Gears of War 2

 Want blood? Lots of blood? Epic gore? Cutting out gigantic worm's hearts? Cutting people in half? CUTTING? You need Gears of War 2, or medical help. But get Gears, for it has all the killing you can ever get in a video game. Oh, yeah, and I forgot, you can blow shit up.

 As mentioned above, this game is totally filled with gore, and it's awesome! Though the graphics aren't the best, they somehow help portray the action, and make the game look very fast paced. Blood splatters are realistic, but the blood doesn't catch on armor, unless the scene calls for it to (Like when you cut open a bunch of hearts inside a huge worm, and practically dissect the thing, from inside!!). The graphics on character animations are smooth, but I always feel that the characters are like big moving blocks, and way too bulky. Sure, the guys are covered in armor and equipment, but they still seem like huge blocks. The third person prospective is quite nice, and let's you see much more of the map at once. If it were a game like Halo, I wouldn't like it, but Gears makes third person look awesome.

Extreme GORE!

 The AI is not great, and not bad. It's just ok, enemies will react to what you do, move around the battlefield, accurately fire upon you, dodge grenades. They don't know when to retreat, though many games don't know how to do that either. Your team mates are also pretty good, they'll follow you around and do the objectives, I've yet to see anytime when my partner got stuck on a lamp post and I had to restart my console. Another great thing about the AI is that it doesn't glitch.

 Multiplayer is provided, but didn't work for me, I tried connecting for about 30min, but it didn't let me through. May be a problem with my internet, or the multiplayer may not even be active anymore.

 There are weapons, but I would hope for a few more than are provided, yet the weapons function nicely, and I find them very fun to shoot stuff with.

 Also, a firefight style, hoard mode gameplay type is playable. This lets you fight multiple waves of enemies, that are increasingly harder. Very fun to play with friends, or alone, after you have beaten the singleplayer.

 Overall, the story is actually really great, graphics suppliment the game's focus (GORE!!) and help the player feel a sence of action and drama. Game dynamics are pretty cool. Hoard mode add to the value of the game greatly. Multiplayer not working, or is it? And not many weapons, lower this games rating, but not by too much. It's still something I would buy.

 Overall Score: 7.5

Minecraft Beta

  Feel like building an empire? A Roman city? Even something like the Empire State Building? Well, you can do that in minecraft, from scratch, from the very earth itself. Live in a city, out in the wilderness, in a cave, on a floating island. The options are endless.



 As stated above, the gamer can do anything. The gamer starts with nothing, survives his first night, build a small base, and hopefully starts to create a huge empire. The game is huge. People say it can randomly generate (Yes, the whole game is randomly generated) enough land to cover the surface of the earth 8 times. But someone would need a huge computer, for it uses your computers memory when it generates the new land. This game lets the player build up, as high as the clouds, or down to the bedrock of the earth, encountering several useful materials along the way.

 Another amazing feature is crafting, you can build crafting tables to let you make axes, swords, armor, blocks of ore, buckets, and many, many others. The only way to survive in this game is crafting.

 Anyway, kind of off topic up there, (I'm kind of ranting about how great the game is...) onto the more important things. Multiplayer is supported in this game, but it is quite hard (If you're not a tech geek) to set up a mulitplayer server, yet you can still play in other people's servers. Singleplayer is really fun, and if you really want to you can hack it with downloaded materials from other sites. Updates come very often to this game, sometimes monthy, or weekly, and the developers and very good about repairing the game. Graphics are old school, but thats not important. This game isn't about graphics, it's about creativity, and fun. Texture packs can be downloaded to your computer to modify the games textures, and make it look better(Or in some cases, worse).

  Another very, very major issue is bugs. This game is riddled with them. Game crashes, game glitches, etc, this game has it. Of course, the developers are trying to fight them off, and have almost completely rid the singleplayer of them. Multiplayer though isn't free of the occational crash, and glitch. This doesn't really make the game any worse, (And I will say this again) since it is very clear that the developers are not going to let it go on, the bugs will stop.

 Below are some pictures of the game... Oh man, I love this game... xD Check it.

A cityscape. Urban life.

 Life in the Wilderness... I think this one is on a texture pack.

Is that a floating island? This one is on a texture pack.

A small, but pretty cool forest castle.

 Overall Score: 9.0

 And that's it guys, I'll be back sometime this weekend or sometime soon for another review, possibly an old game known as Gears of War 2 shall be reviewed.

 Jay