restart the level.Where to Find: Sierra 117How to find: In the area where you rescue Sarge, behind the prison cell is a large ledge. Got to the far right side and jump on the boxes, then onto the pipes to get up on the ledge, goto the far end of the ledge, turning two corners the skull is at the far end.

Tough Luck Skull

Effect: Enemies do saving throwsWhere to find: Tsavo HighwayOn Tsavo Highway, about halfway through the mission (right after you are forced to walk through a large blue barrier), you will come out of a tunnel on the highway, and see a large pipeline on your left. Drop down in between the two, and run to the wall in front of you. Follow the wall all the way to where it connects with the cliff on your right, and turn to the left. There should be a few ledges–simply crouch jump from ledge to ledge, and the last one should have the “Tough Luck” skull on it.

Mythic Skull

Effect: Every enemy on the field now has double their normal amount of health.Where to find: HaloHow to find: As soon as the mission starts walk up the hill in front of you and into the cave. Hug the right side of the cave and after a large boulder you will see a path on your right, just take the short path and it will be at the end.

Cowbell Skull

Effect: Explosive force increased (sputnik from H2)Level: The ArkLocation: First pick up a grav lift from the small building near where you fight the scarab. Now proceed through the level until you reach the second sloping hallway (stairway), you should see some partitioned risers (platforms) halfway down. The skull is on the top level. Toss the grav-lift on the right side of the hall so it lands on the fourth little green dot from the door. Then run, jump, and use the grav-lift to propel you to the top. You should reach a ckeckpoint just as you enter the room so it you miss just try again.

Thunderstorm Skull

Mission: The CovenantEffect: “Field promotions for everyone!” — Upgrades enemies to their stronger versions.After you shut down tower 1 and get access to the hornet, fly to tower 2 (the one the arbiter shut down). While walking up the stairs, go to the middle part that connects both and there should be a stair leading up to a platform where the skull is.

The 7 Terminals

The Ark:1. Start the mission and once you enter the first building take a left into another door and now you should be in a curved corridor. On the inside is a Terminal.
2. After activating the bridge to let your comrades accross the gap, do a 180 and you should see it. (it does not open until you activate the bridge)
3. In the third building after defeating the scarab, kill the group of sleeping covenant, then follow the corridor downwards. Once you reach a door in front that is locked, immediately on the left there’s an open door. Go through and walk straight off, then do a 180 to find a secret room. It is in there.The Covenant:1. When in the first tower standing on the lift, face the access panel and turn left. Jump over and it’s right there.
2. Land your hornet on the second tower, walk towards the entrance but when you see the locked door, do a 180. Should be right in front of you.
3. When in the third tower standing on the lift, face the access panel and turn right. Jump over and it’s right there.Halo:

1. After reaching the end of the first cave, hug the right wall and you will see a building. Jump up onto the walkway and hang a left once inside. It’s right there.

Fog Skull

Mission: FloodgateEffect: “You’ll miss those eyes in the back of your head.” — Your motion sensor disappears.As you are walking down from the anti-air gun you destroyed in the previous mission, you encounter a ramp (next to a missile launcher). Around this ramp, you hit a checkpoint. At this point, you should also hear a marine yelling, “There! Over There!”. Look up and to the right, directly at the roof of the building next to the missle launcher. There is a single flood form (not to be mistaken with the two other flood forms jumping in front of you) which is holding the skull. Kill him before he jumps, and he will drop the skull down to the ground where you can retrieve it. Too early, and the skull will get stuck on the roof though, so just time it carefully.

Famine Skull

Mission: The ArkEffect: “Trust us. Bring a magazine.” — Dropped weapons will have very little ammo compared to normal.When you first go into the valley to the right after the wrecked phantom, look to your left where you will see a huge boulder. Use a ghost and get to the side of the boulder that is closest to the bridge overhead. It is easy to pilot the ghost up the side of the wall using the thrust. To get the skull, pilot 2 ghosts up the wall to the top of the bridge and stack them one on top of another next to the beam where the skull is placed. Simply jump from the top of the ghosts towards the skull and land on the beam.

Tilt Skull

Mission: CortanaEffect: “What was once resistant is now immunity” — Enemies have different body parts that may be resistance to certain bullet typesWhen in the circular type room with all the flood look for a small structure piece next to two archways, jump on top if it and up on the rocks to the top left, turn left and jump up again, then do a 180 and jump to the rocks across from you. After that follow the the rock sticking out and leading up on top of of the original circular room, the skull will be in a pile of blood.

IWHBYD Skull

Mission: The CovenantEffect: “But the dog beat me over the fence” – Unlocks bonus dialogue throughout the game. For most, this is the last skull, so this gives you the Hayabusa Helmet as well.To get this, get to the room where you “fight” the Prophet of Truth. Let the Arbiter kill him, turn around, and kill all the Flood here as well; makes it a LOT easier. With all obstacles out of the way, you need to jump through the Halo holograms here in a specific order, listed below:4 6 5 4 5 3 4When you jump through the final hologram, they all light up in a sequential pattern. The Skull will be at the end waiting for you right before the energy bridge leading to Truth’s corpse.

Catch Skull

Effect: all enemies have 2 grenades, throw more grenadesLevel: The StormLocation: From the start, go through until you go outside again. When you go outside look straight across there is a small round building straight out there, the skull is on top. In order to get up there you can either use a warthog as a platform or grenade-jump. DO NOT destroy the wraith near the door or the skull will disappear.

My Review:

Regardless of how you felt about its cliffhanger ending, there’s no denying that Halo 2 was a gigantic success that raised the bar for what we, as a game-playing society, expect out of a good console-based first-person shooter. In the years that followed, plenty of games attempted to duplicate the Halo formula, with varying degrees of success. But there’s still nothing quite like the genuine item. Luckily for all involved, Halo 3 is a positively amazing package that offers extreme satisfaction across all of its different parts. Maybe now you can finally retire your Halo 2 disc and really move into the next generation of games.

Halo 3 manages to feel familiar while also packing in a good amount of new material.

Halo 3 is an interesting mix of established protocol and intriguing new stuff. For example, the gameplay doesn’t stray too far from Halo 2, which, in turn, didn’t exactly reinvent the original Halo. Don’t take that as a negative, because it means that Halo 3 plays extremely well, with the same types of light tactical considerations that have made the series stand apart from other, faster-paced shooters. The balance between your guns, your grenades, and your melee attack has always given Halo a unique feel in the genre, and those same considerations apply today, both in the campaign mode and in multiplayer. You’ll also have new weapons and items to consider, such as a host of Brute weapons. One example is the spiker, which is an exciting automatic pistol that fires quickly and decimates opponents, especially if you’re holding a pair of them. Another is the mauler, which is a one-handed shotgun that can level enemies up close. You’ll even find weapons so huge that your movement speed slows when you carry them. When you use these weapons, the camera pulls out to a third-person perspective so you can see your missile pod, plasma cannon, or flamethrower as it fires. And then there’s the gravity hammer. Originally shown in Halo 2 (where it wasn’t usable by the player), the gravity hammer is a large melee weapon that will wipe out most regular enemies in one swipe. Needless to say, it can be especially fun in multiplayer settings. The end result is gameplay that feels wholly familiar without retreading the same ground too heavily.

The campaign is structured in much the same way as past Halo games, with multiple chapters and effective streaming that ensures you’ll see load times only between chapters. There are also lengthy vehicle sequences to break up the on-foot action. You’ll pilot the classic Halo vehicles, such as the Ghost, a hovering one-person craft that’s fast and deadly, and the Warthog, a dune buggy with a turret mounted in the back. You’ll also see new vehicles, such as the Brute Prowler, which is a two-person vehicle with turrets. Like in previous games, the vehicles are fun to use. Also similar to previous games, the artificial intelligence can’t drive very well, so if you’re playing alone, you’ll usually want to grab the steering wheel rather than the weapons.

The concept of “equipment” is new to the series. These deployable special items have a variety of effects. The most obvious example is the bubble shield: You (and your enemies) can walk through it, but bullets and explosions bounce right off. It’s especially entertaining when your enemies use it, given that you can just walk through and bash them with the butt of your gun. You’ll also find items that make your shields regenerate more quickly, and others that drain enemy shields and stop their vehicles dead in their tracks. These items also show up in multiplayer, where they’re a little more interesting.

Halo 2′s ending was widely criticized for being too much of a cliffhanger and leaving you with no sense of progress or resolution whatsoever. It’s good news, then, that Halo 3′s story doesn’t suffer from that problem at all. It opens immediately following the events of Halo 2: The Covenant is on its way to Earth, continuing its religious zealotry and attempting to activate the floating space weapons known as Halos, which could destroy civilization as we know it. The Master Chief and the other Earth forces of the UNSC are in hot pursuit to stop them, with newfound allies such as the Arbiter coming along for the ride. We’ll spare you the specifics because they’re quite compelling and should be seen firsthand. All you really need to know if you’re on the fence about Halo 3′s campaign is that it’s a delicate balancing act that manages to provide satisfying closure for the trilogy, make perfect sense of all the cryptic events in Halo 2, and leave you filled with anticipation for more adventures set in the Halo universe. Not bad for a game that will take most players between 10 and 15 hours to finish on one of four difficulty settings.

But you’ll probably go through the campaign more than once, thanks to the inclusion of a strong co-op mode. Previous Halo games have let two players go through the campaign; Halo 3 ups that number to four players and lets you do the whole thing over Xbox Live, if you so choose. This is a really fun way to experience the campaign’s nine chapters, and you can choose to go through them in any order, provided you’ve already played through it alone. Furthermore, this method of play (which you can also do alone) lets you turn on scoring in campaign mode, in which you earn points for kills and lose them for dying. This adds a sense of competition to the co-op, and there are also achievements associated with finishing chapters with high point totals. You can also customize the experience a bit by turning on a series of unlockable modifiers that open up as you collect hidden skulls. The skulls are stashed around the game, and some of them do things such as increase the amount of damage you’ll need to deal to take an enemy down, remove the heads-up display and make your weapon invisible, and so on. This gives the story-driven section of the game some more replay value, although it doesn’t get significantly more difficult as you scale up the number of players. Consequently, finishing the game on legendary difficulty is a breeze if you’re rolling through with three experienced fellow triggermen.

You can earn the campaign achievements in co-op mode, which makes the legendary difficulty a lot easier to manage.

In addition to the four-player co-op action, you can also play competitive solo and team-based multiplayer matches with up to 16 players on 11 different maps. There’s a lot of depth to the multiplayer modes, ranging from simple stuff such as deathmatch and team deathmatch (still referred to as slayer and team slayer here), to more objective-based gameplay such as capture the flag. Another similar mode is called territories, in which the two teams fight to defend or attack various control points around the map. You’ll also find a mode called infection, where a percentage of the players start as sword-wielding zombies and must convert the members of the other team by killing them, until only one non-zombie remains. Each of the maps can handle any of these game modes.

Like in Halo 2, you can customize these game types, and there’s more to customize this time around. You can change things like starting weapons, the weapons that appear on the map, whether the motion sensor is active, the force of gravity, the game speed, whether the players all have active camouflage or not, and much, much more. The multiplayer is as strong as it has ever been thanks to the addition of new weapons and tweaks to old ones. Swords have been made much more interesting this time around: If two players run at one another with energy swords and attack at the same time, the swords clash and the players bounce off one another. This makes all-swords matches totally wild. The gravity hammer is also big fun in multiplayer matches, both because it crushes enemies that are foolish enough to get too close, and because you can smack incoming rockets to bat them away, which makes for an interesting game of baseball.

The weird thing about this last concept is that, with the addition of the Forge, you’ll actually be able to build some sort of crude baseball variant if you want. Forge mode is a map editor, but not in the 3D modeling sense that you’re used to seeing in PC shooters. You can’t edit level geometry with Forge, but you can spawn, remove, and move objects and items around the level. All of the editing is done in real time, and you can pop in and out of edit mode by pushing up on the D pad. You can also play this mode with other players, letting everyone run around in edit mode to spawn Warthogs, rocket launchers, and whatever else is already on the map. On the surface, that doesn’t sound so exciting. But in practice, it’s a weird and potential-rich addition to the game because there are a ton of little secrets and tricks you can use to manipulate the objects in ways the developers may not have intended.

The Forge might not sound like much at first, but when you figure out how to play with it, it becomes one of the game’s most impressive features.

For example, take the fusion core. It’s Halo’s version of the exploding barrel, and by default, it blows up when you shoot it or drop it from a significant height. It also takes 30 seconds to respawn. You can modify it to respawn every 10 seconds and, with help from another player’s rifle fire, you can coax it into respawning in midair, where it tumbles to the ground and explodes every 10 seconds. Naturally, if you surround that spot with more stuff that explodes, you’ll have a fun little physics-based bomb that respawns and explodes every 10 seconds. If you’ve ever messed around with Garry’s Mod, a similar physics-based toolbox for Half-Life 2, then you’ll recognize this as a simplified take on that idea when you start using it for more than simply adding a few weapons to a map or moving spawn points around. Though many players probably won’t get hooked on Forge tinkering, it’s an extremely powerful addition that may just take over your life.

You’ll be able to easily share your Forge creations with other players via a handy file-sharing system that lets you quickly send map configurations and gameplay types to your friends. You can also set a certain number of items as publicly shared, and users can go to Bungie’s Web site to browse and rate the shared items. Additionally, you can flag items for download on that Web page, and the next time you fire up Halo 3, it’ll download the items you’ve marked. It’s a very slick interface that makes moving stuff around very easy.

You can also use the file-sharing options to send screenshots and saved films. Saved films are replays of action from any of the modes in the game, from campaign to multiplayer to Forge sessions. The game automatically stores the last 25 or so sessions, and you can choose to save them more permanently from there. Once you’ve got them, you can edit them down to key kills, weird single-player behavior, or the strangest Forge stuff you can come up with, and then save them for sharing, just as you would with a map or game mode. Much like Forge, the saved-films feature doesn’t really sound like much, but Halo 3 is a very replay-worthy game, and you’ll probably run into plenty of little moments that you’ll want to save for posterity. Another nice touch is that the films aren’t locked to one perspective. You can detach the camera from your player and fly anywhere on the map, or change it to any other player’s view, as well. The only real issue is that rewinding and fast-forwarding are a little clunky. So if you’ve got something you want to save that’s at the end of a 45-minute session, you’ll have to hold down the fast-forward button for a long time to get to that moment, and if you miss it, rewinding can be a real pain, too. Once you’ve figured out the little idiosyncrasies of footage manipulation, it’s not so bad.

Halo has always had a very strong artistic vision, and the graphics have always been just good enough to convey the necessary imagery without becoming huge technical powerhouses. That’s not to say that the game isn’t technically impressive, because it maintains a smooth frame rate throughout, and looks very sharp overall with plenty of great lighting and other nice effects. But the visual design overpowers its technical side and really stands out. Given that the game takes place in a wider range of locales than the previous two games, you’ll see a lot of different, colorful environments, including deserts, snow, jungle settings, great-looking building interiors, and more. The enemies, many of which are returning from past games, also look great.

The audiovisual portion of Halo 3 is definitely impressive, with great art, sharp effects, and terrific music.

The sound in Halo 3 is a good mix of old and new, much like the rest of the game. You’ll hear the familiar Halo theme music and variants thereof. You’ll also hear plenty of great new music, including one suspenseful track with a heartbeat-like sound that manages to get your heart pounding as well. Most of the voice cast from Halo 2 returns to voice their respective characters, and they again turn in terrific and believable performances. You’ll also hear a ton of combat dialogue, both from the marines that fight by your side as well as the enemies you’re fighting, who don’t seem to appreciate it when you kill one of their comrades. Our favorite line from the Covenant was probably “You’ve killed my brother for the last time,” which is pretty hilarious.

As games start to consider user-generated content, it’s becoming clear that more and more games will be ready to give you back just as much as you’re willing to put into them. On the surface, Halo 3 is every bit the sequel you would expect it to be, in that it delivers meaningful upgrades to both the story-driven and competitive sides of the package. However, it’s the addition of the Forge level editor and the saved films that give the game an even longer set of legs, legs that will probably keep you running at full speed until Bungie figures out where, exactly, to go from here.

Origanal post by:Gamestop.com

Metroid Prime 3:Corruption

Prime Corruption Unlockables

Unlock Hyper Mode Difficulty

Beat the game and you will get Hyper Mode Difficulty

Unlock Extended Ending

Collect at least 75% or more of suit upgrades to view an extended ending once you complete the game.

100% Ending

Collect all 100 pickups to view a secret ending clip after the game credits.

Metroid Prime Corruption Easter Eggs

Secret Message from Iwata.

When in Samus’ ship, go to the radio And press the following symbols.
Going from left to right, press the second symbol, the seventh symbol, the fifth symbol and then the first symbol.
You’ll be greeted by Iwata himself. Of course, this is in Japanese.A brief translation…
Hello, this is Iwata from Nintendo.
A president has to take things really seriously, even if it doesn’t seem like it. It’s understandable if you lose weight from stress…but I get fatter instead. Nobody thinks I’m taking it seriously.

Secret Message from Miyamoto

When in Samus’ ship, go to the radio and press the following symbols:
Going from left to right, press the eighth symbol, the third symbol, the fifth symbol and then the fourth symbol.
You will then hear a message from Mr. Miyamoto!A rough translation:
Ah, can you hear me? This is Miyamoto.
All of you playing Metroid, can you hear me?
It’s fun, isn’t it?
I’ve also worked on many [Metroid] games, but this one is the best yet, don’t you think?
Definitely play it all the way to the end.
See you!

Bumper Stickers for your Ship

Having these games on your Wii system memory will cause your ship to get decals when you enable the bumper sticker bonus:
Wii Play
Wii Sports
Zelda: Twilight Princess
Super Paper Mario
Metroid Prime 3
Excite Truck
Wario Ware: Smooth Moves
Mario Party 8
Super Mario Galaxy

Secret Message from Kenji Yamamoto

When in Samus’ ship, go to the radio and press the following symbols:
Going from left to right, press the third symbol, the sixth symbol, the fourth symbol and then the eighth symbol.
You will then hear a message from Mr. Yamamoto!

Secret Message from Yoshio Sakamoto

When in Samus’ ship, go to the radio and press the following symbols:
Going from left to right, press the fourth symbol, the sixth symbol, the first symbol and then the seventh symbol.You will then hear a message from Mr. Sakamoto, co-creator of the Metroid Series!

Secret Message from Kensuke Tanabe

When in Samus’ ship, go to the radio and press the following symbols:
Going from left to right, press the first symbol, the third symbol, the eighth symbol and then the fifth symbol.You will then hear a message from Mr. Tanabe!

Metroid Prime Corruption Secrets

Reveal all item locations

Go to the place in Skytown when you have to get the first part of the bomb you have to make using your ship. Near the bottom there is some Phazite, shoot the switch inside to activate the satelite system. Go to the top and go around the walls using the spiderball tracks and bomb all the bomb slots to get markers on your map for where every expansion(missle,ship missle,and E tanks) is in every part of the game, except the items that are in the Valhalla.

My Review:This game is aesome,it mught be one of the best ever, If you think you knew what it felt like to be the bounty hunter behind the visor, think again. Take aim at evil with Nintendo’s revolutionary controller. Players control Samus by moving with the Nunchuk controller and aiming with the pointer, allowing for a level of immersion unlike anything they have ever experienced. Through the eyes of Samus, players experience a quantum leap in first-person control as they wield the Wii Remote, the ultimate device for the first-person shooter genre. Samus employs well-known power-ups like the Grapple Beam and Morph Ball, as well as a bunch of new surprises, to help her survive her coming trials. Saving the planets from Corruption isn’t enough, though. Eventually, players must take down Samus’ mortal enemy, Dark Samus.
 

Origanal post by:Gamespot.com

Super Mario Galaxy

Super Mario Galaxy Unlockables

Hidden Character *SPOILERS*

Get all 120 stars. Return to Rosalina on the Comet Observatory and request to fight Bowser again. Finish the credits and you will get a message saying that Luigi is now playable.

Grand Finale Galaxy and Star 121 *SPOILERS*

To unlock the final star and galaxy, collect all 120 stars with Luigi and beat Bowser. Doing so unlocks the Grand Finale Galaxy, which is the Star Festival seen in the beginning of the game. Collecting the 100 purple coins in this galaxy gets you the final star.

All coconuts become watermelons.

Collect 9999 star bits in the hub, and all the coconuts in the game become watermelons.

Death Count

The Grand Finale Galaxy, which is the secret galaxy that can be unlocked after 120 Stars are gathered with both Mario and Luigi, holds another secret.Once this final Star from the stage is acquired with both Mario and Luigi, you will be able to see your death count on your save file. You can now see how many times you died while playing the game with both Mario and Luigi.

Super Mario Galaxy Secrets

Starting Boost When Racing Cosmic Mario

When the countdown timer starts as you are racing Cosmic Mario, hold forward, then as it hits 2, hold down on Z to crouch, and when the race starts hit A right away and you will turn yellow for a few seconds and get a really good boost that will put you way ahead of Cosmic Mario.

My Reveiw:This game is adveterous,seriously awesome costumes adn if you buy it ot you”ll be happy.

Here is the game that Wii owners have been pining for, a game that has tons of appeal for both the less experienced player and the longtime gamer. A game that deftly combines accessibility and challenge, all wrapped up in a package that’s both deep and addictive. Super Mario Galaxy is all of this and more. It is simultaneously one of Mario’s best adventures and a game that doesn’t require fandom of the portly plumber’s previous engagements to appreciate. The sheer quality of Mario Galaxy’s wonderful level designs, tight controls, and brilliant presentation is the sort of thing that just about anyone who loves gaming should be able to appreciate, and that many will fall head-over-heels for.

Mario takes to the stars in Super Mario Galaxy.

The premise for Mario Galaxy begins in fairly well-worn territory. Mario receives a note from his beloved Peach to come to the castle, for she has a special “gift” for him. He arrives, only to walk straight into chaos as Bowser and son arrive in a fleet of airships and use a giant UFO to pluck the Princess’ castle right out of the ground. Mario gives chase, but is unable to rescue her before the fearsome twosome jet off into space. This all certainly sounds par for the course, but it’s where Mario ends up that gives Mario Galaxy its own flavor. Mario eventually hooks up with a creature called a luma, from a race that looks like some kind of cross between an invincibility star and a headless chicken. The lumas are led by an enigmatic woman named Rosalina, who lives with them on a crazy spaceship called the comet observatory. Mario learns that Bowser has made off with a gaggle of power stars used to power the observatory. To reach Bowser’s hideout, Mario has to travel to all the various galaxies in the universe to collect as many power stars as he can in order to power the ship back up, fly to the center of the universe, rescue the princess, and set everything right again.

Mario 64, anyone? If you played that seminal game, Mario Galaxy’s star hunt progression probably sounds familiar to you. But apart from that basic structuring, you can hardly call Mario Galaxy a Mario 64 rehash. If anything, Mario Galaxy simply takes the basics of what made Mario 64 such a dynamite game, and turns them completely crazy.

The definition of crazy here has a lot to do with gravity and physics. Each galaxy contains a series of little worlds that can’t even really be called planets so much as they are floating puzzles. In many of these worlds, Mario can walk just about anywhere. When he lands on a sphere, he can walk all over it, going sideways and upside down in the process. Sometimes you’ll simply jump in one area and end up gravitating toward the ceiling or walls or even another nearby planetoid without even realizing it. Often Mario will need to track down launch stars, which, when you shake the Wii Remote while standing near or inside one, will send you flying to a whole new, previously inaccessible area. There are even sections where you’ll be floating through space, using specialized pull stars to hop from area to area, all while floating through the spatial void.

Practically every galaxy you explore is an absolute joy to experience. The level designs here are top flight in every regard, with tons of clever and sometimes dastardly traps and puzzles for Mario to navigate. The difficulty doesn’t start off terribly high, but as time goes on, the game ramps up nicely, building the challenge steadily until the final areas, which, though perhaps a bit frustrating to inexperienced players, provides the exact sort of tough workout you’ve come to expect from a Mario adventure. But even aside from the challenge level, simply exploring all these various galaxies is half the fun. Whether you’re floating from land mass to land mass on a giant spinning flower, running frantically around a giant series of platforms that shrink to nothing the first time you touch them, or taking on one of several terrific 2D side-scrolling areas reminiscent of New Super Mario Bros. for the DS, you won’t be wanting for variety while playing through Galaxy’s dozens of levels.

In a sort of nod to the suit-happy gameplay of Super Mario Bros. 3, Mario can don a number of different costumes that give him new abilities. For instance, in several levels, Mario can take on the abilities of a bee, buzzing around through the air via his new pair of wings, and wall-climbing specific honeycombed areas of the environment. With others, Mario can freeze water to walk over it, launch fireballs (natch), fly, wrap himself in a Mario-sized spring and jump to great heights, turn invincible (natch, again) and even turn into one of those pesky boos, allowing him to float around and pass through some solid walls. In most cases, the game takes great advantage of these abilities in the context of each level. A few involving the bee suit are a bit frustrating (given that you lose the suit when you touch water) and the spring suit is kind of a pain to control given Mario’s perpetual bounciness, but otherwise, these abilities add a great dimension to the already excellent gameplay.

All the crazy gravitational pulling and perspective shifting is undeniably cool, and also potentially a little queasy.

Apart from the screwiness of the spring suit, there’s very little issue to be taken with Mario Galaxy’s controls. At its core, it controls much as Mario 64 did, but with a couple of Wii-centric twists. For one, Mario’s primary attack is a basic spin move (the same spin move you use to activate launch stars). Simply shaking the Wii Remote engages the spin, and it’s an extremely responsive mechanic. The one trick to it is that you have to wait a second before spinning again, so you want to make sure you’re able to get away from whatever bad guy is nearby if you happen to miss.

The other key change is the addition of the Wii Remote as a pointer. Simply by pointing at them on the screen you’ll collect star bits, which can be found just about everywhere and serve as both Super Mario Galaxy’s currency and as a weapon. Firing star bits is as simple as aiming the Wii Remote at an enemy and pressing B to launch. But you don’t want to fire off too many of those, as they come in handy for unlocking new stages later on. Only in a few specific cases does the game really dabble in true motion control, such as sections where you’re surfing on a manta ray or walking on a boulder. But even these few divergences from the standard gameplay formula are largely successful and quite fun.

Mario Galaxy’s journey is scattered and epic all at once. There isn’t much of a thread tying together all these disparate worlds, apart from the fact that they have power stars hidden within them somewhere. And yet, at the same time, the lack of cohesion in what you’re doing never really gets in the way of your enjoyment of it. Because each level is so much an island unto itself, it actually makes each one stand out all the more.

It helps that practically every stage in the game has a great deal of replayability purely on its own merits. These levels are just inherently fun to go back to again and again, and that the game gives you plenty of reason to is even better. Once you complete an area, you can go back and engage in a specialized version of it in certain cases. Essentially, comets will enter orbit in some of these galaxies, and thus change the way you play in some bizarre way. Whether it’s speeding up all the enemies in an area, putting you on a timed run, or having you race against a doppelganger Mario, there’s a nice variety of change-ups to experience. The adventure probably won’t take you more than 12 to 15 hours if you just collect the minimum number of stars necessary to get to the end level, but you can certainly tack on a great deal more to that if you’re into going back and collecting all the stars. And if you want to unlock the game’s neat end surprise, you’ll need to get all of them.

There is even a multiplayer component to the game, albeit a limited one. Another player can point their Wii Remote at the screen and take part in some of the basic fun, like collecting star bits, shooting star bits, and the like. You can even directly assist Mario by pointing at him and pressing A at the same time as your friend to make him do a super jump, and stop certain enemies from attacking by highlighting them with the pointer. It’s not the most involved co-op mode you’ll ever experience, but it can be fun if you’ve got someone enthusiastic alongside you.

As wonderful as Mario Galaxy’s gameplay is, its graphics are even better. There simply isn’t a better-looking Wii game available. A great deal of credit is due to the art design, which is simply phenomenal. The character designs, level details, animations, all of it is incredibly colorful and vibrant, and just a joy to look at. The technical engine does its part as well, keeping the frame rate drops to minor, infrequent bouts. One area especially worth noting is the game’s camera, which takes a largely cinematic perspective, albeit with a limited amount of player control. You can adjust it right or left in certain areas, and go to a first-person view if you just want to look around. There are a few areas where the camera prevents you from seeing things perfectly, but mostly it does an excellent job of framing the action, especially considering all the kooky perspective shifting the game does as you run around these oddball environments. The only thing that’s kind of a bummer is that you’ll undoubtedly wish at some point while playing that the Wii could support resolutions higher than 480p; but even with the limited resolution, the game just looks beautiful.

Some of the new suits are seriously awesome.

Audio is also excellent, thanks largely to the top-notch soundtrack. Much of the music is made up of classic Mario tunes from a wide variety of different games, and it’s all modernized and orchestrated. These are some of the best renditions of these tracks since the originals, and you’re sure to be humming along as you play. There’s little voice work in the game, but the few voice samples that are there are used to nice effect. It’s probably better to just hear Bowser snarling than it is to hear him being a chatty Cathy, anyway. The sound effects are a touch on the shrill side at times, but the bulk of them fit the vibe of each stage nicely.

When all is said and done, the thing that really makes Super Mario Galaxy such a standout game isn’t the fact that it’s another Mario game, but the fact that it doesn’t even need to be a Mario game to be successful. Sure, it’s got all the nostalgic flavor Mario fans would want, with the updated soundtrack, familiar foes, and various other Mario-related bric-a-brac scattered throughout the adventure, but the game never leans on these nostalgic aspects as a crutch. It instead puts the whole of its focus on its gameplay design, and with good reason. You could probably swap in just about any other characters from practically any other franchise, and this would still be a phenomenally fun game. That it layers all these memorable characters and components on top of that phenomenal design just makes it all the sweeter. If ever there were a must-own Wii game, Super Mario Galaxy is it.

Resident Evil:The Umbrella Chronicals

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Beginnings 1	Beat Train Derailment 3
Beginnings 2	Beat Beginnings 1 with an A rank or higher
Dark Legacy 1	Complete Fall Of Umbrella 3
Dark Legacy 2	Complete Death’s Door and Nightmare 2
Death’s Door	Beat Raccoon’s Destruction 3 with an A rank
Fourth Survivor	Complete Dark Legacy 2
Nightmare 1	Complete Mansion Incident 1
Nightmare 2	Beat Nightmare 1 with an A rank or higher
Rebirth 1	Beat Mansion Incident 3
Rebirth 2	Beat Rebirth 1
The 4th Survivor	Beat Dark Legacy

Unlock Past Items

To unlock the items from past Resident Evil games, you need to earn an “A” or “S” rank on the respectable chapter. For Normal, one must acquire an A rank or higher to get the item. For hard, one needs an S rank.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Briefcase	Complete Train Derailment 1 with “S” rank
Relief of Discipline/Obedience/Unity	Complete Train Derailment 2 with “S” rank
Sterilizing Agent	Complete Train Derailment 3 with “S” rank
Valve Handle	Complete Beginning 1 with “S” rank
Microfilm A/B	Complete Beginning 2 with “S” rank
V-Jolt	Complete Mansion Incident 2 with “S” rank
Fuel Canteen	Complete Mansion Incident 3 with “S” rank
Hex Crank	Complete Nightmare 1 with “S” rank
Emblem/Gold Emblem	Complete Nightmare 2 with “S” rank
Slide Cartridge	Complete Rebirth 1 with “S” rank
Death Mask	Complete Rebirth 2 with “S” rank
Book of Wisdom/Future Compass	Complete Raccoon’s Destruction 1 with “S” rank
Lighter Fluid	Complete Raccoon’s Destruction 2 with “S” rank
Chronos Key	Complete Raccoon’s Destruction 3 with “S” rank
S.T.A.R.S. Card (Brad’s)	Complete Death’s Door with “S” rank
Eagle/Serpent/Jaguar Stone	Complete Fourth Survivor with “S” rank
Film A/B/C/D	Complete Umbrella’s End 1 with “S” rank
Square Crank	Complete Umbrella’s End 2 with “S” rank
Ink Ribbon	Complete Umbrella’s End 3 with “S” rank
Medium Base	Complete Dark Legacy 1 with “S” rank
Battery	Complete Dark Legacy 2 with “S” rank
Spade/Diamond/Club/Heart Key	Complete Dark Legacy 2 with “A” rank
S.T.A.R.S. Card (Jill’s)	Complete Raccoon’s Destruction 1 with “A” rank
Mixing Set	Complete Train Derailment 1 with “A” rank
Crystal/Obsidian/Amber Ball	Complete Raccoon’s Destruction 3 with “A” rank
Blue/Red/Yellow Gemstone	Complete Rebirth 2 with “A” rank
G-Virus	Complete Fourth Survivor with “A” rank
Last Book, Vol. 1/2	Complete Nightmare 2 with “A” rank
Plastic Bomb/Detonator	Complete Umbrella’s End 1 with “A” rank
MO Disk	Complete Mansion Incident 3 with “A” rank
Cylinder Shaft	Complete Nightmare 1 with “A” rank
Vaccine	Complete Umbrella’s End 3 with “A” rank
Joint N/S Plug	Complete Raccoon’s Destruction 2 with “A” rank
King/Knight/Bishop/Rook Plug	Complete Dark Legacy 1 with “A” rank
Fire/Water Key	Complete Beginning 2 with “A” rank
Statue of Good/Evil	Complete Train Derailment 2 with “A” rank
Picture (Ada and John)	Complete Death’s Door with “A” rank
Clark/Gail X-Ray	Complete Rebirth 1 with “A” rank
Blue/Red/Green Chemical	Complete Umbrella’s End 2 with “A” rank
Blue/Green Leech Charm	Complete Train Derailment 3 with “A” rank
Sun/Star/Moon Crest	Complete Mansion Incident 2 with “A” rank
Motherboard	Complete Beginning 1 with “A” rank

Unlock Special Stage

Complete all scenarios and sub-scenarios to unlock the Special Stage minigame.

Unlimited Ammo

Get an S rank in all the missions on Hard to be able to upgrade a weapon to level 5 for unlimited ammo.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Unlimited Ammo	S rank in all missions on Hard

Unlock Cooperative Mode in ALL Missions

To unlock Cooperative mode in all missions, including the sub-missions (Wesker’s missions), simply complete “The Fourth Survivor” sub-mission on any difficulty. An option will appear on the right when selecting characters that looks like two pistols and says “begin play with 2 players”. Both players play as the same character, there are just two aiming reticles on the screen to play with.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Cooperative Mode in ALL Missions	Complete “The Fourth Survivor” sub-mission

My Review:Resident Evil is ratd mature and theres no tht much blood or language and Over the years the Resident Evil franchise has been split into two main categories: The traditional survival horror, and the gun survivor series. While the latter of the two hasn’t caught much of an audience outside of Japan, the series lives on through masterpieces such as the Resident Evil remake on GameCube, game of the year Resident Evil 4, and the highly anticipated RE5. With so much acclaim put on the main series itself, the gun survivor titles or spin-off products such as PS2′s Outbreak series get less and less of a push. Ask us a year ago if the Resident Evil gun survivor series was even worth pushing, and a hearty “heck no” would have been your response. Leave it to a system like Wii, however, to change things up a bit.

The gun survivor series may never have reached AAA status (or even A status, to be honest), but there was always a bit of allure for the niche group that followed the series. It eventually ended here in the states with Resident Evil Dead Aim, but hardcore RE fans may remember that – despite its “passable” score – the title still had some charm to it. Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles looks to take the gun survivor design one step further this time around, again dropping the free-movement control of Dead Aim, and focus on the more traditional light gun gameplay, allowing players to grab a Wii-mote, aim, and fire; no more, no less. What you end up getting is an experience that isn’t exactly Resident Evil, and isn’t exactly a light gun game either; it’s a merging of both.

Enter the survival horror.

Right off the bat RE:UC has a lot going for it. The franchise has done well for itself over the last five years, and as a result this light gun tour of the series has a ton to work off of. The thought of experiencing all the key RE moments over again is enough to peak the interest of a longtime fan of the series (us included, of course), as there’s something amazingly cool about the entire design of Umbrella Chronicles. You’ll have a chance to relive the train incident, explore the mansion, hit the streets of Raccoon, and eventually march right up to Umbrella’s doorstep. You’re getting the characters, locales, weapons, and enemies you remember. In that sense, Umbrella Chronicles is a huge success, as it’ll bring fans of the series down memory lane for 20+ hours.

After going the distance with Umbrella Chronicles there are certainly a few gripes to be had though. For starters, the experience feels incomplete without the inclusion of RE2 and RE4. You’ll play through parts of Zero, the original RE, and RE3, but the game lacks any RE2 or RE4 goodness. Why they were left out is anyone’s guess (we’re hoping that this is an early hint that Capcom is working on a new RE2 to team with the re-release of RE4 on Wii), but they’re definitely missed, as those two games include a ton of great Resident Evil moments.With that being said, fans will still get a chance to experience the police station and licker-killing goodness of Resident Evil, as the area is revisited in the closing chapter of Resident Evil 3. Oh, and for the record, RE3 is hands-down the best portion of this game, with zombie police, lickers, an absolutely evil Nemesis fight, and the flashlight-only portions found in part two and three of the scenario, which are easily the scariest and most moody sections of all of Umbrella Chronicles.

Origanal post by:Gamespot.com