Game Reviews

It seems as though a week cannot go by without Dead or Alive 4 popping up in the news. This week is no exception, and unfortunately for developer Tecmo, once again the news is not good. Gamers have been screaming for the past week and a half that the game has some serious glitches, and some of the complaints have questioned if the game is even truly playable in its current state.

What exactly is going wrong? The story starts back in November 2005, when Dead or Alive 4 was originally slated to be released to the public. Initially the game was to be included in the bundled Xbox 360 package when the console went live, but development delays forced a last minute change to the package. DOA 4 was pushed back to a release date of early December, then mid December, then late December… and was finally released on December 29, after the holiday sales season but just in time to be considered a 2005 release. Although Tecmo never made an official statement as to the reason behind the development delays, industry experts strongly suspected that either Tecmo was having supply problems or that the game was filled with bugs and was not meeting minimum testing requirements. If these bugs were serious enough to inhibit game play, then Dead or Alive 4 would fail Microsoft’s certification for the Xbox 360, forcing Tecmo to take the game back to production for debugging once again. Read the rest of this entry »

This puzzle game is more challenging that you would ever believe. The idea of this puzzle game is to fill in all of the empty spaces on the screen with shapes that match with the space that is moving past before the shape disappears. There are an array of colors and types of shapes like hands, snowflakes, arrows, stars, squares, triangles, feet, leaves and many many more. In addition, an item will appear that will allow you to use them in any space. Once you add all the shapes in their proper places that row will disappear. If you grab the wrong shape, or were too slow, or you just need that shape right now, you can throw them away in the colorful trashcan on the side.
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I got this as one of those last minute Christmas presents from Firebox and am now really pleased I did. When I asked who I gave the gift to, what they thought of it (expecting a “uh it’s okay”) this is the response I got: Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, I know you have to be a member of Gamesville.com to play this game, but who is not? I really love playing this game. It seems to relax me and other times frustrate me because I cannot seem to pop all the bubbles.

The idea of course is to pop all the bubbles on the screen, but it is not as easy as it sounds. You can only pop bubbles when two or more of the same colored bubbles are touching. As you mouse over the bubbles their color changes just a bit, that means they can be popped. Still sounds easy, right?

Well, there are three different levels of difficulty. On each level, there is a certain amount of bubbles you must pop before you complete the round. You can glance at the bottom of the screen to learn how many you have left to finish the round.
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This is one game that I really enjoy playing online. It is a multi-player game where you can also make friends and chat while you create comical, clever or imaginative answers to random acronyms.

You will receive points based on how many people like and vote for your answer and how quickly you give an answer. The object of course is to be either first or second when it comes to points. The person that has 30 points first will advance to the Face Off round who ever comes in second place will also advance to the Face Off round. The game goes to the Face Off round as soon as one player has accumulated 30 points.

First, you will have to choose a game room or allow a room to be chosen for you. There is an adult side that does allow adult language in the room and the answers to these acronyms can be rather crude but some are also very hilarious. As long as there are 3 people in the game room a game can be played. There cannot be more than 14 players in one room.
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I enjoy all kinds of horror films and games so I search out new ones to try. Bum Lee, an animator that is attending Carnegie Mellon University, created Deanimator.

Bum Lee got his inspiration from Herbert West: Reanimator, which was written by Howard Phillips Lovecraft and was published in Home Brew in 1922. It is a story of a peculiar young doctor with a weakness for experiments that involve bringing back the dead. The terror begins at the back door in part III.
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I’m a big fan of unusual games, and it seems that the place for those at the moment is the Nintendo DS. The stylus allows for some interesting new gameplay and a great example of this is the game Trauma Center: Under The Knife.

You play a surgeon in a hospital where you have to save the lives of your patients by performing operations on them. The stylus becomes your scalpel, syringe, tweezers and a host of other medical implements. For example, you may have to remove glass from a patients arm. To do this you may first have to clean up the wound, then inject some anaesthetic, then carefully remove the pieces of glass one by one. When all the glass had been removed, you then sew up the wound.
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Do you remember playing the strategy board game Battleship? Then it advanced to electronic Battleship. Now you can play this fun game online against a computer and see if you can outwit it’s strategy.

The objective of Battleship is to destroy all of your enemy’s fleet of ships before he finds and destroys yours.

You will first place your ships on the board. Your ships include a minesweeper, a submarine, a frigate, a battleship and an aircraft carrier. You can place each ship any place on the board either vertically or horizontally. You will use your left and right arrow keys to place your ships. The placement of the ships is the most important because you do not want your enemy to find all them huddled together. That would be too easy, but maybe if you place a couple together it may throw them off course. You use your mouse by clicking on the spot on the board where you wish that ship to be placed.
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Is your favorite game on this year’s top 50 list? You might be surprised!

In celebration of the New Year, Eurogamer.net has just released its list of the Top 50 Games of 2005. The list covers video games from all different platforms and genre, and avid gamers will find that there are more than a few surprises this year. A number of “sleeper” games appear on this year’s list, indicating Eurogamer’s view that just because a title doesn’t reach a wide market, doesn’t mean it’s not a great game. In fact, some of the very best games this year flew well beneath the mainstream radar. There is a repeat or two of some games that also hit last year’s top 50 list. Can anyone say “staying power”?

And now, without further delay, we give you that Top 50 Games of the Year! Read the rest of this entry »

Knights of Honor may remind you of Age of Empire but it is quite a bit different. This is a real time strategy game where your main objective is to conquer the entire continent of Europe.

You must fight, trade, and make alliances if you are to achieve your goal while building up your kingdom at the same time.

You can choose which time period you would like to be in from Early Medieval, which is around 1000AD, high medieval which is around 1200AD, and Late Medieval, which is around 1350AD.

The time period you choose along with the kingdom affects the complexity and confrontations you will have to endure. If you decide on England you will have a large realm with lots of resources where as Aragon is a much smaller kingdom and hardly any resources. According to the kingdom, you choose your economy, the social situations, province sizes and even how the rest of the world reacts to your power will be different. The architectural structure of buildings, the religion of your realm and many other factors are also very different from one kingdom to another.
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