Fable 2

   Are you on the light side, or the dark side? Now, I'm not talking about Starwars here, I'm talking about Fable 2. This game is one of the most interesting games I've played this year. Growing horns from your head, or gaining a halo around your head. Turning corrupt from jacking up your rent prices, or becoming pure from being kind to all sorts of people. Fable 2 is probably the one RPG game where I really feel like I can customize my character to my standards.

      Fable 2 lets you explore the land of Albion, lets you set off on a multitude of quests, and lets you control your characters social behavior along the way. That's the thing I like about Fable 2. It's a humorous game, you can kill anyone, people will say funny things, and your social expressions that you can preform are just awesome. Moving on though, the land of Albion is quite large, though I can argue with many friends that other RPG's (Namely Elderscrolls IV, Oblivion) have a far greater landscape. The quests you encounter in fable 2 are fun, very easy to solve quests that usually let you decide between being good, or evil. An example would be: A group of slaves has been captured, you can either free them, or let them be taken my bandits. Each choice effects you and the people around you in someway. Your choices can even destroy towns, or rebuild them, let them flourish, or make them a pit of desperation.

   Your companion in this game is a faithful dog. He will tromp around, find treasure, sniff out buried items, and alert you to enemies. He can be taught how to do tricks, and how to get better at fighting and find items. He will be virtually everywhere with you, except on certain quests and at the end of the game, if you make a difficult choice. His appearance changes with yours, be evil and he will look truly fearsome, be neutral and he will look like any normal dog, be kind and good and he will look as shown in the picture above (Golden and dashing). After playing this game, I really do hope that a dog, any dog, will be your pet in Fable 3!

   

   Magic looks awesome on the screen, and swordplay and archery are totally cool. The third person view fits perfectly for fighting tons of enemies. Yet if Fable 2 were to have been made in a first person mode, then you could never have been able to fight the quantity of enemies that come at you at one time on this game. The team that made this game understood that, so they made the wise decision to make fable 2 a third person game. Battles on Fable 2 start out as mere skirmishes, but later on into the game, they turn into large, very destructive, clashes. You get xp from every kill, and you can use that xp to buy new abilities, like being able to shoot people in the head or groin with a rifle. 

  Fable 2 is a great game. It lets you customize your character to the greatest you can. It makes you the head of an impossible, and epic adventure. It brings the best out of a third person RPG. And almost everything Fable 2 lets you do, it lets you do it perfectly. Yet, sometimes I found myself wondering how many times I could hit a bandit on the head with a HUGE hammer without him dieing, it seems the answer is "many...many times". 

 Overall Score: 8.25

X-com UFO Defense (A "Classic")

 Shuffling through the field in the dark of night, fearing each sound, losing your squad in seconds. Freezing in the arctic, blasting aliens to shreds with plasma weapons and getting pushed into a position where you are 1 vs. 5. Quickly flying ships around the world, spending hours pouring over statistics, spending days working on a base or squad layout. These are all examples of X-com UFO Defense, a great, very deep and interesting turn based strategy game. This game was made in 1993, and for standards back then this game was probably a pretty cool game. Now, in 2010, with games that are breaking the barrier of anything video entertainment has ever seen before, X-com UFO Defense is still an amazing game. Sometimes X-com UFO Defense can be one of the most frustrating games known to the universe, but for some reason that makes it very, very, VERY fun!

  

 X-com UFO Defense has can NOT compete with modern day graphics. This is no matter, though it usually is in most games. X-com UFO makes graphics not matter. Everything is rendered clearly, so I wouldn't really care if it had better graphics. The gameplay isn't hindered by the graphics, ships look normal, people too (Though everyone looks the kinda the same), and aliens fit their role. The landscape is destructible and looks perfect. Cities have gas pumps, soda racks, food racks, cash machines, houses, warehouses, and many more. Fields have grass that can be burnt and fences and tress that can be destroyed. The world view, or "Geoscape" looks like a jumble of not impressive colors and textures. The Geoscape is still a great addition to the game, it would be really boring to just click, "Send ___ ship on patrol to (Insert a list of all the major cities in the world here)". 

   

Games that are made during this decade seem to wear off after a month or two, then you MIGHT pick then up at some later date to play with a friend. That is the main reason I keep buying more games... X-com UFO Defense is a completely different story, though it might not be for some people. Let's get this straight before I proceed with the "Gameplay" section, X-com UFO Defense is a hardcore game. Not for the casual gamer, or someone who might sit down every few days to play an hour or two. To fully experience this game you need to have patience, time, and... more patience. Spending minutes deciding how many scientists to assign to a project, then realizing you need to do another project and spending even MORE time considering which project to proceed with. Spending thirty minutes to an hour on just one terror mission, spending an average of 10-30min on a large spaceship crash recovery, this game takes a while. Just today I spent maybe, an hour to an hour and a half on my first terror mission. I was fully equipped, had a lot of high quality soldiers, and yet I got completely dominated. After I went in with my full party of 10 soldiers, I came out with 2. Even with me saving after each turn, and cautiously proceeding. I learned a valuable lesson with the mission. Even if you have the best squad, the best weapons, the best plan, everything that can go wrong will go wrong. The main point I'm trying to get through with this is: X-com UFO Defense can last a LONG time. If I'm reviewing it 17 years after launch, then that is solid proof. Hours of base planning, even more hours of strategic combat, and long periods of thinking. Several re-plays are recommended once you beat the game on the easiest setting. 

   

Sounds in X-com UFO Defense aren't anything special, a man's scream always sounds the same. An alien's plasma weapon has the same zapping sound. The footsteps of a soldier on metal are identical. The only thing that makes me a little mad at the X-com sounds is that they sometimes lag slightly. (Remember this IS a 1993 game.)

   

X-com UFO Defense is one of the best strategy games I've ever played. It's a ton of fun to play, and will only get boring if you lose patience. I only recommend this for a hardcore gamer who has a ton of time on his hands. It is available on Steam for a meager price. Pick it up today before it gets snatched from your hands by an alien humanoid! 
   Overall Score: 9.0

Team Fortress 2 PC review

This game is probably one of the multiplayer games that I can truly say that I've had a HUGE amount of fun playing. I mean, lighting fat guys carrying huge machine guns on fire with flame-throwers, building large defensive turrets that completely blow the opposition into pieces (Literally), and stabbing quickly jumping Scouts in the back with a knife can't be more fun. The different classes offer tons of fun, sneaking around as a spy, camping in a dark corner as a sniper, and blowing crap up as the demoman! 


    Moving on to the first topic I'm going to cover, which is gameplay. As described above, the gameplay is full of fun, and excitement. The maps that you can play in this game are well rounded in my perspective, the classes perfectly matched, and the hats you unlock for your characters are just plain old awesome! The maps are very fun to play, have a great setup, and can be played many times over again without getting tired of. Set in the desert, grassland, urban environments, the maps aren't all the same. It's not like you're going to play through the game only encountering snow or desert battlegrounds. The character classes, nine of them in total, are evenly matched so you aren't going to have one class that can completely beat all others. Though a lot of people like the power they can get from playing that "all powerful" class, it's not a good thing. For if it would be the case that Team Fortress 2 had that "all powerful" class, then all it's other classes would be useless. This would reduce the playability of this game drastically, since there would be absolutely no point in using the other eight classes. Luckily this isn't the question. TF2 has perfect classes that match each other.

    Next up is the graphics. Over all, they are great. To me, they match video games that are out now, though TF2's graphics are all cartoony. Blood is great, models are awesome, and the maps are equally awesome. The cartoony art style fits TF2's mood down to the tiny molecule, and supplements the game by making it so obscenely fun to play. The FPS heads up display also fits the game and adds another (yes, yes, there is A LOT of cartoony art in this game. The whole game is a cartoon!) cartoony addition to the game by making your bullet count appear in bubbly, lopsided text. (I'm not going to describe the whole HUD.) The bullets that streak across the map are just yellow lines, and the muzzle flash is a yellow cone. Yet these graphics are soooo appealing. A small touch I have found that I like tremendously is the sun glare off of the weapons and the gloves of some characters. The final verdict on the graphics of TF2 is that though they are completely cartoony, they match they game and give a special, fun feeling to it.

   The last topic I'm going to cover is sound (Give me a bit of credit, I usually don't). The burst from a gun, turret, or rocket launcher, doesn't sound the BEST it sounds ok. But the sound in this game is the best because of one defining factor that "only multiplayer" games hardly ever use, letting the character have a personality. The voice acting (Well... more like small sentences) is top notch. The spy, in his formidable accent, says that he surely doesn't want to get blood on HIS suit. The heavy gunner does more laughing than talking, but it still gives him a personality. The pyro is probably one of the best voice characters in the game. I haven't yet heard of a multiplayer game (Please inform me if there is one or two) that thought of MUFFLING a voice if it inside a gasmask! The scout acts like an ignorant little bugger as he taunts his opponents. This list could go on for all nine characters, for the voice/sound for each of them is great, and there are multiple examples.

   Team Fortress 2 would be one of the games that I will never get tired of. The gameplay is top notch, graphics are entertaining, and funny, and the sound is intriguing. Experimenting with the different classes is amazingly fun, and the aspect that makes any multiplayer class based game worthless if it's not included, is perfectly even classes. Luckily TF2 has this feature. I would put this one your wishlist, for it's one of the best multiplayer games out there.


  Overall Score: 9.5