Music Reviews of Videogames, PS2, XBox, Gamecube
Band Spotlight
Chiodos
Perhaps no one can explain the sheer ferocity and timid quietness it is better than when vocalist Craig Owens says “we don’t want to let the kids down” when discussing the group’s intense vocals live at shows. Well they never let a single kid down with their vicious assault on the ears and grip on the jugular...
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Current Top Ten Chart
Skinny Puppy - Mythmaker
Converge - No Heroes
The Graduate - Anhedonia
Death By Stereo - Death Alive
Comeback Kid - Broadcasting
The Snake The Cross The Crown - Cotton Teeth
Dear and the Headlights - Small Steps, Heavy Hooves
The Geeks - Every Time We Fall
Limbeck - Limbeck
WinterKids - Memoirs
03.09.2007 by J-Sin
Music Reviews of Videogames, PS2, XBox, Gamecube, Dreamcast
Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 2 — PS2 Buy it at Amazon
Finally the sequel to the hugely popular computer game Baldur’s Gate is here, which just a couple of years ago made the trek to the console with the first addition to the popular series Dark Alliance. What you liked about the first, you’ll love about the second as the interface is mostly the same. This isn’t just your typical hack-and-slash dungeon raider. You can collect runestones and gems and upgrade your weapons into even more powerful magical items. Not to mention you have more choices for your starting character and can play two-player with experience points being divided 50-50 for monsters but 100% for quests. Fun, addictive, and complete with a great compelling story, there was good reason to wait the extra few months from the original release date while their company was sorting out legal issues regarding the release of this game.
- J-Sin
Madden 2004 — PS2 Buy it at Amazon
Madden 2004 is just another football masterpiece by EA Sports in a long series of Madden masterpieces. They take everything you’d ever want to experience playing football on a console game system to the next level. This year they allow you to be the “owner” where you cannot just set prices, work with a salary cap, develop players and dynasties, but also you can eventually build your own stadium, move your franchise elsewhere if your city can’t support you, hire/fire your coaches, and many other facets of the game that even the players and coaches don’t get to experience. The Madden challenges are back again and some of them have been updated to present new and more challenging skills for the player to master. Everything that was great about 2003 is even better this time around. In fact I stood in line for two and a half hours to get it the night before it was officially released. How’s that for dedication? The sliders always can help make a hard game harder or easier or vice versa. You won’t hear any complaining from me as I give Bill Parcell’s Dallas Cowboy’s the whupping they deserve from the Redskins—let’s just say I beat them 184-0 with a drafted team and a hell-pressed defense. But obviously if you want competition just don’t manipulate the sliders and set it to All-Madden and you’ll be getting the whupping. And this year the Madden curse was on again as Michael Vick who’s on the cover breaks his leg in real life and is out for a good six weeks. If you don’t believe in superstition than talk to Marshall Faulk, Daunte Culpepper, and Eddie George. Great game and great series!
- J-Sin
Tom Clancy`s Ghost Recon — PS2 Buy it at Amazon
Ghost Recon is quickly becoming one of my favorite first-person shooter/action games. It`s almost a simulation of sorts for a special forces group. It takes place in the future and the Soviet Union is slowly reforming and gaining strength. Mission by mission there are increases not only in difficulty but in weapon availability, specialists, and of course complicated missions. It`s not only extraordinarily engrossing but it lets you play war without actually hurting anyone. Maybe we should send a copy to the White House!
- J-Sin
High Heat Major League Baseball 2004 — PS2 Buy it at Amazon
I`ve been searching for quite some time for the perfect console baseball game. I`m a huge fan of the game and I want to be able to have great and realistic stats along with good playability. I`ve found my match. There are perfect tuning systems to make hitting, pitching, fielding--all the elements of the game—easier or more difficult. Personally I hate fielding as I usually find my reaction time isn`t as good as it would be in real life, so I just set that to automatic and let the computer do the damn fielding. You can create your own players, do a draft, play either in season mode or franchise mode, have a home run derby, play exhibitions, do trades, edit players, have batting practice, and play an All-Star game. I find everything about this game to be as close to perfect as I`ve ever played. Sure there are some things that would be nice—more realism in pitching as far as being able to strike out hitters or take a walk easier. But if you simulate a season you`ll find that the computer is very close to real-life.
- J-Sin
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City — PS2 Buy it at Amazon
Rockstar comes out with its follow-up to Grand Theft Auto III and while this is not a sequel (you could kind of look at it as a prequel if anything) it continues on the award-winning path of the previous title. The setting is Miami (hence the clever “Vice City”) in the middle of the most greedy and sinful decade—the 1980s. There are several changes in addition to the different setting including your character who is now voiced by non other than Ray Liotta. Other famous voices are present such as Miss Cleo and Lawrence Taylor. There are helicopters, planes, motorcycles, and a variety of new vehicles to jack and drive at breakneck speed as well as a plethora of different weapons such as the chaingun and the katana. The scope of the game is bigger and follows a more detailed storyline. You can buy a variety of properties that ultimately can make you money after you complete missions for that property. But if you need money quick you can drive up to the mall and wander around robbing stores but be careful because they’ll send the SWAT team after you and you don’t want a bunch of cops jumping from helicopters on rope after you. There are really no problems with this game whatsoever and in fact they improve on the minor flaws of the third installment. My major complaint is that when you first start it’s harder to make a lot of money since you no longer get money for every car you bash up. But after you buy properties it’s much easier. The missions also are a bit more difficult quickly in this game but that only makes repeat playability shoot through the roof. Musically this is a far superior game with music right from the pop charts of the 1980s and while some children who don’t remember the 80s may not enjoy the music as much as older children and adults they should be able to follow the inside jokes about Reagan era that can be heard on various stations. All in all a vast crime world at your disposal with literally hundreds of different adventures that will leave even the most casual gamer completely addicted.
- J-Sin
Scooby Doo : Night of 100 Frights — PS2 Buy it at Amazon
Kid's game? Maybe. Will adults like it? If you're a Scooby Fan!!!! This game IS the cartoon. Bottom line. And, it’s based on the cartoon, not the movie.
You play as Scooby, wandering around in a Haunted Mansion (and the area around it). The game play is just like every typical platform game. Collecting Scooby Snacks instead of coins, timing jumps onto various objects, jumping on enemies to kill them. It's all there. While the game play isn't at all original, the fact that it is the original cartoon captured perfectly into a game is where the appeal of it all is. All of the classic villains from the shows are here: The Creeper, The Black Knight, and The Headless Spectre. And they all look exactly like their cartoon counterparts. Speaking of graphics, while not coming anywhere close to pushing the system to its max, they represent the artwork of the cartoon to a tee. The animation of Scooby is perfect (down to his hiding with a lampshade on his head, knees trembling). The environments are very detailed, being very bit even though they are extremely linear.
The only complaint I have about the game is the lack of camera control. This is a 3-D platformer, but most of it plays like a 2-D platformer. You don't get huge 3-D areas where you explore. You get linear paths that you have to take, and the movement along these paths is very limited. Now, this is fine, but the lack of camera control means some very frustrating times when you have to jump to different objects while trying to figure out how far away form the object you are. Because of bad choices in camera views this becomes very difficult to judge distance. In other words you fall A LOT!
Overlooking this flaw and and its unoriginal game play, if you are a fan of the old Scooby cartoons then you owe it to yourself to try out this game.
- Wayne
Aggressive Inline — PS2 Buy it at Amazon
The first thing that I would like to point out before starting this little review is that before I played this game, I had not played much of the Tony Hawk series. I had played Tony Hawks 2 & 3 a little, but didn't even really like what I had played. Now that I have said that, Aggressive Inline is probably one of the top ten games that I have ever played. It is THAT good.
Aggressive Inline is a "Tony Hawk" style extreme sports game, based on inline skating. I know!!! I know!! Inline Skating?? Yeah....reeeaal extreme!!! All I have to say is, check out the videos in this game of the pros and your views might change. They do all of the cool tricks that you would expect from any suicidal skater trying to see how many bones they can break.
Ok. To the game. The first thing that I noticed when I started playing this game, are the environments. The first level (of seven) is the Movie Lot. You are skating around grinding benches, walls, etc, on the streets of a movie studio. All the while thinking, wow, this level is as big as any of the Tony Hawk 3 levels. Then you stumble upon a huge door that opens and now you are on a movie set. This part of the level is as big as the last part. The levels are absolutely massive!! I'm talking two sometimes three times the size of some of the levels in any other extreme sports game of this type. There is so much to do in each level that you can spend so much time in one area and you never get bored. Each level is completely different. You have a Movie Lot, a Civic Center, an Amusement Park, an Airfield, and a few others. All having perfect lines to skate so you can string up really huge trick combos.
That brings me to the meat of the game, the career mode. Just like in Tony Hawk, there are challenges that have to be completed in order to open up the other levels. You get them by going to the pause menu and checking the challenge list for that level. You also get them by talking to different people scattered throughout the levels. Also, some of the challenges will trigger events that alter the environment. For example, in the Movie Lot, you do one for a ghost's voice coming from a tombstone under a giant tree. When you complete the challenge, it causes the tree to grow and extend it's limbs up to a cliff part of the set that you couldn't get to before; which gives you another area to skate in. There are dozens of times throughout the game that this happens.
Another improvement over the Tony Hawk games (in my opinion) is lack of the 2-minute timer for challenges. Instead you have a meter that goes up the more tricks you pull and goes down when you wreck. This let’s you have an unlimited amount of time to explore, and do the goals. As long as you are doing tricks to keep the meter up. With the amount of challenges that there are in each level (at least 15 or more) this lack of time limit is almost necessary.
The controls will be easy for anyone who has played Tony Hawk to pick up and play. The only addition is the use of the action button. This lets you do a variety of different things depending on certain objects that you are next to. It lets you grab the back of moving vehicles (roller coasters included!). It lets you swing around vertical and horizontal poles. It lets you vault over benches and other items. This really adds a lot to the style of the game. The graphics in Aggressive Inline are very good. The detail in each level is outstanding. Each level is colorful and animated with running traffic, roller coasters, planes flying overhead, etc. The character models are not as detailed as the ones in Tony Hawk 3, but do the job fine.
If the developers had added a create-a-skater mode to the game, (it does have a level editor) then the game would be "perfect". Instead its just "almost perfect"
- Wayne
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance — PS2 Buy it at Amazon
This is one of the few games I just sat down and played until I beat it. It took me about 3 days of 3 – 4 hour clips a piece to beat it. And boy was it fun. The 3D engine is utterly amazing and the sound is equally great. But is it any wonder? The Baldur’s Gate franchise on the PC gaming market was immediately successful so its no wonder that this game was equally brilliant and addicting. Unfortunately the scope of the game on the PS2 isn’t as wide and varying as the PC versions but it’s no less fun and engaging. Unlike the PC games this one only allows you to be one of three different classes and the customization isn’t as alluring either. But this is made up for by the different feel of the game. It’s more of a hack-and-smash than a traditional “role-playing” game but if you play as one of the different characters it can be vastly different. You have the choice between a dwarf fighter, which is the easiest for beginners, a human archer who can use magic and most weapons, and a elven sorceress who just mainly uses magic. The inventory and mapping is handled with transparency that doesn’t really detract from the action, which allows the graphics to really shine. Sonically the game is quite good with few exceptions with varied non-playing characters who speak in different tongues and while the score isn’t all that it doesn’t annoy which is the most important thing to me. Finally while the storyline isn’t all that fat there is diversity in the ways that the three characters play but I hope the sequel has more varied side-quests and more of a twisting plot. Overall this is the best RPG I’ve ever played on a console.
- J-Sin
WWF Smackdown: Just Bring It — PS2 Buy it at Amazon
I love wrestling games, well ok, I love WWF wrestling games. I used to watch WWF all the time and while I haven’t had much time to watch it recently I still could easily get right back into it (give me a couple weeks to figure out the storylines and I’m there). I used to get all the pay-per-views and I’d love to predict the outcomes of matches based on my theories of where things were going. Now I don’t have as much time for it but I still have time to play some games so I figured hey I could easily get back into the WWF (or WWE nowadays I suppose) by picking up this game. So I did but I didn’t. I haven’t gotten back into wrestling mostly because a lot of stuff about this game for lack of a better word SUCKS. It all starts with the manual, which doesn’t give instructions on the most basic of moves (like how to tag your partner in a tag team match) and doesn’t really explain the whole Create-a-Superstar mode. Arguably wrestling games are so much better against a human opponent anyway which is fine but not fine for a person who wants to win all the belts and beat all the computer matches. The story-mode is good and a great step in the right direction but it’s not really random (other than the characters you can play) and a lot of the power of the PS2 wasn’t harnessed here. I get frustrated having to read the same stupid lines said over and over again and often the characters up close look so bleakly static instead of animated moving people. The sound is pretty good other than the commentating, which is just ignorant of what’s going on and who it’s going on with. The scope of the matches is huge but again those matches are hard to come by in story-mode unless you look up the exact way to get to them and follow each step precisely which kind of kills replayability. Also there is no real way to make it easier for you to win (or vice-versa) there’s no “easy mode” which can be a blessing and a curse all at once. The Create-a-Superstar mode is pretty cool and it’s neat to be able to tweak your wrestler’s every move from his or her entrance to their submission holds. Unfortunately I was never able to get very far with a created wrestler and that’s why this game really needs some major tweaking before Smackdown 4 comes out. All in all Just Bring It is a great game to play with others but a horrible game to play by yourself. Come on THQ make me a WWF fan again!
- J-Sin
Triple Play 2002 — PS2 Buy it at Amazon
First let me preface this by saying that I’m a huge baseball fan. I love the game and all the intricacies that exist therein. EA has always provided me with great sports games. They always manage to find the perfect fit between simulation and arcade fun. Unfortunately for their baseball title this isn’t always the case. Don’t get me wrong I do enjoy the game but there are some fundamental flaws that make the game either too challenging or too easy. For example if you play at the rookie level hitting and pitching are relatively easy but fielding isn’t comparatively as easy. Sorry but if I’m playing with Omar Vizquel at shortstop I’m not going to miss a routine grounder. When you go to the next level hitting is still relatively easy but pitching is slightly harder (especially with middle to long relievers) and fielding is yet another nightmare. The all-star level is the same just up another notch and the computer will hit the hell out of ANY pitcher you throw at them. The commentary is provided by Bob Costas and Harold Reynolds and can be annoying and filled with erroneous information. Many times I’ll hit multiple home runs against a certain pitcher with Bob telling me that was just the first homer off of that pitcher. Another example was a one hit shutout I was pitching and in the 8 inning after I had struck out 12 batters and thrown exactly ZERO balls I pitched ONE ball out of the strike zone and Harold let me know that it was time for relief. I went on to strike out the next 3 batters and complete the game. Now with that said I do like the game. The music is good and is modern featuring artists that are currently riding the wave of mainstream radio/MTV play. The season mode is addicting and it’s fun to draft your own team and pit yourself up against the computer. However the computer is just downright dumb when it comes to lineups, pitching changes, rotations, and other managerial decisions. The other thing that I don’t like is the stats—they don’t provide information in good boxscores after the game is finished with the basic stuff like how many times you were caught stealing, how many homers a particular person hit, and other such basics. The feel of the game other than fielding is great and the accuracy of the ballparks is painstakingly keen. The home run derby is fun but I’m not really moved by it. True gamers are going to want to play this game for its season feature, which is Triple Play’s best feature for better or worse. Overall this game does enjoy replayability with the season mode (as well as drunken escapades against friends late night on the weekend). If you’re expecting Madden-like quality then you’ll be disappointed but if you’re just looking for a relatively decent game then go for it.
- J-Sin
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