Christmas 2011

Merry Christmas or holidays to any viewers I may have! And for future viewers too!

For those of you that simply prefer to watch on Youtube:
Christmas in Raccoon City


To those of you who'd want this picture as a gif, there is multiple images below for you to have fun with.

Big thanks to Airos for making the snow gif, and the animated vintage thingy! As well as letting me upload with his photobucket... thanks.

Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360)

That's pretty manly.

Writers note: I have not played Gears of War 1, or 3 at the time of writing this. I am judging the game on its own merits.

For me, the popular shooters have lost what made them fun. Every main-stream multiplayer monster of today is a First Person Shooter, and a lot of games that want to be unique, decide to go down the First Person Shooter genre to gaurantee sales. FPS games have gotten slow, boring, repetitive, unimaginative and they all feel the same, or a cheap and easy way to make a quick buck. That's why Gears of War dragged me in. A giant monster of multiplayer that's not in first person? Over the shoulder so I can see my character and watch him kick ass? A camera viewpoint which allows me to have some actual peripheral vision? Just the camera angle first drew me in, so I did some research. One more interesting thing after another and soon I found myself borrowing the game, becoming quite pleased and promptly buying it a couple months after giving it back. While it has its share of problems, the game is finally able to put a spin on "point your guns at people and shoot" that actually holds my interest. And so, the following is why.

As per usual, lets start with the story set-up. From what I've gathered, humans kept doing their human thing on the planet Sera, fighting eachother until some alien rock-looking people called the Locust showed up to fuck things up. All of humanity had to link together to fight against the Locust, and even then it became what felt like a losing battle. In Gears of War 1, I'm pretty sure we were introduced to many of the characters, four of the most important ones being Marcus Fenix (very very angry man), Dominic Santiago (very emotional man, his armor lite-brites are also broken), Baird (a very cocky, and comic relief character) and Augustus "Coletrain" Cole. (large screaming black man who suprisingly doesn't die.) In the first game, the four of them brought a huge-ass bomb to the middle of the Locust hive, and proceeded to blow them back to kingdom come, ending the war.

Or so they thought, since, in Gears 2, the Locust are alive and well, and have pushed the human army back to one big city called Jacinto, their last armored, safe haven. As you can guess it's slowly becoming less safe. To once again combat the threat, you will be playing as Marcus Fenix, and always have Dominic Santiago by your side, whether he be computer controlled or be played by your good ol' Xbox buddy (or you're playing as Dom) it's a campaign designed for Co-oping.

Now whether you're playing campaign, or going online/offline-with-AI-bots in Multiplayer, the controls for Gears are a multitude different, and more complex than pointing and shooting. The main huge stepping stone for Gears is it's cover system. By tapping the A button, and using the analog stick, you can quickly press your back up against a wall, chest-high barrier, the corner of a wall, all to avoid bullets and peek in, or out of a corner to shoot, and duck back to safety. The cover system can also allow you to quickly zip over to the next wall, or if you're against something tall you can crouch or stand, confusing your enemy should they be trying to rush to you and miss your head. I know that Gears is not the first game to do cover, but it's probably done it the best. In most games, the cover often feels cumbersome, heavy and just not worth it trying to struggle. But here, it's a quick tap of the button and you're in safety. Moving left and right along the wall, blindfiring (shooting out of the cover without peeking yourself out) and of course stepping or jumping out is all handled quickly, smoothly, and doesn't hinder the player whatsoever. The other glorious part, is that, usually no matter what you do when you take cover there's always a toe or hair sticking out even to people directly on the other side. This makes most games' cover useless but Gears remedies this by giving you a smaller hitbox that can only be nabbed at by being a lot more open to your attacker. While it's strange sometimes to watch bullets going through your shoulder and not hurting you, it's a damn blessing and actually makes this system worth something.

Otherwise, this game has also somehow managed to refine the old act of shooting people. You can shoot in two different ways. One is by aiming with one button, causing a reticule to come up on the screen, and then shooting with the other. This mode is accurate, zooms in slightly, but you walk slowly while using it. The other way is firing from the hip. Done simply by shooting without aiming. There's no aiming sight, and the gun becomes much more inaccurate, but this method is useful for quickly whipping around to shoot, jog-strafing while keeping your enemy under cover with a bullet-rain, and you can also perform this while in cover. Firing out of cover much less accurately, but keeping your head behind the wall, called Blindfiring. Pretty self explanatory. Either aim and shoot slow and straight, or, jog and fire wildly and fast. Your choice. Different strokes for different situations.

And finally, the movement of your character is also done well enough. If anything, the movement might be what suffers in a couple questionable areas, but it still works great. The left analog stick will move and strafe your character in all four directions, and the right makes him turn side to side, or look up and down. He can walk, jog, and if you hold down the A button, he will go into Roadie Run. This causes him to crouch, and run forward at high speed. He's a little harder to steer like this but by combining the Roadie Run with other well-practiced movements, he can flow seamlessly across the battlefield. Unfortunately the Roadie Run camera also starts shaking spastically, which I could have lived without but it isn't a huge deal. Finally for movement is the dodgeroll. It's a little big questionable how it actually works. I just mash the A button two or three times to get my Gear soldier to dive roll in whatever direction I press. He can dive forward, backward, left or right and all directions are fast, and you can even turn the camera while rolling to face a specific direction when you stand, even if he sometimes fails to roll where you'd like, preffering to dive somewhere more dangerous.

Now that we've covered how you move, let's cover your armory. You have four slots to hold four weapons, each of which is accessible by the D-Pad. The Up slot is your grenades. These range from Smoke, to Frag, to a poisonous gas cloud Ink grenade. Each of these can he carefully aimed, hip-thrown, or if you're feeling fancy enough, you can press B to tag the grenade onto a wall, turning it into a proximity mine. (Even fancier is the ability to tag it right onto an opponent. Haahaha.) In your Down slot your pistol. There is three of these in the game, ranging from a basic fast-fire okay damage gun, to a slow, powerful magnum revolver, and to a burst-fire SMG. You may only hold one type of pistol, or grenade at a time. Finally, in your left or right slots, you can hold two of many types of weapons in the game, and here's where the real mean guns come in.

For the most part, you have quite a few basic. A burst rifle, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, there's even a deadlier version of a grenade launcher. But the game has some wicked choices within it too, the most popularly known being the Lancer machine gun. What makes it special is it's melee attack. When you hold B, the gun will lift up, and start revving it's chainsaw. Yes, chainsaw. Quite a few mechanics are packed into the chainsaw fun alone. While holding up the chainsaw, you move just a slight bit slower while trying to close in on your enemy. Should you get close enough to them, they're sucked into an instant-kill that saws them right in half. It may sound cheap, but it's hard to pull off because if someone shoots you, your saw will go back down, and you won't be able to use it for a couple more seconds. Each time you attempt to in this timeframe, your character will simply jump back a little. So the chainsaw needs to be used at the right time, at the right place. And finally into the chainsaws, if your opponent is facing you, and they as well have a Lancer, (they don't need to be revving for this) you'll enter a chainsaw duel. Both saws will collide in the air, and whoever mashes the B button the most pushes the other person back and saws them right down the middle. It's very rare for those duels to happen but when they do, and you win, it's the most satisfying feeling you usually get out of the game. Oh boy is it satisfying.There's a couple other fantastic guns lying around as well. Specifically, the Torque Bow. It has no scope, but it's a charge-up weapon that, once fully charged, will stick it's bow right into an enemy and explode, usually guaranteeing a one-hit kill. It's hard to use but if you're even luckier, you can fully charge it to go through one enemy's head and hit another one. Or blow up two at the same time. Etc. Then there's the heavy weapons. There is two of these, and they can't be held in your inventory. You pick them up, and they're often slow and cumbersome to use. These consist of the Mortar or Mulcher. The first is a high-lobbing airstrike style bomb which you can use to sweep out enemies behind cover, or support your troops. The second is an absolutely devastating gatling gun that you either walk with while firing, place on the ground or place onto cover to shoot. Slow to use, but will bring someone into pieces within seconds of concentrated fire.

Almost all of these weapons can be reloaded, and even there comes in a cute little twist. When you reload, a tiny bar shows up in place of your clip counter, and shows a little sweet spot while a line glides along it. If you press the reload button again as soon as that line hits the sweet spot, (think of the power meter in golfing games) you'll reload much faster, and your new ammo will get a temporary damage boost called an Active Reload. This makes this one of the only games where you don't specifically want to be fully loaded all the time. If you know where the enemy is, you can leave a few shells out of your gun until you're ready to "Active Reload" and bring them down. However, if you miss the sweet spot, your gun will jam, causing your reload to be significantly slowed down by a few more seconds which can mean the difference between living or dying, so be careful.

Finally, I just wanna quickly touch on the health system. You have no actual health bar. Rather, as you're shot and damaged, a red skull with slowly start fading in on the center of the screen. If you can get behind cover and wait long enough, the skull will go away and you're free to fight again. Yes, regenerating health. Oh well, it's the new thing I guess. If it lights up all the way however, well, read below.

Whether you be burning, smacking, shooting or exploding your enemies, if they don't die right away they'll be crawling on the floor slowly after you damage them enough. If you happen to be the one brought down to your hands and knees, you have only a limited time to crawl back to a partner and have them revive you, before you either get killed by an enemy or simply bleed to death. If your enemy is the one you've sent crawling however, now you get your opportunity to rub it in with Executions. If you didn't kill them right away you can walk up and finish them off with many a satisfying kill. Chainsawing them, curb-stomping them, and of course my personal favourite, kicking them over onto their backside and punching the hell out of their face. Some weapons even come with their own unique executions. This is also an opportunity for strategy. You can use a crawling enemy to draw other enemies to you, or you can pick him up and use him as a meatshield, allowing you to tank the battlefield for a little bit till your shield is expired from being too riddled with bullets. But if you can't get close to finish the kill, you can always just keep firing bullets into him from afar till he's dead. That works too.

So, generally that's the gameplay covered. But for a mainstream game, it's probably gotta look and sound good right? Well, first let's tackle the looks. Let's just say that the environments do look like they're textured, the characters animate fluidly, and it's all still pretty pleasing. But it does have one big, glaring issue with it's art design. Brown. I understand that it's going for a barren wasteland war mood, but there's times where what was on screen was quite literally just different shades of brown that I was surprised I could see through. Hell, it was hard finding pictures for this review that didn't look like a mess! It's an amazement that we've come far enough to display trillions of colors on-screen at the same time and yet developers choose to pick the three blandest colors and stick with them. I guess it looks nice, you just gotta see what brown can do for you.

Otherwise I can tackle sound. I'd have to give the musical score here a definite plus. During combat in the campaign, intense mood-setting and sometimes even epic choruses of a soundtrack will echo the intensity and stakes of your combat. The sound in game also seems to have some time put into it. Almost every gun sounds hard, and fun to use. You also get great feedback hearing your enemy groan in pain, and hearing the bullets splatter into their flesh. Even the characters talk believably, and are fun to listen to when they get angry. Unfortunately, the characters are a little blandly voiced, mostly shown by their in-combat quotes seem to all be the same. I've heard the same line spouted from about five different mouths here. To make blandness worse, the huge downside of the sound is that like a lot of games these days the multiplayer lacks any music to be mentioned. I have my own tunes to play, but that's hardly an excuse. Give the job to a couple of nerds with music programs, chances are they'll fix something up to go with your levels nicely. But no, the multiplayer comes, unsurprisingly with no music to speak of. Oh well. Unreal Tournament soundtracks go real well here anyway.

Before I sink into multiplayer which I've now mentioned a few times, I can quickly sum up the campaign. It's a rather well-done campaign. Linear for sure, but it will reward your exploration with ammo, or maybe even a collectible text-file that you can read, 40 something of which are scattered across the full campaign. Between walking, searching and preparing is your combat. Mostly it consists of good ol' cover fights that you can handle a couple ways. Usually the battlefield is swayed just right into your favor anyway, allowing you to get the high ground on enemies, or arm yourself with a giant gatling turret for a storm of them to come through a door. There's even a couple vehicle sections, and some monstrous bosses and whatnots to fight. The Locust come in many different sizes. From human, to bastardly-small, and really really big. Hell, there's even a giant dinosaur looking thing armed with gatling guns and missile launchers. It's not an amazing campaign, but you might play it a couple times, and you'll enjoy your first time through going from cities, to underground, to mountains to what have you.


So finally, I'm gonna bite into the big fat multiplayer fish. None of the actual controls here have changed, but the fact you're fighting human players who have the same power as you definitely will change your strategy. Each game mode consists of up to 10 players total, five for each team Human and Locust. For both teams, you can also pick your character you wish to use, well over the amount required for everyone to have a unique character. You cannot use the various campaign monsters on the Locust team here, both sides are exactly the same with a man, and a gun and two legs. For these you have about ten levels to fight in, most of which are symmetrically designed, and you have the game modes as follows.

Warzone, is a spin on Team Deathmatch. Each team must simply eliminate the other, and every player gets one life. This means that, if you die, that's it until one of the teams is completely wiped out and the next round starts. The winner is chosen by whoever reaches 5 round wins first. This number can be changed in Custom Matches.

Execution. This is the same as Warzone, but crawling enemies rules are changed a bit, if someone isn't killed instantly they'll be crawling on the ground. In this state, they can only be killed by someone getting close enough to perform a special execution on them. You MUST be close to them to finish the kill, and if you don't they'll revive themselves at the end of their bleedout time and be ready to come hailing back at you. Luckily, they can only go down three times before simply dying so it doesn't become endless shooting.

Guardian. This mode picks up the stakes and strategy. One player on each team is chosen as the leader. As long as this person is alive, the team may respawn and respawn as many times as possible to continue protecting the leader and assaulting the other. Once the leader dies however, every team member is instantly on their last life. So the objective is to kill the leader by any means neccessary, and then finish sweeping the team. Next round, the leader is chosen randomly.

Wingman. This mode is a multi-team based mode. Two people are on each team, with a total of five teams, made up of ten players. This mode follows Execution rules for the killing, but your score is actually decided by how many people you kill, rather than how many matches are survived. I actually didn't like this choice, as it forced you to go out guns blazing and brick your quiet, sneaky ninja tactics, but it's still fun nonetheless. It's also the only mode where you can watch a human curb-stomp another human.

Submission. A spin on Capture the Flag. One random NPC with a shotgun is spawned somewhere in the map. Both teams must attempt to shoot him down to his knees (he cannot die) take him for a meatshield (he doesn't block any bullets) and bring him to a designated area. If someone can hold their Meatflag in the specific area for a certain amount of time, they earn their team a capture. This mode is considered one of the more chaotic, as it can be over in seconds, or one round can go on for minutes. Personally, between me and my friends we're a little dissapointed that an optional eleventh player isn't allowed to play as the Meatflag. It would be impossible to win, but it's also impossible for the Meatflag to die so it's be fun holding yourself off against ten people trying to kidnap you. But it isn't there, and it's a small idea I wish had made it into development.

King of The Hill. This is about the only classic mode that hasn't had a spin put onto it. Simply put, a random weapon spawn on the map is chosen as the Hill location, and teams will be fighting eachother to gain total control of this hill. As long as you hold the hill, it will continue giving you a steady flow of points. Once a team reaches the point limit, or once time runs out, the team who has gained the most points from said hill receives a round point. Usually this goes to 2 round wins, changeable in a Custom match.

Annex. Oops! King of the Hill does have a cute spin! Annex is different from King of the Hill in that the Hill actually moves. Once the hill is drained of all it's points, it will dissapear, and another random weapon spawn will be chosen as the new location. Whichever team reaches the point limit first, wins a round. It's fun to have both teams viciously fighting eachother just to gain control of the hill and suck away it's one remaining point.

Through all of these matches, you will gain experience based on how well you do. All the way from level 1, to level 100, it's somewhat satisfying to level up, but I'm not sure why. You don't actually get anything for leveling up except a shiny new medal. Some new character unlocks or something would have been nice, but there's absolutely no rewards for leveling up except achievements. I reached level 100 because I'm an achievement whore, and you don't even get the higher level achievements unless you have specific DLC, which is simply put, a stupid stupid move. There's no excuse for it.

As well as speaking of DLC, I'd also like to point out the Social Xbox Live playlist. The Social playlist will always be in your multiplayer menu, constantly. Even if you don't have the map packs. The problem is, if you don't have all the maps you are not allowed to play on Social. It's a tease, mean, and strange move that probably angers anyone with just vanilla Gears. More and more games tease you with DLC you can't select, and it's getting on my nerves.

But regardless, the multiplayer is competent, somewhat fresh, and if you have no access to online, thank god the game allows you to play fully with bots, allowing you to play offline, create funky custom matches or simply practice new moves or refine old one. Unfortunately with the bots, they're bumright dumb. They work... okay. For the most part they move, shoot, use a reasonable weapon for the situation, they work okay. But occasionally they'll perform the stupidest moves. Usually this means they'll take cover on a wall that's right out in the open, and then not react whatsoever when someone is busy shooting them. It also takes bots ages to kill eachother off, so watching them fight is like watching an exercise in motor-skills retraining. Though I'd rather have them dumb, than not at all. However, besides their intelligence, the bots also have the ability to do physically impossible things. This includes roadie running with a heavy weapon (their character model spazzes out pretty humorously) shooting bullets sideways out of the barrel, looking one way with their camera the other way, or just recently, a campaign enemy fired its mortar backwards, causing me to unexpectedly blow up when I flanked him from behind. I really wonder what causes some of these but they're funny to watch anyway.

Finally, there's Horde mode. I left this till the bottom of the list because it can be a single, or Co-op experience. Up to five players play as the human cog army. You will find yourself battling wave, after wave of campaign-style computer controlled enemies in an effort to live as far as you physically can, all the way up to Wave 50 in whatever multiplayer map you choose. They're all compatible. Sadly you can't have AI partners, but if you feel like being a badass, you can go it alone and see how long your single ass can go (which often isn't long) or team up with a few friends or some randoms in ranked matches, and see how far you go with backup. Using cover-deployable metal shields you can make ghetto-style bases, and hopefully everyone will cooperate together. The downside is that after Wave 10, it'll repeat the same enemies for every ten waves, each time just boosting their stats. For example, there will be sires on waves 6, 16, 26, 36, and 46 upwards. It's a livable problem, but it sure looks lazy. Still, it does give you a few waves every time it loops to get prepared for the tougher waves past the 5, 15, 25, etc marks. The other dissapointment is that none of the monumental enemies from campaign are brought here. It's understandable that they couldn't squish in, but I still would have loved to see one of those giant dinosaurs with guns slapped in there to mess with me. Oh well. Horde mode is at it's heart, a deadly Survival Mode which I believe every game with fun combat needs.

And to close this review, I'd like to finally attack the game community and some of it's networking faults. The community is not something I can blame the game for though, so the negatives here about people are not the game's fault. It's the people who play it, so technically this section is null and void, but hey it's gotta be said. The good thing about the community is that it's actually one of the few online games that's almost empty of five year olds. I rarely hear a squealing voice or whiney baby. But the people that are there do say annoying things. Constantly throwing out slanderous sexual insults, and the ever-so-common "omg host advantage" that makes me want to rip my ears out. It's obvious that hosts of a match have a slight advantage. It's just science. But blaming your entire loss on it is a poor practice that makes you look a schlub.

In combat, it's hardly ever consistent either. There's times where I've done so suspiciously well that I actually feel bad for the person on the other side of my badassness. Then there's the times where we have a well-fought even match and despite who wins I walk out feeling satisfied about a good match. But the ones that get under my skin are the ones I'd like to call "shotgun rushers". This usually consists of three, or the whole team of players that literally dash across the battlefield and simply close the distance to blow everyone away with shotguns. I'd like to believe I can try and combat this technique, but I swear even when I have my shotgun inside their stomach and I fire, they hardly flinch, and usually when you get one shotgun rushing team you're bound to encounter a few in a row. I'll be honest, I sometimes quit out of rage. A bot will replace me anyway so it's all good right?

As a quick piece of networking issues as well, the games level system seems to be broken for some people. I've had friends that have been reset down level one, apparentely multiple times. It's never happened for me, but I'd watch out. Another irritating thing is that when you are connected to Live, the game has to go into updating mode for almost every menu. You can't select menu items while it's doing this. I don't know why it feels the need to go into Updating processes every time I start it up or return to the menu, but there's the occasional times where I guess the servers shit themselves and it stays in Updating process for ever, making me shut it off. Certainly something I would have lived without rather.

That brings me into my final negative for this review. The shotguns. From what I hear, they've been nerfed many times throughout Gears 2's life and they're still a little overpowered. Why use any other gun at all when the shotgun is an up-close instant kill, and can down someone in two shots from halfway across the battlefield? The shotgun is also pretty inconsistent as well. Whereas I'll be taking cover on a barrier and someone is covering on the other side, I'll fire a shell directly into their head and they won't move a muscle, but then they duck out of cover, and blow me into bits in one blow. There's many variations of this damage inconsistency, but they're all anger inducing, no doubt. However they seem to be limited to the shotgun, so that's not a global problem, even if the shotguns make up a large portion of play.

FINAL SAY:
Despite ending the review on a sore note, Gears of War 2 is what I would call a great game that actually stands out from the rest of the shooter crowd. Except of course for the big use of brown colors. With of course it's slew of problems (the gamer community being the worst but I can't blame them) it's still fun to play, kick some ass, it's a bit unique and most importantly, it's made even more fun if you grab a few friends and go online or decide to blow eachother to bits and pieces. If you want a competitive game with guns that's actually different than the mindless masses try checking this out. It's cinematic, complex gameplay may be your fancy!

Resident Evil 5 - Untold Stories Bundle (DLC, Xbox 360)

We couldn't think of a good caption. So, implied rape.

Writer's note: This is a review of a Downloadable Content for the full game Resident Evil 5. If you haven't please go read that. Also, ahead are spoilers of a couple downloadable chapters, and the main game if you haven't played it already. Proceed with caution. I also apologize for lack of pictures. Blogspot feels like being an ass to me and I don't wanna sift through HTML code.

So, the Untold Stories bundle consists of every bit of DLC for Resident Evil 5, except for Versus mode. All of this includes the costume packs, Mercenaries Reunion, and the two extra story chapters Lost in Nightmares & Desperate Escape. These two extra chapters take place around Chris and Sheva's adventures and explore parts of the story that have mostly been established, fleshing them out into two full-length game chapters worth the adventure. I chose to bundle them together in one review because they're similar to each other and they can be downloaded as one. It also prevents me from having six different reviews all stemming off of Resident Evil 5. I can't be that lazy and spread it over six weeks of updates... but it sure is tempting.

First up is Lost in Nightmares. For those of you who have played Resident Evil 5, you'll remember that before Chris met Sheva, he and Jill went to confront Spencer (the head of Umbrella) hoping it would lead them to Wesker, which it did. This is where Chris lost Jill and these are also the events that Lost in Nightmares expands on. And expand it does, where the main game would have you believe it was a rather straight-forward mission they were on, here in this chapter it's far more fleshed out, all harking back to the old days of Resident Evil with creepy atmospheres, hefty text diaries to read and even an easter egg that turns the camera into a fixed security-camera like style of the older games. It's obvious Capcom was trying to please older fans with this chapter, but were they successful?

I'd like to say yes. While there's nothing here that actually scared me, I was washed over with nostalgia when I would backtrack a couple times through halls solving miniscule puzzles. Here you'll find yourself playing with the team of Chris and Jill. (technically for the first time in the entirety of Resident Evil) The first portion of this chapter takes place in the main hall, and a few branching rooms of one of Spencer's mansions. Throughout this main portion you'll be gathering items, weapons, solving one or two simple puzzles, and even saving your partner from a good ol' crushing ceiling trap. It's all a welcome, slow-paced meander through creepy halls, all so you can proceed forward into the dank, gross underground torture chambers of the mansion.

And it's here, in these gross undergrounds that you'll encounter your first enemy. He's a large, hooded, multi-toothed bastard with a giant eye growing on his shoulder, and wielding a huge anchor. At first you'll think you can take him with little problem. But when you find out that his grab move is an inescapable death-grip, you'll be panicking just to get a shot off into his weak point on his back, trying desperately to run past him and hoping your partner is close enough to save you should he grab you. There's definitely more than one of these guys, and their sheer death-dealing power will make you panic and run with your heart racing (especially when there's two of them) a good feeling that the Resident Evil series has been missing. Unfortunately, these guys are the only enemy in the chapter (aside from Wesker) and they're literally just a re-skin of the Executioner with some boosted stats from the main game. Reskinning would make sense, but it's still quite lazy for such an interesting looking enemy. Because he shares the same animations, it's awkward to watch him swinging his anchor wildly just like the axe man because his anchor constantly clips through the cramped, narrow hallways. The animations just don't fit this chapter's claustrophobia. It's rather dissapointing, but regardless these guys are deadly, and (if you don't want a cool gameplay spoiler, proceed to the next paragraph) there's even a part where you lose your weapons and you must kill up to four of these dudes using cranks and ceiling spike-traps. Being the bait for that isn't comfortable.

After you've escaped from the gross-ass sewers, it's time to confront Wesker. It takes place in the exact same room as the cutscene only now you get to fight him, making a total of four Wesker fights throughout Resident Evil 5 and it's DLC. This particular fight with Wesker is actually quite different from the main game ones (again, good gameplay spoilers coming up) in that there's nowhere to hide, so rather than hiding you must provoke Wesker into attacking you and hope you're good at Quick Time Events, otherwise you'll be suffering some serious pain. Along with the new way you must fight him, he also comes packed with a couple extra moves and a bit of attitude, such as the ability to send you flying back at a wall, then laughing right in your face as you're trying to recover. Unfortunately, the QTE events being pretty much the only way to open him up for attack, it's a shame they aren't responsive. I can't tell you how many times I've obviously pressed the required X, and still been hit by him, and an AI partner isn't quite helpful here. I find that they tend to try and shoot Wesker rather than punch him off me, made worse by the fact he dodges bullets. But regardless, either you've gotta dodge his moves and smack him, or have your partner smack him when he's busy on you. Survive for a set amount of time, OR inflict enough damage, and the chapter ends, showing the cool fight scene from the main game and giving you your score.

So that's the gist of the chapter, but it sounds like one round would be enough right? WRONG! Thankfully, this DLC chapter boasts a few thing inside it to keep you playing at least a few times over. As you raise the difficulty for example, the game becomes significantly harder beyond just tougher enemies. For example, at one point the mini-bosses stop showing up on the GPS radar on Professional, and on some difficulties they may even begin to spawn inside the first mansion area, totally throwing you off guard. Also spread throughout the level is hidden score stars. Shoot these as you would a BSAA emblem for more score. While the only thing you can unlock from finding them all is an achievement, they're still fun and well hidden if you like that sort of hunting thing. Alongside difficulty changes, the game will randomly swap out it's weapons. While the area they spawn remains the same, what weapon actually spawns there is different each time. What might be a shotgun one round, could be a simple machine gun the next. Overall, Lost in Nightmares is a fun chapter that brings itself back to the good old days of Resident Evil for the most part, and is worth playing over and over.

Moving on from that is Mercenaries Reunion. This particular incarnation of Mercenaries technically comes with Lost in Nightmares, and the big deal about it is that it features new characters. Originally, you'd have to unlock these characters by purchasing the different bits of Resident Evil 5 DLC, and this is a vicious move, so the Untold Stories Bundle is definitely your bet. Among these characters is two different costumes of Chris and Sheva, Josh, Excella, and the most significant additions are the supporting characters from Resident Evil 1. Barry Burton and Rebecca Chambers. Among the new characters however, you won't find any new stages but the stages have been altered a little from the main game Mercenaries. Time bonus locations are changed, and depending on the stage, the frequency and types of mobs have been tweaked to change difficulties. Some stages are tougher, and some have been significantly nerfed. It's all a somewhat fresh experience, and the new characters here have some incredibly amazing moves. Barry has the ability to headbutt someone so hard their skull will rupture open. That's fucking manly.

But the Mercenaries Reunion is called Reunion for a reason, the inclusion of Rebecca and Barry. The original Mercenaries characters can't be brought into Reunion and as a result you're stuck with the eight-character roster. Now don't get me wrong, I do like Josh and Sheva, but I would have gladly chopped these two to include Wesker, and especially Jill in her STARS outfit. It's a reunion, and the full STARS team are the people that deserve to be here, not these newcomers. It's a rather kick in the balls, because many people were hoping Jill would get to fight alongside Barry once again. Still, despite that rather shady move, the characters are all blazing fun, and Reunion is just as awesome as it's predecessor, more even.

Finally, we move on to the extra chapter Desperate Escape. Again, if you've played the main game you'll likely remember the fight with Jill Valentine, and that after you freed her of Wesker's mind control, you don't see her again till the end of the game when she's on a helicopter with Josh. Desperate Escape covers that entire area in between. Apparently what had happened is that Jill passed out after departing from Chris, later to be found by Josh. Throughout this chapter you will play as Jill and Josh, both on a mission to get to a control tower, and radio their friend "Doug" (a character exclusive to this chapter) for a helicopter so they can later help Chris and Sheva. This chapter however, is nothing like Lost in Nightmares. Rather, Desperate Escape pumps up the action to the absolute maximum. As you make your way through the world you'll hardly have a moments rest. Dangerous enemies, spawning mini-bosses, and constant explosions will rock your world as you struggle to proceed through the chapter just to get to the end.

Even at the end , you'll find yourself having to survive on a rooftop for what is only a few minutes, but with the absolutely ruthless enemies, and the mini-bosses that spawn in coming at you, it seems like an eternity just watching the seconds tic down. The entire chapter is a crazy run through hell, and it's made even more interesting by the fact it shares some replay value similar to Lost in Nightmares. Weapons here are randomized even moreso, and while you won't find any emblems or special stars to find, the enemies often come across as random too. Even going so far as the entire mob-list could be completely different in one run. What may have been normal town Majini and axeman first, could turn into military Majini and constant Reapers on another run. It's insane, heart-pumping, and you won't always know what to expect so it's definitely something you'll play more than once.

Finally, if you're looking for a serious challenge, these two chapters are your bet. On Professional difficulty, both chapters hold back not a single thread, and it'll get to the point where you'll be wondering how it's physically possible. Sometimes it was ludicrously hard to the point I almost broke a controller, but Desperate Escape has an achievement called "Run the Gauntlet" for a reason. It truly is a gauntlet, one that will test even the most hardened, veteran players.

FINAL SAY:
As far as I'm concerned, this entire pile of DLC was well worth my.. what is it, seven dollars? Microsoft points are weird. Anyway, Lost in Nightmares was a well-loved harkening back to the old games, and Desperate Escape goes to the complete other end of the spectrum, challenging me to my wits end. While I'm a little agitated at Mercenaries Reunion for putting in Excella rather than a STARS Jill, it's still a fun, worthy alteration on the original formula that I'm glad I payed for. If you need more Resident Evil 5, here's where you'll find it.

Virtua Quest (Playstation 2)

The first skill you get. And it's super shiny!

The Virtua Fighter series is a long-standing well-respected fighting series that focuses less on being wild, and seems to put itself more into serious, realistic fighting. (aside from broken arms still working fine) As with many well-established franchises however, this one got a strange, hyper-crazy spin-off called Virtua Quest. It delved into the world of outrageous enemies and moves, and turned into a beat-em-up rather than a one-on-one classic fighter. Was this for the best? Continue reading. Do it.

Virtua Quest takes place in the not-too-distant future, on the man-made island of Acropolis, where people in this time period have grown tired of their actual lives, and have taken to living inside virtual reality, nowadays called the Nexus. Strangely, the servers they live in just represent normal stuff like shopping malls or cities, although a VR server is a good place to safely explore a jungle. Well... it's not so safe here. (Even more strange is that the people living like this haven't become horrendously fat as a result of technically sitting on their ass all day. Everyone is miraculously skinny.)

You are the young, suprisingly deep-voiced (and spiky-haired enough to rival Dragonball Z) Sei, and you are new to the Nexus. In order to make money for his friend Hayami to finish building an air-bike for a race - this plot point disappears very fast - Sei must take on the role of a Hunter. What Hunters in Nexus do is go to abandoned servers, where only security programs remain, and then find bits of data lying around which they can later sell to make real money, or for the purpose of gameplay, upgrade their own skills.

The aspect of the reality outside of Nexus however will never come into your gameplay. You'll never find yourself leaving the Nexus except in cutscenes (and even then Sei just dicks around his room and computer), and personally I would have liked to done some things to get Sei off his ass. Yknow, like ride that air bike damnit! But you're stuck inside the Nexus. So the way this games level progression works, is that the Hunter site is your hub, where you can talk to people for small missions, buy upgrades and tools, take training, and most importantly choose which server you want to go to. Servers are just levels that you must run through from start to finish, but when you enter a level for the first time you can't leave till the end. The reason for being unable to "logout" the first time you go in, is that every server you log in to is taken over by a nice ol' evil corporation named Judgement Six, and there's a big baddy called a Root User blocking your exit. Sei learns this in about five minutes of joining his first server after he meets up with a blue-haired girl Toka who warns him to leave, and once he finds himself unable to logout she tells him he must defeat the Root User. Then she leaves mysteriously and you're left on your own to fight through the level towards mister big boss man.

Now how you actually fight is a different story. It's a rather simple system, but it is more complicated than most beat-em-ups. To the point where you're able to put variety into your combos, but you won't find yourself having to vigorously memorize commands or forgetting them. You have your basics. Left analog stick to move, circle button to do a basic attack that can turn into a three-hit attack (or more if you buy certain upgrades) square to block and X button to jump, and even double-jump. You can attack in the air or on the ground, but you have special abilities called Virtua Souls.

These are rumored powerful discs in the Hunter world, and Sei is the only one that can see these special bits of data and throughout the game you will find them. Some from cutscenes, some from doing a bit of well-rewarded exploration. Should you find one, you are thrust into a single isolated room with a famous Virtua Fighter. Turns out all those tournaments in the whole series were just to study the fighters' moves and use that data to create super-soldiers. Who knew? Regardless, once you find the data corresponding to a fighter, you will battle this person. Should you defeat them (and sometimes that can be nigh-impossible) they will teach you a powerful move straight from their own roster.

All these moves fall into different categories. Strike, Jump, Dash, Throw, Floater and Charge. You can equip one move in each of these categories at a time, for a total of six powerful Virtua Fighter moves, all of which are mapped to different combinations of the triangle button. For example, pressing Triangle and Circle together will perform whatever throw move you have equipped, and there certainly is a good variety of moves. Yet you must be willing to explore the level thoroughly as well as going back to previous levels for ones you couldn't physically obtain before. Every time you use these moves, it takes up a little bit of your SP (Synapse Power).

When this bar drains, you are unable to perform any Virtua Soul moves until it refills either of it's own accord (slowly over time) or by using your basic attack on enemies and things. (which is much faster) Also linked to your SP is a move called Synapse Break which you can initiate with the R1 button. By doing this, you go into a hyper-mode that causes enemies you send flying to float in the air in slow motion for a long time, allowing you to string vicious combos as well as having the SP bar absorb any damage you take directly. So, that's pretty much how you fight.

The less hostile aspects of your character comes in his ability to climb about the environment. He can grab onto ledges, shimmy, run on walls, and most importantly use his wire. The wire is a long, florescent pink whip that shoots out of Sei's glove and, while it can be used to attach to enemies and fling yourself to them quickly for more combos, it is mainly used to grab onto floating orbs throughout the level. (And it also provides plenty of suggestive humor.) By doing this you can travel in a few different ways. Yellow orbs simply swing you back and forth and you must time the jump properly, green ones will take you straight where you need to go, purple ones will swing you in a vicious circle which requires your most pristine timing, and anything else I may have forgotten. Unfortunately, these orbs are scripted to specific spots, and your wire isn't good for much else making it a rather unexplored aspect of the game.

And this wire is where I'll start with the games control issues. For me, I do enjoy punching or kicking a guy in the face with an overzealous flashy move but the controls are stiff and often times get in the way, even so far as causing you to lose. The wire and camera being some of the biggest offenders. The wire is controlled with the right analog stick, but flicking said stick in any direction will still cause the wire to shoot out only where Sei is facing (thankfully it locks onto important stuff) and the only way to manually control the camera is by pressing the L2 button which repositions it directly behind Sei. These two functions are hardly mapped well and with the functionality of the wire they could have well been switched. Leaving the wires' mechanics untouched and allowing the right analog stick to freely control the camera. But that isn't how it works, and it's a big offender when you're trying to see what you're doing. Not to mention I've fallen off ledges countless times trying to fumble around the camera.

Other control problems come directly into your fighting. There's no move-canceling function, and combined with the fact that a lot of your moves have a deadly-long cooldown phase, you'll find yourself attacking a giant robot only to see him swinging his arm and you have no way of avoiding it because you're already attacking. There is a dodge-roll move you can buy, but occasionally it's a little unresponsive due to being mapped right onto your block button; Though it can get you quickly out of a jam, often you'll find yourself diving right into an angry fist. None of this prevents me from enjoying the game like the guilty pleasure it is, but I'll admit it's basically a game breaker.

Finally, the enemies you fight are a bit of a downer as well. No doubt the bosses are fun, all the way from the blonde super-Terminator in the first level, right up to the multi-tiered final boss. But the enemies in-between are nothing to fire up about. It's basically the same few types of enemies over, and over again that have been shamefully reskinned and had their health upped. It's a let-down and makes you get bored real quick and easy.

But despite it's flawed execution, the game does at least become innovative with some of it's concepts. While these don't do much at all to redeem it's faulty controls, they can still be appreciated. The upgrade system for one is rather unique in how it works. Instead of just buying upgrades more, and more, you have a 3 by 3 by 3 cube of squares for an upgrade grid. Excluding the very middle block which you can't use, you have a total of 26 blocks to work with, and upgrades come in the form of what look like Tetris pieces I guess. The more powerful the block, the more space it's likely to take up. You can buy these, or find special ones hidden throughout the different worlds. It's a system that works well, and even puts in a bit of puzzle-solving should you reaaally want to squeeze in that extra attack power.

In the middle of all that, you also have a cute little floating companion named Bit. You can find food to feed Bit to change three statistics on him, all relevant to what you feed him. Depending on how his stats raise, or lower, he may transform from bunny-themed, to a dog or octopus or bear or cat or whatever. Each different Bit will help you in a different way. It's small, but it's actually pretty cool. Unfortunately it's likely you'll find yourself sticking with the default as he helps you find important items.

The other good end of the game comes in how the story interacts with levels. Or at least that's how I'll word it. With the whole "virtual reality and servers" theme, the game can feel free to jump straight from a shopping mall, to a construction site, to a medieval japan level with no transition needed, and this prevents the game from repeating its own design throughout the full experience and allows the art direction to be colorful, pretty and at least does the work just fine despite how desolate some levels are. Each level can at least be appreciated for as much as the graphics will allow. My personal favourite level is the final one, and (note, possible incoming spoilers) it doesn't try to represent any Earth structure, it's simply the inside of a computer. Black, blue, grids, floating streams of data, the entire last level is just all too cool. I wish it wasn't one of those levels that you can't actually come back from, because when you finish, it gives you the "The End" screen and you have to reset your PS2. But regardless, as a final level should be, the last one is my absolute favourite.

Graphically wise, you can put this game in at average. The character models are designed well enough, the world is colorful, textures do their job rather well without aliasing, and it's all done with just a little polish. Just a little. There's nothing spectacular here, but nothing that'll cause your eyeballs to hurl either. Not much to say there. Soundwise the game isn't too amazing either, probably worse even. While most of the sounds are okay, some of them come out dull, quiet, or just not right. The acting is on another shelf though, so lets tackle the cutscenes all in one.

In cutscenes, you'll definitely find no blockbuster names or astounding, immersive fluid body animation. It's all cheesy, and quite typical of a lot of Japanese media, with over-extended emotions and whispering being a totally unheard of concept between these people. Watching the characters awkwardly spaz, yell, and go into unneeded deep thought can be humorous to the point of "it's so bad it's good", but there's moments where it's just hard to watch and you'll keep an eye on your bedroom door should anyone burst in and witness what unholy mass of crap you're watching.

FINAL SAY:
Virtua Quest is at least ambitious and there's things in here you can appreciate, but it's best you borrow this and play before deciding if it'll be a guilty pleasure style game for you. Its high points are the concepts, unique upgrade system and the fact it rewards exploration as well as giving good replay value with hidden items. Unfortunately it lacks the finesse in it's controls to hold up on it's own, with unresponsive commands, deadly-long animations and things that need the rust taken off them. Don't get me wrong, I do like the game and will play it, but I'm willing to admit it's just not good. With the concept it put forward, SEGA should have teamed up the thinkers, with some better programmers to make an actual good game. You can pass on this, it won't hurt my feelings. But I'll still be playing it regardless because I find it fun. I just won't heavily recommend it.

Resident Evil 5 - Versus Mode (DLC, Xbox 360)

I found this picture... and I just had to use it. I'm sorry.

Writer's Note: This is a review of a Downloadable Content for the full game Resident Evil 5. If you haven't already, please go there first.

Versus mode was a piece of DLC that was announced just before Resident Evil 5's release, and then put forward a couple weeks after. Naturally this irritated people as it shows disrespect for the consumer, but that's not what we're here for. Versus mode is a set of four extra gameplay modes that can host anywhere from two, to four players, and in all these modes the players will be competing against eachother for a hefty sum of points. These modes include Slayers and Survivors, both of which are Free-for-all games that can be played with two, three or four people. Then there is team variations of both those modes that require the full four people, and the teamwork works just the same as the main game.

For avid Mercenaries players on the main game, Slayers will be familiar (as will Team Slayers). It is much the same concept here. Get high combos, kill all the enemies and gain as much points as you can. Although now you have a couple extra factors. These being that you're competing to do better than the other players at Majini killing, you can respawn after death, and the person (or team) in last will receive a double-score bonus until they're at least in third. It's a lovely concept indeed, and one I like to go and try out every now and then but the problem is that the competition creates unbalancing issues in your strategy. Time is very important here as well but in the opposite way. You want to be killing as many enemies as you can, but can't let the time limit extend unless you need that extra time to get ahead. This mode would be fine and all, but often times it turns out you're casually plucking away at enemies and you're in the lead, then suddenly once the time runs out the other team jumps ahead by tens of thousands of points. After the game is over, you look at the scores to notice they had bunches more enemies at their hands. This unbalanced traffic of the games' mobs causes much more frustration than you would want, and it's obvious that Slayers wasn't altered much to make up for competing enemies. Balancing issues are also evident in that the Slayers and Mercenaries loadout are the same. So while any character could kick ass in Mercenaries, the different strategy here in Slayers doesn't transfer well over to these same weapon sets.

Then we have Survivors, or of course Team Survivors. The objective here is to damage other players for points. Now, while hurting, and then punching a player in the face to kill them is worth massive points, Capcom made the right decision for points by making every shot you land give you points as well, not just kills. With tank controls like this game has, a decision like this was genius. The more powerful the weapon you're using on the person, the more points you get for each hit, and headshots count for 1.5x the normal amount of points. And thankfully here, character loadouts are different. You start with either a pistol or machine gun, some grenades, ammo and a healing item to start you out. Tougher weapons are gained by finding them across the map, taking them off dead players or killing big bosses in the map for their drops. Yes, the normal enemies are still running around to make your day worse, and they will drop ammo and other items for you like crazy, so they are a target if you need some goodies; But they won't give you points. Player kills will.

Unfortunately these stages for Versus are the same ones pulled directly from Mercenaries. The problem here for Survivors is that some of these stages have certain dead ends, so a team could literally climb up a ladder to a dead end, and they basically win the match, because they can gun down anyone who climbs up. It's severely unfair and, while a sniper rifle will help this on some stages, it's impossible to fight against this tactic on most maps. And, even with the nerfed loadout we still have unbalanced characters. You'll basically find yourself picking the people with fire grenades as a start. Setting a player ablaze will cause them to flail their arms about in a burning animation for a few seconds leaving them open to fire (haw haw, get it?) while flash grenades are useless cause your giant "1P" logo can be seen through the flash anyway, and frags must be ridiculously close to a person to do any real damage. More balance problems comes in that, if you're getting your ass kicked you're gonna have crap weapons while the other people have all the best ones, and soon you'll find yourself unable to get better ones and as a result, unable to put up a fight. So again, Survivors is very unbalanced but that doesn't prevent it from being fun.

What prevents it from being fun is the players that play it. Resident Evil 5 brought over with it, the ability to change to the RE4 control scheme, and this brought a nasty trick with it. With one instant, a player can literally be aiming to either side without going through any turning time whatsoever. So a player can literally run beside you, and you won't even see them turn at ALL, then you find a shotgun in your skull blasting you to bits. It's terribly cheap, and with the tank controls you simply can't fight it. Pretty soon you'll find yourself having to get rid of the comfortable side-strafing ability to use the control scheme for this unfair, brutal tactic that near breaks the game. It's hard to tell if this was an intended trick by Capcom, or if it's a glitch because this same ability was president in Resident Evil 4, and it could acceptably be used to your advantage; But here, it's just a mean, cheap tactic to use and if you ever find SOMEONE who doesn't do it, you'll find a bit more fun to be had.

The other reason these players ruin the game is that they abuse a "quick-rocket" glitch. The rocket launchers are instant-kills, but they're slow and bulky, it takes a second to haul the thing onto your shoulders and aim properly and that's why normally they'd take careful planning to use against someone. Except for this glitch. It allows a player to quickly whip out the rocket and fire it at you in less than half a second. So basically, they look at you and you explode. It's frustrating, cheap, and the worst part is, out of these two major issues Capcom has shown no interest in fixing it, the bastards. Oddly enough, you'll find that these players always choose to be the Jill character. So now she's ruined for me and playing as her feels dirty.

And if it isn't cheap, glitch-abusing players, you'll find yourself stuck with people that are just downright stupid. You'll often have people that join into a lobby, and don't realize that the teams are unbalanced. It seems they don't know that you have to have two people on either team and they refuse to switch, which holds up the whole lobby. Once in game, these are often the same players that won't listen to you as a partner. Requesting healing items, ammunition, anything you desperately need will go unheard to their ears. You'd think that kind of teamwork would have carried over to them from the real game.

FINAL SAY:
Versus was a fun experience when I was naive and first came into it, but I soon realized the terrible reasons I was losing, paid more attention to it and I very rarely win a match using legitimate fair tactics. With unbalanced gameplay, glitch-ridden combat and far too many things that have been blindly overlooked, unless you have a few friends that play nice this won't be worth your five dollars. Feel free to pass on this. I kind of wish I did. I could have spent my 400 points on something much better. I simply can't enjoy this mode. Unless you're a person who thinks using glitches to win is okay (and if you are you're scum) then don't buy this.

Survival Crisis Z (PC)

Never did like kids.

Now here's a game you probably haven't ever heard of, but it's from an indie developer you might know of. Ska Studios, back then simply known as James Silva. I've said about Ska that they've never made a bad game, and the same applies to this early title of theirs. While it has it's quirks, bugs and some inconvenient over-looks, this is definitely a game worth trying, playing, and best of all it's free now!

Survival Crisis Z offers to throw you into a good old zombie apocalypse... or at least that's what it seems like at first, and it does this with two modes of play. Story Mode, or Arcade Mode. We'll start with the latter. In this Arcade mode you take your character, and are thrust into a random portion of the city to fend yourself off against wave after wave of increasingly deadly hordes of zombies and whatever other creatures the game wants to throw at you. You will do this by mostly shooting them, but you will pick up special guns, and powerups to help fend yourself from the zombies. The powerups can even be stored for later use, though only one at a time. The funniest of these is a shopping cart. This turns you into a high-speed, invincible death-mobile of a man sitting inside a shopping cart. It's crazy fun, and this isn't the only powerup of it's kind. Other special things in Arcade mode usually come in the form of wave-specific mutators. Some waves will suddenly make everything dark so you can't see behind you. Some waves will cause fat exploding zombies to rush you en masse. And some will even cause the spot you stand on to become a hill, making it harder for the zombies to get at you, and this hill will move with you. It's interesting to watch the landscape warp in such a way.

After a while, Arcade mode will get brutally hard, but as you earn more and more points the game will give you rewards. You can even unlock a cute little Tetris-style minigame, but the most significant of these, is the ability to customize your character's appearance. From a humble businessman, to a burnt SWAT member literally missing his face. So no doubt Arcade mode is where you wanna go for a quick monster-murdering romp, and it's also where you want to go FIRST, to get used to the games controls.

So now let's move onto the serious bulk in the game, and that starts right as you boot it up. When you start a new character, the game will ask you your name, gender, and then more importantly it'll ask you what class you'd like to start as. The difference between them being that they all have different starting abilities, but they can all be evolved to the same point. You always have access to all the skills no matter who you start as. I went with the Doctor, because regenerating health and a high-power revolver is a godsend. Finally, the game will also ask you what faction you would like to be in. Neutral, Rebels or SWAT. The last two of those are two human organizations who have begun warring against each-other while Neutrals are just people indifferent to both sides. Yknow, typical zombie apocalypse stuff. All of this stuff will determine how you start out, your disposition towards the factions and how they act to you, and of course your appearance which you'll want to change if you have unlocked it in Arcade Mode. Once you've done all that wonderful picking, select Story Mode and you'll have a choice of three episodes. I'd of course go with Episode One to start off but if you're feeling brave...

So now you've chosen your starting corners. After a small, cryptic and slightly unnerving opening cutscene, you will suddenly (and I mean suddenly) find yourself in the middle of a street, inside a small randomly-generated town with no clue as to what you should be doing. This is the games most crippling point, is that it boots you out the front door on your ass and expects you to know things. So you'll find yourself wandering around town for a bit, shooting a few zombies here and there once you figure out the controls, and eventually, you'll come across a dude with a knife inside a building. He'll come up to you, spend about five minutes explaining a bunch of stuff like he's the god of knowledge, telling you not to waste your ammo, and to go do safehouse missions. This becomes irrelevant as soon as he starts running into zombies trying to be knife Rambo.

But this guy is your first partner and you're stuck with him until he dies; this is just one of many features the game has. The game is technically free roam, and to progress with the story, you must do story-based missions. This can be done two ways, but the factions are what you need to get to these, so lets explore the organizations first. Rebels and SWAT are self explanatory, and both factions own buildings throughout the city, as do Neutral parties. For each safehouse of these three factions there is a leader. This is the important guy. You can talk to him for missions, guns, items, and even skills you can buy. You receive money for all these by completing missions, or finding money conveniently placed throughout the world in suitcases or dead corpses along with other items. For Rebel or SWAT buildings, you can talk to this man to do side-quests that ally yourself with that faction, while making you a target to the other one. If you talk to the leader of an enemy faction, you can bribe him to take the bounty off your head if you wish; Though if you've heavily invested yourself into either side, this becomes extremely expensive. So decide wisely, or decide neither.

Even if you decide to side with someone though, Neutrals are still neccessary to your success, as they're one of the only ways to unlock story missions. The way you do this is to go to the leader of a Neutral safehouse, and request a job. This usually consists of taking a package, or taking a person to another safehouse in a limited time. You have plenty of time to do this, and when you're done, you earn a profit based on usually the distance from point A to point B. When you return the package/person to the point B safehouse leader, if he's Neutral (which is most of the time) then you can finally request a story mission, and as you progress further and further through the stories, you'll eventually come to the end of an episode, and once you finish an episode you move onto the next, randomly generated plot of city. This is how you progress through the game, but it's not the only thing you can do.

In case you've been wondering, there is another faction... and it's you. If you so wish to, you can waltz on into a safehouse, talk to the leader and pick an option to start a takeover. For neutral safehouses, you'll be fighting off a brutal onslaught of zombies, and usually the smaller the room is, the worse off you'll be. For SWAT or Rebels, you'll be doing a hostile takeover, killing waves and waves of their members until the house is yours. In either case, you're shown the difficulty level before you confirm you want to do this, and you will have to use all your skills, survival ability, and any items necessary to survive because these mini-game wave fights are an absolute gauntlet to get through. Tesla-balls and turret sentries are your friends more than anything else. But once you do become successful, the house belongs to you, and now you've opened up the game to so much more.

In addition to being able to access story missions instantly, and sleep for free, you can now draw in profit, and better NPC partners to your side. As you take over more, and more buildings, you have three factors that go up with each one. Profit, how many NPC's you have, and how good their weapons are. All the way from getting 2 cents for killing a zombie, and maybe having one guy with a knife - to getting tens of dollars from every zombie kill and always being gauranteed to have a four-man posse of flamethrower and heavy machine gun wielding badasses. But don't get too attached to these badasses. While it's easy enough to keep them alive with medkits, if you're rushed by an incredibly fast and sudden wave of zombies or other creatures, your partners can dissapear in the blink of an eye, until you recognize their mangled corpse attempting to take a bite out of you. As well as, should a partner be badly injured and you can't help them with it, you may well find yourself having to listen to them talk about not feeling well, and eventually begin vomiting up blood. If you can't heal them they'll become a zombie coming to eat your flesh, and a fast one at that. It's especially saddening to lose one because the NPC's have their own personalities. Sometimes they don't get along, while other times, they get along so well you want them to make it through the whole, long episode alive with you so they can escape and get married and all that sappy stuff. Once they get mobbed by a bunch of zombies coming from a window, it's sad, and disappointing but that's something great to be had in this game.

Of course, you may feel a little less bad for them if you pay attention to their AI. You'll find that they may like to run headfirst into a group of zombies when they only have a knife, or they might fumble trying to get around a wall and get close to you again when you've moved on from one building. But these issues become second-nature to accept when you're on your fifth successive survivor cause the others die, and that's actually quite the problem. You'll find that your survivors die even more because, while you can achieve better-equipped survivors, these badasses must be new. Older ones can't be re-equipped, so whatever weapon you find them with is whatever they're permanently stuck with. It feels kind of bad to have to drive two knife-wielding innocents into a mob of zombies so they'll die and open up space for someone with a better gun.They also tend to get themselves killed because they must stand still to talk. While reading the nice snippets of conversation they have to offer can be nice, them stopping abruptly leaves them a sitting duck for hungry mouths and they aren't exactly sensitive about when they choose to speak. So just let your first couple die off till you can find ones with big shinies.

And these problems of overlooked design don't stop there. When you swap over an episode, you'll lose all your buildings, profits and other stats except your inventory and skills from the last episode. So really, there's no point in doing a bunch of buildings until you're on the last episode. And finally, beware this; When you do the absolute final mission, you can't go back into the game. Your screen will forever be stuck in a black limbo until you restart a new character. So once you've had one run-through, you should make your way through the game up until the last mission, then do all your free-roaming building-stealing fun.

So, fun! I've spent too long not talking about the gameplay so here goes. Survival Crisis Z is presented as a shooter from an isometric angle. I'd recommend goofing with the options until you can get a WASD and Mouse combination working, because the game becomes too hectic to play otherwise. Hectic it is, and it is oh so satisfying. You'll start out with basically one type of enemy, and that's zombies. You'll fight either old, decayed slow zombies, or the fresh ones. The ones that have recently been turned. These ones are fast, and vicious because they haven't had time to decay. As you move on you'll begin encountering more paranormal enemies... and places. One of my favourites being the "children". These are crazy little buggers that you can't see. Until they're really close to you, then they appear, and your entire world transforms into an insane asylum until you move away from the ankle-biters, or kill them. So if you're surrounded by a good mob of them you're likely to start feeling a little uncomfortable because you'll be running away, panicking and the world will constantly be changing around you. These are a very unique, fun enemy and the game is full of these.

The game also tends to do paranormal things around you. For example, you'll be exploring an empty room, exit it, then come back inside immediately and you'll find the room flooded with a mob of crazy zombies that want to eat your flesh. Or you'll be exiting a safehouse - all of which are normally devoid of undead life - and suddenly a huge swarm of flesh hungry monsters comes bursting out of the door you just left and into the streets when they had nowhere to come from in the first place. It seems like an accidental loophole in game design, but it's honestly a good one and it keeps you on your toes.

So to fight these threats, you'll have many, MANY things at your disposal. From a handgun, revolver, shotgun, all the way to a military-grade heavy machine gun, or the ever-so-deadly flamethrower. These are easy to access in your inventory, because when you pull up your inventory it pauses your game. Here you have multiple sections to your HUD, three of which are interactive. Up top is your items. These consist of smokes, bombs, health, small food items, and even things you can mix and combine to create useful items or dangerous drugs. In the middle is your weapon and health wheel. You'll cycle through your weapons with directional buttons, and the red circle surrounding them represents your health. Try not to let this go down. On this screen you can also see how much ammo you have for each gun. Third, we have the skills section. Here you can view and use your skills that you have bought from safehouse leaders. Some of these are passive, while instant-use ones will show you what items you require to use them. These range from running fast, all the way to sentry turrets, and making C4 that can literally blow up an entire building.

Finally, we have the other miscellaneous stuff, like fatigue, hunger and your commodities. If your fatigue and hunger become far too low, you'll notice your character become slow, and your screen will begin twitching as a sign of unfocus. While it takes a long time to die of hunger, being brought down to a snails pace is deadly in itself, so you must sleep and eat to keep these going. This brings me to commodities. These consist of things like Food, Electronics, and a couple other things I forgot. Food is used automatically once your hunger hits zero to prevent it going negative, so always keep a healthy stock of food. The other commodities are used to make items, or initiate skills. One skill allows you to craft items out of commodities, while another lets you randomly disassemble your inventory into usable coms. The game is well thought out, and all in all it's presented simply, and usable. But, not user-friendly as it can take a while to figure out how the whole experience works.

Aesthetically wise, the game boasts a good, believable and properly disturbing audio track, all the way from the screeching white noise of the world changing around you, to the good loud bang of a gun (and it certainly is a bang) and of course the shuffling of good ol' zombies. But graphically... well, it's not gonna break the game. Some of the textures are good and pleasing, but sprites and such are cartoonish, and honestly downright ugly at times; And this is all spread out over a very repetitive world where buildings are not memorable, and you'll be checking your map constantly. Still, even if the graphics are bad, the game does show some creativity with it's artistic direction. The console menu is always in an LED-style red print with static overtop of it, and it's charming despite the actual graphic capability. These factors don't hurt the game for me, but if graphics are a big deal for you this is something you'll have to fight your way through to get at the sweet, delicious game candy.

Finally, the game boasts a rather unique system of dungeons. Occasionally you will come across a random grate in a room. This is a rare chance, and when you do come across it, you have to decide whether to enter it now, or never. When you leave the room, the grate will disappear so you can't go off and prepare yourself for the trials underneath. So, do you think you're ready? Cause if you are, and if you happen to survive the dungeons' dangerous halls, then you'll be heftily rewarded. From some real good amounts of items, to even very very special, secret items.

FINAL SAY:
Survival Crisis Z boasts almost perfection over the concept of a zombie apocalypse and even throws in some crazy paranormal twists in here and there. It had some design flaws and things that seem carelessly overlooked, but if you know what you're doing the game will love you and you'll love it back. So prepare yourself to face some seriously dangerous, paranormal and flesh-eating monsters as you fight your way through this apocalypse, not to mention the dangerous humans that may fire upon you depending on what you've done. So download it now right here! It's free!

Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360)

Dental care isn't good in Africa.

Now before I get into the meat of this, I'd like to say that the golden ages of Resident Evil have certainly gone and past. No more are the horror-elements, intense ammo conservation, cinematic camera angles down hallways, and just all those things that made it what it was. Ever since the more action-oriented Resident Evil 4 hit shelves, it became an instant success. No doubt, Capcom will follow the action road valiantly now and while I'm sad about it, I'll stick it for the ride; Because at the end of the day, Resident Evil 5 was an amazing, and most importantly fun experience; Still is too!

The story set up here is very bold and full. Since the fall of Umbrella (the evil zombie-making dudes of long ago) their bio-organic weapons such as viruses and monsters have fallen to the hands of the black market and terrorists. Chris Redfield (a long time protagonist of the series) is now a member of the BSAA, an organization dedicated to fighting bio-weapon threats all over the globe. Today, he is coming to Kijuju, Africa. Think of the movie Black Hawk Down and you've got a good idea of your surroundings. Here he is greeted by an African BSAA member by the name of Sheva Alomar. She is here to make his time as an American in Africa easier, and she will now serve the purpose of being your co-op and/or AI partner through the game. Then suddenly, after this greeting the game throws a curveball into the story that will throw any long-standing Resident Evil fan off balance. Chris flashes back to a gravestone of one Jill Valentine, another long-standing protagonist. "Whoah, what? When did this happen?" you may ask. This is how the story will set you up and no doubt the rest of the story is just as bold in it's presentation and plot points, although much of it is shamefully Hollywood and predictable.

How you will move through the game world and survive is where the real fun comes in. Most of the time your gameplay will consist of being rushed upon by hordes of angry people with everyday weapons, sometimes even a long-range weapon. These people are called Majini, and they are hunting you down because they are irreversibly infected with a parasite known as Las Plagas, which was featured in RE4, though here it is even more volatile. Using your guns, and a slew of very fun satisfying melee moves, you are to survive this ordeal by any means necessary. Usually that means killing the people running at you with hatchets. All of this is presented in-game with a close-following over the shoulder camera save for special cinematics.

Now the controls are what normally turns people off. Resident Evil 5 has still paid respects to it's older brethren by keeping intact many of it's old staples, though it has taken the liberty of giving the player the ability to side-strafe, making movement much easier and smoother. What normally turns people off the game is that, in order to attack, you must aim. And when you do aim, you stand still. You must stand still to shoot and most people HATE that you can't run and shoot at the same time. What they don't understand is that this system has been in Resident Evil since the very beginning, and it forces the player to think a little more strategically, make quicker and accurate shots, and it also prevents you from just backing away while gunning down the hordes with ease. So you stand still to shoot at the enemies. Your other method of attack is Melee. You can either use your knife, which is mapped to the LB button and doesn't take up space, or you can shoot your enemy in specific spots to open up an opportunity to hit them. For example, Chris can shoot an enemy in the leg, and while they're stunned it is an opening to get close, and perform an Uppercut. This will damage (and possibly kill) the enemy while saving ammo and knocking other enemies in the immediate vicinity onto their asses. Melee is a must, and yknow what? It's just plain fun to shoot a dude in the forehead, and then punch him in the face. Add this together with the fact that you can chain together attacks with your partner, and overall you have a unique, and well-performing combat system.

So that's how you fight. But where you put these weapons brings in another thing that outsiders to the Resident Evil franchise hate. Before each mission, you have a giant inventory you can stuff anything you want inside, but in-game the same doesn't apply. You and your partner have a 3x3 inventory totalling 9 spaces per person. Each item takes up one of these spaces, while things like ammo will stack into one slot. A lot of the older Resident Evils did this same type of system, and I can see where other players are coming from. An AK-74 (seriously) will take up the same amount of space as a plant or 50 handgun bullets. But this simplicity helps to make organization much easier, and the limited space does have to make you THINK of what items to take with you and what to leave behind. I rather like the nine-space system. You can also request any item from your partner (except for weapons. It's to prevent new players from getting rocket launchers) or give them something they'd need. To top it off, anything you place in the up, left, right and bottom squares of your inventory will be mapped to your directional buttons for easy access so it's smart to have three weapons, and a healing item on those particular slots.

Even more controls come in the form of partner actions and commands. You can interact with your partner in a variety of ways. From simply saying "Thanks", telling them to "Go" or punching an enemy off their back as well as saving them from the brink of death, you and your partner's cooperation is needed, and the AI will always listen. I found the AI partner to be just fine, great even. She (or he) will never use healing items if it isn't a reasonable time, she's more accurate than a beam of light, and will even hand over ammo of her own free will should you be running low. And in the heat of battle, you can order her into Attack mode which causes her to stray away from you and use more powerful guns. If you keep her in Cover mode, she'll stick close, and continue using her pistol. Remember that this is vital. The only problems the AI may have is that sometimes they appear to be fumbling around the map a little, she may not react to immediate dangers towards you unless you yell for help, and not to mention she occasionally makes some odd choices. But nonetheless, Capcom has a history of making terrible AI and this is an exception to that.

Finally, and my last point I'll voice on the gameplay because this is becoming a long review, is that of quicktime events. Resident Evil 4 has them in abundance, to the point it became a natural reflex to PRESS X TO NOT DIE. However, here RE5 can fall flat. It does still have quick-time events, but almost all of them come in the form of offensive actions like kicking or punching... or stomping. There's next to zero quick-reaction life saving ones, so when they do happen you're suddenly unprepared and you find yourself having to restart because of being caught off by one of the few life-saving QTE's.

As it is obvious so far, I'm highly fond of the gameplay. How unique it is, and that it takes more thought than just "point your guns at the people and shoot". But one of Resident Evil 5's strong points comes in the visuals. Resident Evil has always been on the cutting edge of graphic technology, and while I'm not one to judge a game based on this sort of thing, here it is nothing short of absolutely amazing. Textures are smooth, believable. The houses are real, enemies move realistically, your characters animations seem fluid and satisfying just to watch, and all the guns you have at your disposal are oh so purdy. Top wrap it all up you'll be travelling through wasteland villages, marshes, oil fields and even ancient ruins, all of which are fantastically done. It's just a full treat for the eyes, topping most any game of this generation, and it'll probably hold it's own even in the next. Visually, the only thing I might complain about is a couple direction choices. One is the shaky camera in action-heavy cinematics. I've never been a fan of shaky cameras and they're not necessary for a good scene as far as I'm concerned. The other complaint is that Chris and Sheva are pointing their guns at people in nearly every cutscene. It'd give the characters a less bland look if they'd let their arms down for a second, especially since their tiny pistols won't do fuck-all to the mass of giant bosses they'll be fighting throughout the game.

Since that was visuals quickly wrapped up, let's move onto sound. Soundwise, this game isn't so strong in. The best of it is that the voice acting is absolute top-quality, believable and some of the characters you'd just die to hear talk more and more. But in other areas, this isn't so. The music score is - while pleasing - not quite as amazing at the game seems to think it is; But it no doubt does the work. The other aspect of sound that may fall flat are some of your guns. While most of them sound, and even feel right, a couple of them sound like throwing a pillow onto a pond, an unsatisfying grind of dust and weak metal. However these weapons are far and few between thankfully, as weapons like the M3 shotgun sound hard, and angry. So overall, the sound is well done and does the work properly, though falls on a dead note in some areas.

And then, after you're done the game, you still need stuff to do right? Well the game is high and mighty in this regard. After completing the game, you unlock the ever so important Mercenaries Mode. This is a timed score-attack mode where you gather time, and must kill as many enemies in rapid succession as you can for high combo counts, and directly related high scores. There is eight stages to play from, most of which are altered versions of maps found in the main campaign, and each stage pits you up against different mobs, and mini-bosses to fight, all of which are worth different point values of course. The real fun part? If you didn't like your partner, this is the only mode where you can go full on solo, and it's a different experience to be a one-man ass-kicking juggernaut punching machine. Or you can go Duo mode. The only problem here is that you cannot bring an AI partner in here, so offline players are almost left in the dust... almost. Thankfully the game has a fully-featured split-screen for both it's story and Mercenaries. So train your parakeet to use joysticks or something. Finally for mercenaries, you can unlock up to 10 different characters to choose from. Each of which has a different item and weapon loadout (no you cannot take your main story weapons in here) but for the most part you can apply similar strategies to each of them. Problematically, there is some balancing issues between characters, but since there is no player versus player you'll find here it ain't a big deal. Mercenaries is an excellent mode that extends the game length by days even.

The game has many, many more things to strive for and unlock. An extra couple of costumes you can get for finding hidden emblems throughout the main story, small figurines of all the characters and enemies in the game for you to look at and admire, and special guns to unlock. One of which is a wonderfully-fun triple-barreled shotgun called the Hydra. Oh yes. However, the only unlockable here I won't agree with, is Infinite Ammo. You can unlock this for nearly all your guns and while it is a nice novelty to entertain yourself with, it becomes old and drab because you limit yourself of many of the games doable actions, especially partner communication. It wouldn't be such a problem but, nearly all online co-op games you go into will have infinite ammo turned on. It irritates me to no end and I find it boring.

FINAL SAY:
Resident Evil 5 followed up on the last Resident Evil game fluently, and rather than trying to stay relevant to horror it simply built itself around fun. While this can be definitely a bad thing, Resident Evil 5 is nothing short of an awesome, amazing and wonderful experience that can be sunk into with weeks worth of play hours. So go get yourself a copy, and start mauling angry parasitic villagers.