Far Cry 2 Gets Reviewed

Far Cry 2 is finally here and I would have to say that it is shaping up to be one of the top 2 shooters of 2008.   The advancement from Far Cry the original is apparent in the gameplay movement, graphics, and effects.   Check out the video review here.

Left For Dead Preview

There is a lot of things that I like about Left For Dead, but I am not completely sold on it yet.  The coop is enticing, but it is hard to say until you have it home on your 360 how it is going to play.

At its core, Valve’s Left 4 Dead isn’t a complicated game. In its main cooperative mode you play as human survivors who must, using bullets and teamwork, overcome hordes of swift, “infected” (zombies) and reach the end of a more-or-less linear stage to escape. The survivors are then graded on their performance, and onto the next stage you go. That’s pretty much it in terms of basic structure, but Valve’s added in plenty of wrinkles to make it interesting, including split-screen offline and online cooperative modes for the Xbox 360 version.

The modes split the screen only two ways, and you can choose between vertical and horizontal orientations. For our play session with the Xbox 360 version of the game, we chose for the screen to be split from top to bottom, and found it worked pretty well. We were playing on an HDTV, so any owners of sets with 4:3 aspect ratios may have a different experience, but it felt as though all that was important was contained within the viewable area.

A more interesting note is that you can play on the infected side as well as survivor on the same screen. So, in addition to playing as the gun-toting survivors, you can enter a versus mode where you’ll cycle through spawns as four of five types of boss infected. There’s the smoker, who can lasso survivors from a distance with its long tongue; a hunter, who can pounce from long range and claw at survivors it pins; and the boomer, who can vomit on survivors to trigger a rush of infected. Then, once in a while, an infected player gets the option of playing as a tank, a hulk-like menace that can absorb far more damage than the others and can slam survivors or rip up and toss chunks of the ground. There’s also a witch that can more-or-less instant-kill any survivor that bothers her, but she’s never put in a player’s control.

Fable II Money Cheat

In Fable II,  you can buy a property you have the option of renting it out and earning money every five minutes. That five minutes is real-time, which means you don’t even have to be playing the game in order for the time to pass. Better yet, you can set the clock of your 360 system forward and reap the benefits—try setting the system’s clock forward a year and the next time you turn on the game you’ll earn rent for a full, real-time year.

Far Cry 2 Review

Far Cry was quite a disappointment for me, but the second time around is looking pretty smooth.   Can it compete with COD and Gears?

After spending somewhere around 25 hours getting through Far Cry 2’s single-player campaign, there was one question I couldn’t quite answer: why is this game called Far Cry? The sequel, developed by Ubisoft Montreal, retains nearly nothing from Crytek’s 2004 original or from the Xbox and Xbox 360’s Instincts and Predator derivations. The story doesn’t carry over, the characters aren’t the same, there’s no mention at all of Jack Carver, there are no mutagens, no feral powers, and no Trigens. Instead, it’s a struggle between warring factions, called the APR and UFLL, in an unnamed African nation.

The game also doesn’t give players a pre-determined protagonist. Instead, you select a character to play as, and the rest of the cast appear in the game world around you as friendly NPCs, called buddies, who you can choose to work with. Things begin with a simple tutorial section, introducing you to basic first-person shooter controls and the game’s premise. Your main goal is to find The Jackal, a menacing character that supplies weapons to the APR and UFLL to keep lit the fires of conflict.

The point is, with this kind of setup, it’s odd that the Far Cry name was even used at all, other than for its obvious name recognition value. Pushing that issue aside and accepting that this is basically a totally different game, you’ll find there’s quite a bit to like.  IGN gave it a score of 8.8/10 on ign.com

I think that I will be picking up a copy of Far Cry 2.

Spiderman: WOS Review

I have been pumped to get Spiderman: Web of Shadows.  Videos were sweet and the game play looked like fun, but after this review, I might have to pass.

Early last year, I stated that Spider-Man 2 was one of my favorite PlayStation 2 games of all time. Think about that for a second — all time. Now, I’m not telling you that it’s a better game than God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, or any of the other hundreds of great games Sony’s console brought us; what I’m saying is that Spider-Man 2 was one of my favorite games to play. Even after I had bested Doc Ock, I could swing around New York and stop crimes, gather collectables, and take in the city that never sleeps. At the time, I thought the game had laid out the perfect blueprint of what a superhero game should be, and I believed that Activision got it and would expand the idea when the next generation of systems came around.

As Spider-Man 3 and Spider-Man: Friend or Foe proved, that didn’t happen. Rather than tweak and expand a formula that was fun but flawed, Activision let the webhead slip into worse and worse titles. Now, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is upon us, and while it’s no where near the slap in the face that Spider-Man: Friend or Foe was, it’s got nothing on Spider-Man 2 either.    Ign gave it a 5.7/10 from ign.com.  Amazing and I though that this game was going to be great.

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Gold Members Make More

At XboxPlayers.com we strive to make it easy for you to create some great monthly income, and that is why we have developed this referral program.  Why not make money every time you play games on Xbox Live.

Now Gold members can create even more income by referring friends and making 40% of their friends membership fee every month.  eg.  Your friend sigs up at a Gold level for $24.95 per month, you get $10 per month.  Not only that, as a Gold member to XboxPlayers.com, you will also receive $2.50 each and every month for every buddy that you friend signs up.  Just think what would happen if you had a friend that signed up 100 people.   You can do the math.

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Call Of Duty 5 Beta

Now your can be part of the upcoming COD5 Wold at War beta.  You must pre-order your copy through Gamestop.com to get your secret code that you can use to snag the beta when it is release.
Reserve Call of Duty: World at War and receive access to the multi-player beta.

[hidepost=1]Start date/time for the beta are TBD – check back for updated information. Offer good while supplies last.

All Customers: Codes/instructions will be emailed to you within 2 business days. Please provide a valid email address at time of order online or reservation in stores.

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Fable II Unlockables

There is a great new trailer/video on the upcoming title Fable II.   he world of Albion is chock full of goodies to discover. For a few, the items included on the disc just aren’t enough. There are a few options for gaining bonus items for use in Fable II. If you’ve played the Fable II Pub Games or bought the Limited Collector’s Edition, there are extras owed to you.

For the Pub Games, you will need to play the Fable II storyline into adulthood (about 30 minutes). At that point, you can lay claim to your money and items. To do this, you could launch Pub Games and merge your pub character with your Fable II hero there, but it’s an unnecessary extra step. Instead, visit a game master in any of the bars in Albion. You can merge your character once you’re in the pub game, then exit. You’ll come out with all your cash and any items won in the tournaments.

If you’ve been dying to know what the Mysterious Ring does, well, you may be a bit let down. It doesn’t grant you greater abilities. I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say that it offers a social bonus, not a combat bonus.

The other weapons earned in the Pub Games are powerful at the start of Fable II, but will become too weak about halfway through the game. Still, they give you a nice head start. The potions that give experience bonuses are the best rewards.

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