Archive for the ‘Gaming’ Category

The modern world holds nothing of surprise to us. There are always new developments in science and technology that never go to mainstream because of further review and, all in all, our simple lives carry on day by day, only progressing as slow as the movement of time itself. But what happens when science delves too deep within biochemistry and changes something that actually does affect the world as we know it. Movies have shown it time and time again – games have been made of the genre countless times – Zombie Apocalypse.

Prototype is the one of the latest games to hit the shelves which, once again, talks about a zombie infection outbreak – however, the game play and story line is much different to that of your ordinary FPS, Zombie Slaying, action packed title. For a start, this isn’t an FPS – no first person view here, this game is in 3^rd person, camera behind your character constantly unless you target something, which can allow you to view what’s going on behind you while running forward – a brilliant feature making the game that much more exciting.

Your name is Alex Mercer – and you don’t know what’s happened to you. You wake up in a morgue belonging to a company called GenTek, a bio-engineering company. You need to find out what’s happened to you because you hate it, you have all these amazing abilities and you feel like you’ve been cursed – surprise, surprise. You start off with all the abilities and powers that you could collect throughout the game, and after that, you start the game from the beginning – so it’s like playing the game as a movie, going back and forth in time figuring out what happened to you.

As said, you have special abilities; the zombie virus has done something to you and not made you a mindless, brain craving maniac. Your powers range from morphing your body to hold weapons, change form into another being, see the world in a different way (night vision and more) and have shields/armour. But among all of those, the coolest ability would have to be being super human – human abilities to the extreme. You are able to run up walls, jump from building to building, pick up cars and throw them at anything your heart desires.

Throughout the game you meet new characters; the most common seen would be your sister, Dana. She is the only one to help you find out what has gone wrong and is basically your eyes and ears in the virtual world, tracking down the right people at the right time in order to get you where you need to be. You also find a Doctor Ragland, who, in a section of the game, helps you when Dana can’t (reasons you will have to find out for yourself). You have a lover which turns out to be a person who you really shouldn’t have gotten involved with in the first place (hint, hint).

In terms of gameplay, the game has done exceptionally well to make the player continuously play non-stop. You lose life when something hurts you, and you can regenerate by staying out of the line of fire or consuming another being – human or not. The life bar is easy to see and you are able to upgrade it when you get enough EP (or points).

When you kill any person who is a threat to you, and/or consume them, their life becomes your life – and if they are of human form, you will take their form of appearance as well. Consuming becomes a vital part of the game, as you need to be a certain character in order to complete the mission. Be wary, though, of where you change your appearance, as doing so in public will often get you spotted as a danger, and the military will be on your ass in no time. As well as obtaining their life, certain people / demons have memories which lead you closer to finding out what exactly happened to you – the characters are not random, though, and are shown to you so it’s not a tedious task to handle.

Once you are seen by personal of the military, you will either need to kill/consume all members attempting to hunt you, or hide somewhere and take another form before they see you again. At certain times in the game, there is absolutely no chance of defeating the personal chasing you, as there are often tanks, helicopters, gunmen with missile launchers – as well as demons and zombies, all trying to kill you at the same time. It’s debateable but, at times, the amount of characters trying to get a piece of you can become over-whelming. That being said, though, the game is relatively easy and not challenging at all in terms of puzzles, etc – it’s just all action, all the time.

As you would expect from a game which is made like a movie, it has some very clever twists which you wouldn’t have thought of when you start playing the game. Also the fact that it’s not very long, similar to most other sandbox genre games, a little more than 10 hours total – so if you’re looking for something to keep you company throughout the school holidays, you’re better off with something else.

All-in-all, a brilliant game which has been well thought out in all aspects, especially the controls. Only improvement we could see was the targeting system, as when in a situation of fighting demons, and military are in the same area, you can often land up aiming and killing military personal, and then you’ll have both sides attacking you. Remember to try stick to killing one side or the other (depending on the situation).

We hope to see more successful games like this from Radical Entertainment.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Anyone who’s played Devil May Cry 2 and 3 knows that it wasn’t the greatest game in the history of games, and by that we mean they were pretty darn rubbish. Devil May Cry 4 brings the standard up a whole lot, in terms of pretty much everything.

You start off as the character from previous DMC releases – Nero – and by the way you have an arm with the power of a God, or a “Demon” as the game story line correctly says. From the moment you start playing the game it’s absolutely intense, right from the introduction where there’s an assassination on His Holiness, basically the spokesman of a higher power.

It is believed that 2000 years ago, a great demon – Sparda – sacrificed himself to go against that of which his fellow demons were doing to humanity. And as such he is worshipped as the saviour of all the people today, and also, if anything were to occur similarly to what happened those 2000 years ago, that he’d be there with humanity to protect them. Personally we here at Cyb3rGlitch are fans of any type of story line, but the whole idea of copying Jesus Christ’s story of sacrificing one’s self for the benefit of mankind isn’t the most appealing simply because of it’s originality, or the lack there of.

After the assassination you attempt to catch the killer who has done your civilisation a great wrong. However in your quest to do so, you find that things are not what they seem, and the game has multiple twists which cause you to end up playing as the said antagonist – Dante. In the game you meet many other characters, some of which are with you, and some of which are against you, neither side is clear on who is on which side, however playing through the game reveals a lot which you would not expect.

Dante and Nero look very much alike, in fact you could say that they may be related closely, however the game does not touch on such specifics but rather leave the gamer with the wondering thoughts in their mind, in order to keep the suspense going. Besides that though, the game is very much like a movie – in fact it seems that the movie type game play was one of the main ideas of the developers. Whether or not this is a good thing is entirely subjective, but we thoroughly enjoyed the intense storyline along with the amazingly detailed, regular cinematics.

What really makes the game attractive is the astounding combat system – because there are only 2 action buttons but using different directional button combinations with the action buttons, you can make some amazing combos which do a lot of damage as well as look fluid and dynamic. Unfortunately this does make it over simply easy, but the great thing about this is that you can unlock multiple combos and buy them throughout the game. The simplicity is really what keeps the player from throwing the control or keyboard at the screen.

Unfortunately when you’re about half way through the game you starting playing all the missions again in reverse order. This is basically when you start playing as Dante, you’ve found and allied with him, and now you’re going to play as him going through what you just went through to get here. Nero is the one that finishes the game, which is unfortunate because the combos and techniques performed by Dante appear as if they would be much handier in the final missions of the game.

The game type can most closely be related to the Playstation Exclusive  — “Onimusha” – as you have the 2^nd person camera in a static position some of the game, and a  dynamic  2^nd person camera the rest of the game. Because of the intense story line you also get a Final Fantasy feel when you play, wondering what’s going to happen next, but definitely nowhere near the “length” of any Final Fantasy.

Namco has gone through many different fighting games throughout the years, however none could ever come close to the famous, Tekken. Like previous versions of the game, the new  release always has something new to offer, whether it be new characters, game modes, customisations or even just pretty new stages. Tekken 6 comes with all of that, and more, but does it do justice for more than a year’s wait to it’s fans. Some may think so, others eventually forgot about the amazing series.

The first thing everyone goes to is the arcade mode, where you find your story of a particular character, play through the multiple opponents and soon after, you watch an epilogue of your character. Unfortunately this is not the case in Tekken 6, there is no story in the Arcade mode, you literally start fighting and, at the end, you’re done. In all previous Tekkens you would have the pleasure of watching a short story to the character, and once you have completed the tournament, you had the pleasure of watching their end. In Tekken 6 there is none of this. Instead you have Scenario Mode, which allows you to play through a Story-like game, watching cut-scenes and running around in an adventury 3rd person angle — very much like Jin’s Story mode in Tekken 5.

Scenario mode is comprised of a new character in the series, Lars, who also makes his way around through the open world kicking ass in a 3rd person camera angle. When you get into a battle, however, it changes slightly so you can easily differentiate between where you are on the screen (right or left). The main problem I found with this mode, which put me off completely within minutes, is there is a cut-scene far too often. You would come from a loading screen to a cut-scene and then to another loading screen. It’s as if they wanted you to play in between a movie — very frustrating and demotivating.

The Ranking system is very similar to that of Tekken 5: Dark Ressurection on the Playstation Portable — however there is one flaw to note. If you beat someone of a certain rank, the next opponent will only be a higher rank than that of which you just beat. I was a 6th Kyu facing a “Devastator” which I had never even seen in Tekken 5: DR. Another thing to note is that as you face people of a higher rank, the AI doesn’t increase by MUCH. I was always under the impression that the AI is relative to your rank, so if you’re 6th Kyu facing someone of 7th Dan, it should be very, very difficult, however if you’re facing someone of 7th Dan while you’re 6th Dan, it should be a walk in the park. At the present moment, it does not seem that way.

Graphically the game is right up there, as have all the Tekken games been. The game is played in High Definition, featuring good use of the PS3 resources, such as Depth of View, HDR and other cinematic visualisations.

I’m going to play it a lot more in the near future, as so far it looks really good. However I’ll be sticking to Arcade and Ghost mode — I still haven’t completed arcade due to the huge boss-dude at the end.