Battlefield 2, like every other game, is based on a number of experiences the designers have planned the player to go through. Multiplayer makes the order and specific circumstances of these less predictable, but the principal is the same. It’s the surprisingly excellent design choices that makes BF2’s memories so alarmingly cinematic. The gap between events chartered by the previous Battlefield game’s intro FMVs, and the interactive version you were about to play, is now bridged seamlessly.

For those who’ve missed out on the highly popular FPS franchise from Dice studios, the difference with the BF games is it’s niche blend of diverse vehicular death, accessible controls, lots of class based players and a degree of semi-realism that works pretty well. The third work of the series follows a rather luke-warm receiving of Battlefield Vietnam, that was criticized for not moving the series forwards enough. Suffice to say that for an EA published game, and for most fans of BF, Two will easily provide a fresh enough experience to warrant the sequel moniker.

Everyone’s bored of multiplayer that feels like offline botmatch. Players run around, shoot at each other, never say please or thank you, team kill, and generally, outside of clan play, act like those kids who hang around the corner, near Budgens. A fundamental new feature of BF2 is the way teams are arranged. Individuals can join or form ’squads’ of up to six friendlies who can then benefit from internal voice comms and the ability to spawn on the squad leader. A leader can issue commands that appear on members’ mini maps, and thanks to an excellent radial voice macro, members can instantly confirm or deny the order, as well as a host of other statements/requests, all of which are useful.

I won’t go into the low-level technicalities, you can read about them anywhere. What’s important is that the system is subtly, eloquently engineered to make team play easy. This is great, because team play is also fun. Inwardly embarrassing, perhaps, to be shouting ‘pull back, artillery coming in! GET DOWN!’ down the mike, as if we were back in the fifth grade playground, ha! Good thing we’re all confident sixth graders. But it’s that you might find it embarrassing that proves how good it is – you care about your situation, your teammates, where you wouldn’t have done in previous games.

This is due in no small part to the invention of persistent stats – a first in mainstream multiplayer FPS. On ranked servers (at time of writing mainly lag festive and full) your scores are recorded in great detail for your perusal on an account page of the main menu. Play long and well enough, and your rank will increase for all your envious teammates to see. Play even better, and class specific weapons can be unlocked for use in any ranked game. Your score gained per match is doubled if your team wins, making the stakes that much higher. Fail, and you are personally responsible for wasting other people’s time. It’s an innovation timely fitting to the genre, removing an element of stand-still pointlessness sometimes argued of multiplayer shooters.

As well as the (rugged, manly) intimacy you quickly come to share with your squad, the single position commander role is another that effects the emotion of every battle. He Who Reigns On High has a number of abilities, governed from an RTS style interface. Artillery barrages, radar scans and supply drops all can have significant bearings on battle, as can the authority to issue orders to squad leaders. It’s in this Godly power that the humanity becomes fierce: squad leaders can choose to reject commands, you can rebuke or commend your (real, human) underlings, they can ask for assets that you can then tactically deny, Machiavelli style. Then the logistics fade away in the overhead 3D view as you watch two six man teams decimated by an M1A1 tank you could have protected them from. Their hot keyed screams of ‘medic!’ and ‘we need reinforcements over here!’ biting at your digital conscience.

Back on the ground, more gushing praise can be sung for the graphical splendour of the game’s Eastern theatre. Enemy black hawks cast down ominous shadows, artillery sends up giant, devastating spews of opaque debris, specularity reflects the evening sun off the runway, and the environmental detail observed from a lonely dam-top watch tower takes the breath away. At maximum detail anyway. Weigh it up – graphics card vs non-essential internal organ.

A 50. cal hole in this review is where criticism should be. The support class is repairing as we speak – there are a couple of issues, most consistent with the failings of the previous games. The server browser is inexplicably rubbish and by all accounts, regardless of machine spec, quite unstable. There’s no ‘favorites’ function, refreshing is slow, and the menu takes three of four seconds to load from in-game. Bot matches are poor, in keeping with BF tradition. Dice say they’ve been improved, but they still obviously run across mapped paths, and will resort to the melee knife a little too readily. If you are on dialup, be advised – offline is not worth buying the game for.

Team play innovations, graphical supremacy and the thundering roar of enemy jets combined with persistent stats all work together to really put you There. There being any one of the varied, immaculately crafted maps, each available in 16, 32 and 64 player sizes. The generous choice of class, vehicle and squad dynamics allow for combinations and emergent tactical options that will keep you playing for weeks. Battlefield 2 is one of the best multiplayer first person shooters ever made, you should probably buy it.

Crysis immerses you in huge environments indoor and outdoor where you can see for miles and miles. You have almost unlimited freedom to go anywhere you wish.

You may go into the levels and tackle your challenges all guns blazing or choose to sneak around stealthily or perhaps you wish to create a diversion to temporarily get the enemies attention.

The game-play is amazing, you can take different paths to accomplish your mission and go exploring for different weapons and ammo along the way. Everything is interactive in Crysis, you can pick up and throw any object from crabs and sea turtles to all sorts of weapons. You may even shoot down the trees with your bullets and watch them fall and roll. The physics are incredible and extremely realistic.

There are many ways to travel in Crysis. Try hiding in the ocean and literally swimming around enemy forces or better yet, why not take one of their fancy boats? It has a nice machine gun. If you find a truck in the area, try taking it for a spin. The Hummer with the mounted machine gun is also available. Try a free test drive and take it near an area of enemies then switch to the turret position and start blasting away.

There are a good variety of weapons which are customizable. Try and mount different attachments and tactical enhancements to your weapons such as laser pointers, scopes and reflex sights. As you progress you find some other nice treats like a laser guided rocket launcher and alien energy weaponry.

Your advanced nano-suit will aid you in you traveling. Turn on speed mode to walk and run real fast and dodge enemy fire. Strength mode allows you to pick up very large objects and throw them and will give you a super jump to make those hard to reach places a piece of cake. Armor mode will help you take some serious damage from enemy fire by absorbing the impact. Cloak mode is the most fun. You can sneak around enemies and take them out one by one using your silencer attachment. Watch them scramble all confused as they attempt to locate you. You can perform other tactics in cloak mode such sneaking up and igniting gasoline drums or gas tanks which create some very awesome explosions to divert the enemy?s attention.

Artificial intelligence is really well done. Controlling enemies and squads as they attempt to surround and flank you making an interesting survival experience. I personally recommend playing the game on a hard difficulty setting to intensify the realism. It makes the experience more enjoyable and the single player story last much longer.

Later levels get more intense throughout the game. As you roar through a raging tank battle you see an alien structure emerging high up in a mountain as boulders and debris tumble down to the landscape.

Eventually you find yourself going through the alien structure in zero G’s navigating and fighting alien species, which really twists the game play around.

Graphics

The graphics will not disappoint you as everything in the world is detailed to the extreme. You can see leafs on the trees to each individual blade of grass. Shadows are also produced very well from plants and vegetation. All the textures are detailed and you can see nicks and cracks in almost every object of the game. Walking right up to most objects at close range shows no distortion of texture quality.

Some surreal environments like the alien space craft look like something straight out of the movie Aliens or some kind of high budget hollywood movie. At times you really wonder if this is a movie or a video game. This game is an absolute technical masterpiece which can only be experienced on a high-end PC.

Multi-Player

Multi player mode is one of the more unique experiences in Crysis especially with a mode called power struggle. Here you will play on a team of 16 players against another group of16. In order to destroy the enemy’s base, you must construct exotic weaponry, which requires you to hold specific key power plants on the map. You can also capture other buildings such as factories to manufacture vehicles. Capture a bunker and you can spawn in different positions throughout the map. Take counter strike and a bit of battlefield then factor in the nano-suit and you have Crysis multiplayer.

Hardware

If you want to run the game at full blast, forget it! Running this game with a GeForce 8800 Ultra on a Core 2 Duo E6700 with 4Gigs of good OCZ memory will not run the game smoothly at extreme resolutions with Anti-Aliasing. Turn down the settings and the game will play fine and besides, it still looks much better then any other game out there.

This game is a truly a next generation game almost ahead of its time. Crytek claims that you will be able to unlock more graphical features for the next generation of video cards to follow. Hopefully there will be some moderate improvements with the current generation of video cards through game patches and driver updates.

The original Saints Row, released in 2006, didn’t try to change the sandbox genre formula and instead focused on making everything just plain fun. Saints Row 2 follows that same plan, and while it doesn’t do anything new or different, it is undeniably enjoyable. Also, and this comment may blow your mind, but while GTAIV is easily more polished in terms of graphics and gameplay, Saints Row 2 is easily the more fun game thanks to its over the top tone and wealth of stuff to do.

In terms of sheer variety of the activities you can do and the amount of fun you can have, Saints Row 2 has GTAIV beat. In terms of the core gameplay, however, Saints Row 2 hasn’t really moved forward while GTAIV made some significant improvements. For example, there is no lock on or cover system in SR2. Instead you just have to prey on the inconsistent A.I. and charge forward guns blazing, which usually works since half the time A.I. characters just stand around and don’t do anything even while other enemies right next to them are doing their best to try and kill you. Also, the driving just feels a little bit off. The cars feel kind of like driving boats, honestly. Sort of floaty with wide turn radiuses. Not bad, certainly, but far from the precision you’d like to have when wading through traffic or winding through city streets trying to lose the cops.

Saints Row 2 does a lot of things right, though. The entire map is open to you right from the start, which means all of the fun minigames and vehicles are available right away. Missions also have checkpoints which means if you fail you usually start over at the middle rather than the beginning. Also, the over the top physics and action make pretty much anything you do fun and potentially funny. My take on sandbox games is that you should be able to play how you want and make your own fun, and Saints Row 2 fits that description perfectly. It isn’t serious, it is goofy and crude and an absolute blast to play.

Saints Row 2 isn’t just a single-player experience, there are also co-op and deathmatch modes available as well on Xbox Live or system link. In co-op, the entire map is open to both players and you can both do whatever you want, and when you tackle missions together the game adds in extra enemies to balance out the addition of the extra player. Competitive multiplayer shrinks the map down to individual neighborhoods, but the smaller play area keeps the matches fast and furious.

The only truly disappointing aspect of Saints Row 2 is the graphics. Technical problems such as pop-in, texture tearing, and vehicles and objects appearing and disappearing seemingly at random are pretty big issues. Also, the game just has a sort of ugly look to it. The textures simply don’t look very good, but at least it is consistent across everything (clothes, buildings, roads, cars) so the game has a coherent look. The game does run at a smooth framerate at least and there are some nifty looking explosions.

The sound is fairly good. The dialogue is silly and filled with swear words, but it works. The music selection isn’t particularly good, however, and the lack of a talk radio station really hurts.

In the end, Saints Row 2 is a solid sequel to the cult favorite original. It isn’t the prettiest looking game and the core gameplay isn’t quite up to GTAIV’s standard, but Saint’s Row 2 manages to be fun and gives you lots and lots of ways to make your own fun which is something that GTAIV was sorely lacking. Between all of the funny minigames and side missions, the amazing Zombie Uprising game, the story filled with good characters, and the overall solid design of the city around you, there is a lot to like in Saints Row 2. If you were let down by the fact that GTAIV cut out a lot of the fun stuff from previous games in the series, Saints Row 2 will not disappoint. It is light hearted and silly, and that is why it is so enjoyable. Saints Row 2 is a good game no matter how you slice it and is highly recommended.

Diablo III is more. More action, more death, more skills, more color, more history, more beauty, more top-down, click-hungry, loot-happy, quick on – the cover, randomly-generated, killing the fantasy-horror. Beneath the waves of enthusiasm generated by its return in the form of twenty minutes of impressive amount of the game, there is the slightest undertow of anti-climax.

The game takes place in the sanctuary, a world of dark fantasy. Unknown to most of its inhabitants, Sanctuary was saved some twenty years ago of the demonic forces of the world by some earthly heroes that were brave and powerful. Most of those warriors who directly faced the armies of fiery hell were lucky enough to survive; went mad from their experiences. And most of the others have buried their memories and have frequently pushed the horrors from their thoughts.

In Diablo III, the players will return to the sanctuary to confront evil in its many forms once again. The same exciting look continues on to the real game play. The characters were great and rich detail but climbed pleasant environments. The characters are great, but can still be easily dwarfed by some of the largest creatures in the game. While at first thought that this was a boss, due to its rugged package and the complexity of their attacks, was later confirmed this was hardly a crowd crushed the likes of which you expect to see on a fairly regular basis. The enemies during the game will also demonstrate a variety of behaviors.

In Diablo III, potions still play a part in the action, but downplayed by its importance. Health globes, falling off defeated enemies and will boost the health of your character and those around you if you are playing cooperatively. So developers put it, the idea of enemies dropping health is one that will keep the player moving the game forward in comparison to try to avoid combat. In addition, a new toolbar on the skill, similar in location to the old potion belt in Diablo II, will make your skills that much more accessible, allowing you to easily switch between the skills in place. You can even share the skills quickly using the mouse roller for further ease of use. The result is a game you can probably play almost entirely with your mouse, no more hunting skills for using the F key on your keyboard. Here is most important addition with respect to a cooperative game: When a character picks up a health globe, any surrounding allies also benefit from the world of health, which looks like it will encourage players to stick together when cutting and slashing your way through the game. To your ears, it also sounds like almost any kind, but will have to see how it is done while the game comes.

Diablo III will use a new system by hand, but that is currently in development. The only thing which is known for sure is that it does not involve anything as filler items in a Horadric cube. Other mysterious detail, or lack of it, is included in the game’s story and the identity of the new threat as the first three evils were overcome.

BZFlag (an abbreviation for Battle Zone capture the Flag) is an online, multiplayer video game first released in 2007. It is a first-person tank shooting game, similar to Battlezone. It was originally written by Chris Schoeneman for SGI computers running IRIX, and has been ported to other platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, BSD and Solaris.

Current open source development is maintained by Tim Riker and a team of project administrators. The project is hosted on SourceForge.net. It is currently distributed under the LGPL license.

BZFlag was selected as the SourceForge.net Project of the Month for April 2004.

Features

Play with up to 40 users per server. Any more then this and lag becomes a real issue.

One of the few wildly popular games that can be played on computers with the best of hardware, or the worst.

Pick up different flags like lasor, guided missle, super bullet, and more!

Create your own game maps!

Player vrs player action, capture the flag, and white rabbit, 3 game play modes thats deffinately a blast.

Download the game HERE

The Sims return yet again in this third full evolution of the long-running and always-expanding sim series.

The Sims 3 allows you to immerse your unique Sims in an open living neighborhood right outside their door, interacting with other Sims using the new, deeper personality system. The game also allows you to customize anything, anywhere. From floors to flowers, fashions to sofas, wallpaper to window shades and more, The Sims 3 gives you all the flexibility and options you need to be the architect of your dream house or explore your interior design skills to outfit your ultimate home. Your Sims can make home an ultra-deluxe mansion, a cool bachelor pad, family’s dream home or charming cottage. The choice is yours.

Features

Create any Sims you can imagine and give them personalities! Design your ultimate Sim by choosing up to five traits and numerous body characteristics in the Create-a-Sim feature. Customize your Sims body type, facial features, hair styles, and more. Create an evil, handsome, ripped kleptomaniac that wreaks havoc on those around.

Control your Sims’ destinies. From a rock star or world leader to an expert thief, you choose whether or not to pursue the Lifetime Wish of your Sim. Choose whether to fulfill their destiny, giving them a lifetime of happiness and rewards — or not and be devious!

Customize everything! You are the designer! From clothing to houses, customize patterns, colors, or create any house you can imagine. Customize any aspect of your Sims’ style … even down to the style and color of their shoes!

Be the Director of your Sims’ movies! Never before have you been able to make your own movie with a cast, a set, soundtrack, a story and editing without leaving the game. Now you can with the movie making mash up tool set. Make a movie and share it with the world!

Share like never before! Join The Sims 3 online community where you can show off your creations from Sims and houses to objects, movies, and more.