- High quality graphics and sound

- Very-high replay value

- Great control system

- Great story line with a twist

9.5/10

Time for some more gamin’ folks, later!!  Oh and Happy Veterans day!!

Ah…1992…It was a great year! Cartoons used to play on Saturday morning, Sharon Stone was making all of us want to go watch Basic Instinct, Salt N Pepa had us Talking about sex while Sinead O’Connor was on SNL ripping up pictures of the Pope, Seinfield was having a Contest, the Alabama Crimson Tide was on a National Championship run, and most of us gamers were plastered to our computer chairs with our Arizona Tea kicking back waiting for our MS-DOS system to fire up so we could shoot some Nazis in Wolfenstein 3d. For those of you that just read that last sentence and thought, “Wow, that was 17 years ago?” I am sorry for the reality check, but hopefully it will help prove my point.

Id Software revolutionized gaming in 1992 by coming out with what most of us at the time thought was the greatest game ever.  Wolfenstein 3d gave us the start of the First Person 3d Shooter(FPS).  It helped us take a hard day at school or work and allowed us to go postal on some unsuspecting Nazis.  This is the game that helped games like Doom and Marathon push the limits of our PC’s and MAC’s so we then could gradually build systems designed just to play these types of games.  Halo, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Quake, and Bioshock wouldn’t be what they are today without the original Wolfenstein to kick off the craze and start us rethinking our gaming experience.

I was walking through the gaming store the other day trying to pick out the next game for review and there it set, staring at me.  I saw this skeleton looking Nazi reaching his hand out towards me like he was saying “You must play me.”   Now it seems at first that a fan of the original game would want to buy this game right then, but had it been anyone else they might have.  Unfortunately I had a bad experience, it happened in 2001, it was called Return To Castle Wolfenstein.  The game was mediocre at best and I wasn’t sure I could put myself back through that pain.  I then sucked up the courage (by that I mean Bourbon, don’t worry I had a driver) and went and bought the game.

This game is actually Wolfenstein 3, it is sort of strange calling it Wolfenstein.  The game follows the main character B.J. Blazkowicz just like the others do and uses the paranormal devision of the Third Reich’s military intelligence as the main antagonist.  The plot is basically: The Nazis want to form super soldiers to destroy the Allies and B.J.’s job is to stop them.

The game makers have done a good job of getting the powers to B.J.  as well and it makes game play a lot of fun.  There are 4 basic powers: A shield, one that makes your weapons stronger, one that slows time, and one that allows you to see in the dark and walk through some walls.  When the powers are activated your look and feel of the game changes.  The Change is unbelievable.  The screen has a green hue to it and you can see creatures floating around that aren’t normally there.  You can also see pools of energy that will replenish your crystal powers.  All weapons and powers can be upgraded by finding enough gold and getting to a black market arms dealer.

I will have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by this game.  It made me feel like someone took the time to actually make a good game this time instead of making one just off the name alone.  This game is by no means perfect, but it is enjoyable.  It  puts a smile on my face to see where the FPS has come in 17 years.  With upcoming games like Halo:ODST, Halo:REACH, Bioshock 2, and COD:Modern Warfare 2, I think the best is yet to come.

-Great Graphics and Sound

-Moderately-high Replay Value

-Good control system, right in line with most FPS

-Moderately good story line

8.25/10

If you have not played Wolfenstein 3d cause you are too young or just lame…go find it to download online.  It is still fun! Hard to look at, but fun. If you want to have some fun after you have beaten it, do what we used to do in ’92….cheat.  God Mode is great and you can refill your guns too.  No I will not tell you the codes!  Happy Gaming!!!

You know life sometimes is full of hard choices.  Should you control the world or destroy it? Should you choose the slutty mistress, the nice mistress, the evil mistress, or all three?  Which minions should you send in?  For an Evil Overlord it never ends. In 2007, Triumph Studios and Codemasters came out with a highly addictive, little known game called Overlord.  The game had a small cult following and gained enough fans to spawn an expansion pack in 2008.

Two years after the original release the game developers decided a sequel was needed.  Overlord 2 uses some the same mechanics from the 1st game to make the game player feel right at home with the controls.  The third person action-adventure game is full of dark humor and allows you to decide just how evil you want to become.

The plot line is basically: you are evil, so take over the world.  If you are like me and the darker the character in a game the better, then you are in luck.  This game had me at the moment I sent my minions out to club some baby seals.  The graphics for the game are a little better than the original.  The thing that the game makers decided to change was a little bit of how the minions moved around.  The minions now have mounts that make them quicker and more powerful.  Nothing beats a minion taking out a few villagers and then bringing you back some loot while yelling, “FOR YOU MASTER!”  The game is designed to poke fun at other games and fantasy worlds, and it does a great job of pulling you in and making you want to waste your life destroying the world you live in.  Though the minions sometimes get stuck and the villagers in your world tend to repeat themselves ALOT, I think this is still a great game.

-Good Graphics and sound

-High Replay Value

-Controls are well designed, but a little buggy

-Great story line and does good job building up gameplay

7.5/10

If you haven’t played or even heard of the 1st Overlord game I would tell you to go get it.  You can get it cheap used, and it is good for hours of entertainment.

There are certain characters in Sci-fi that will continue to live on: There are the Star Wars, Star Trek (as J.J. Abrams has shown us recently), and Battlestar Galactica characters.  Then there are the ones that had potential but got killed by idiot directors like Michael Bay (Transformers).

Since I first saw Pitch Black I have loved the character Riddick.   He made you rethink your view of bad and good and helped establish Vin Diesel as a badass.  Unfortunately it also put Vin into movies that were stereotyped for him.   It is like the action heroes of the ’80s and ’90s who couldn’t break away from the mold that made them popular.

In 2004, Vin decided to embrace a character (Riddick) that had a lot of potential and tried to make a franchise out of it.  Unfortunately his attempt to make a blockbuster movie based on this character failed with the release of The Chronicles of Riddick.  The movie wasn’t too bad but could have been made MUCH better.

Something else happened in 2004 that will continue to set standards in the gaming industry when it comes to movie-based games: Vin Diesel realized the appeal of a game based on his character.  He then created a game development company (Tigon games), and along with Universal Studios, he produced a prequel to Pitch Black called Escape from Butcher Bay.  The game was one of the best released for the original XBOX, and until the XBOX 360 came out, it had some of the best graphics I had seen.  However, Escape from Butcher Bay was thrown aside when it wasn’t backward-compatible with the XBOX 360.  Most of us thought the character would be gone to the wayside, but we were wrong.

Back in April of this year I made sure that I had pre-ordered the new installment of Riddick called Dark Athena.  This game takes place right after Escape from Butcher Bay and complements it really well.  The gameplay is slightly different, but for the most part it is the same stealthy/first-person-shooter style of game.  One of the new features I really enjoyed was the ability to use these mindless creatures called drones as a body shield.  Just like Butcher Bay, Dark Athena uses Riddick’s best skill of seeing in the dark to help amplify game play.  I can’t tell you how many times I was playing the game sweating from the fear of being seen, ’cause I knew if caught that twenty people were coming to kill me.  The graphics on the game are up to the topnotch standard of most new 360 games, and the sound is really well done and helps with the pace of the game.  There are still some elements that need work, like how you move dead bodies around, but this game is very entertaining.  It even comes complete with really bad Riddick one-liners (which is just awesome!).

My favorite part of purchasing the game is that the powers that be decided to revamp Escape from Butcher Bay for the 360 and include it on the disc.   The game is better than I remember and for all of you who missed out the first time you get to experience a first-rate game that slid under the radar in 2004.

Since the game has been out for a couple of months I believe that you could stroll into your local game resale store and pick it up relatively cheap.  Plus it is two games for the price of one.

Please note there are few games that I would give a 10 to, but I also think it important to know where a reviewer’s standard is when considering their review.  Games I would give a 10 to are as follows: Fall Out 3, Bio Shock, Halo CE, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, and Doom (1993).  The games may just be great games or innovative in their day.

Dark Athena:

-Great Graphics and sound
-Moderate replay value
-Controls are moderately easy to get used to
-Moderately high story line

7/10

Escape from Butcher Bay: 8.5/10

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena Trailer