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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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