Dudacles

Dom is determined to find his wife

• Warzone is a deathmatch of sorts where everybody gets one life per round. The winner is the team that can take out the entirety of the other team.
• Execution is essentially Warzone, but in order to take out an enemy, you need to execute him. That means have a oneshot kill, like a headshot, or using one of many execution moves while he's crawling around downed.
• Guardian is a mode where both teams have a leader. Keeping your leader alive means respawning, as soon as the leader dies, your team can get taken out much like in Warzone.
• Annex is essentially King of the Hill, Gears style.
• Wingman; in this mode, 5 teams made up of two players each face off against each other.
• Submission is an interesting mode. It's Capture the Flag, but only this time, the flag is a bot that can shoot you. Expect to be taken out many times by his shotgun.

Chainsaw duel!

Marcus Fenix, still a badass

It's impossible to avoid comparing Saints Row to GTA. The first Saints Row was viewed as a momentary fix for those craving GTA-esque gameplay on the next generation of consoles, and thus was infinitely compared to GTA. Now, the first Saints Row didn't really benefit from these comparisons, because while Saints Row was a valiant attempt at recreating GTA, Grand Theft Auto was still viewed as the better franchise. Volition is now trying to counter that by giving Saints Row 2 a personality of its own. While GTAIV attempted (and succeeded) to draw players in with a very deep story and extremely polished gameplay, Saints Row 2 aims to provide as many possibilities for the player to have absurd fun, and the end result is just that; ridiculously fun. 

The game's story starts out with you waking up from the coma that the explosion at the very end of Saints Row put you in. They had to use plastic surgery on you, which is just an excuse to allow you to completely remake your character. Saints Row 2 is one the most customizable games I've ever played, and it shows in the character creation. You can just about create anything. You can mix and mash woman's and men's part, and just do whatever you want. You have six voices in the game, so that means having to record all the dialogue six times as well, which is impressive. 

After you create your character, you have to escape the prison with the help of a sidekick, Carlos. Once you get off the prison, you receive a small crib and can start working on taking out the new gangs that have populated Stillwater after Saints Row. The Ronin, Japanese ninjas and my personall favorite gang, The Brotherhood, tattooed lunatics and The Sons of Samedi, a gang that has a constant purple haze around it. Just like in the first Saints Row, you need to do activities to earn respect bars in order to play these missions. Not all of these activities are awesome, but there are some really cool ones like riding a flaming quadbike, protecting people with an attack helicopter and more. Earning respect definitely seems easier this time around, as beating both heli assault locations and one of the drug trafficking locations was enough for me to get through the entire game. 

The stories of the three gangs are completely stand-alone, as they can be played in any order. This does make them somewhat boring, because there is pretty much no story progression, apart from a couple of moments. Two moments, however, are very strong and really fuel your desire for revenge. Johnny is oddly almost completely absent from two of the three gang stories, which is too bad, because he's awesome. If you were hoping for Dex to return, without spoiling too much, his appearance is way too brief to satisfy. Overall, the story in Saints Row 2 is nothing compared to GTAIV's, though the cutscenes are well directed. Voice work is solid across the board as well.

Saints Row 2 is more of a spiritual succesor to GTA San Andreas than anything else. Along with the activities, which are pretty crazy, you also get diversions. Diversions earn you some respect and money, but they're mostly just for fun. DIversions include skydiving/basejumping, streaking, the usual GTA assortiment of Taxi, Firefighter, Vigilante missions and more. The game also has just alot of crazy weapons and vehicles. Really, the only thing I miss is some sort of fighter jet. Zombie Uprising can be really fun too, and is played on the TV of one of your many cribs.

Those cribs are all completely customizable too, along with your gang style (gangster, bodyguard, freakin' ninjas), your own look, which vehicles your gang uses, radio stations and more. There are a whole lot of thing you can change to really personalize the game.

Combat is pretty awesome this time around. The first Saints Row had fun moments, but overall I felt the combat to be quite tame in that game. Not so this time around. Explosions are huge, you have acces to some crazy weapons and vehicles, melee is improved with three combat styles that all have some pretty insane combos. Melee weapons are nice too, with chainsaws, baseball bats and katanas, with that last one having some cool uses in the Ronin storyline.

Overall, I love this game. I still need to do alot of activities, and I've put around 20 hours into the game so far, which is a rarity for me. If you liked GTA SA, you will love this. It's not the heavyweight GTAIV is, but this Saints Row 2 will provide hours upon hours of pure, unadulterated fun.

Burnout Revenge is a racing game that takes the concept of arcade racing just about as far as it can be taken. While sim racers like Forza 2 and Gran Turismo dedicate themselves to simulating racing, Burnout simply aims to offer speed thrills. Driving the wrong way at 200 miles per hour really gets your heart pumping.

Burnout has a sense of speed few other games can offer. The game has alot of highperformance vehicles, though none of them are liscenced. Revenge's focus isn't necessarily on pure racing though, half of the game is purely about satisfying crashes. Still, the races are the best part about Burnout, so if you don't want stuff like crash mode, where you simply attempt to cause as much damage as possible, you might be better off getting Burnout 3: Takedown. I haven't played that one, Burnout Revenge being my first game in the series, but I've been told that game focuses on racing way more. 

The game does have a pretty extensive singleplayer, with ten levels that each have over 10 events. These events range from racing (with or without a crashbreaker, which allows you to blow up your car after a crash to take other dudes with you) to the previously-mentioned crash mode, which has you trying to hit the right cars on an intersection to start a huge traffic pile-up, culminating in you blowing up your car for maximum damage! It's pretty cool at the start, but personally, I found that the appeal of this mode wore off rather quickly. I simply played them once to get 4 or 5 stars, then moved on to other events quickly.

Events come in a couple more flavors, like road rage, which requires you to take down marked cars with a time limit. Every three takedowns extend your time limit. The singeplayer racing is also fun, although a little more agression from the AI would've been nice. They got me sometimes, but that would be simply because I'd touched them and then driven into a wall accidentally, which counted as a takedown. This would mark them as revenge rivals with a red arrow over their roof untill I settled the rivalry by taking them down in turn. 

You can also recieve medals for every event in the singleplayer, and getting gold on all events seems like an almost impossible task. 

Multiplayer really is awesome though, especially since the game keeps a memory of all the rivals you have, so if you meet a rival two months after they took you down, they'll still be marked as priorities. The multiplayer is pretty lagfree for me, which is a good thing because lag at these break-neck speeds would likely cause many a crash on accident. The online community is pretty small nowadays though, only ranked matches still get games.

Overall, Burnout Revenge definitely is a good game. Not an instant classic, but there definitely is are some crazy moments and fun to be had here.

Forza Motorsport is a sim racer for the Xbox 360. I haven't really dug deep into the racing game genre, having only played Need for Speed Most Wanted and Burnout Revenge up until this point, but I can definitely see that Forza 2 has some real quality. The racing engine is tight, but the most addicting aspect to this game is building up a collection of cars, and painting them. 

Racing

This game is sim racing at it's very best, with only games like Gran Turismo rivalling it. The racing engine is highly realistic, and can take quite a bit of time to master. Especially drifting is something that will take alot of time to master in Forza 2, though Giantbomb.com has a pretty  good guide up for it on the site to help you learn how to drift. The game has an extensive singleplayer, with both arcade racing where you need to do stuff like beat time scores or simply win races for fun, and a career mode. The career mode is the meat of the singleplayer, with a vast amount of events to beat. Events win you money and new cars. Getting new cars is exciting every time, and it's probably the most fun aspect of Forza motorsport 2.

On the multiplayer side, the racing has been entirely lagfree for me, although I didn't really dig deep into the multiplayer. Looking at the other dudes' cars is nice though, since Forza 2 has an incredibly paint tool to personalise cars.

Car collection and painting

Forza 2 has a large amount of liscensed cars from all over the world to unlock, tune and paint to your heart's content. I believe there are around threehundred cars in the game, and attempting to get them all can be really fun, and will take you hundreds of hours. 

Forza 2 has one of the most in-depth painting tools I've ever seen. With enough skill, you can create pretty much anything, which has of course spawned a huge amount of porn cars. Attempting to sell these can get you banned though. Selling cars to other players happens in the auction house, where you can place a car with a starting price and a buyout price to let players bid on your creations. Some cars go out for 30 million creds, while those base cars only cost like 3500000 in the game's career car shop. If you are good at painting, you can make Forza 2 fortunes. The bidding only goes in increments of about 200 though, so if no buyout price has been set, bidding can take a painfully long time, which usually causes one of the players to just quit out of pure boredom.

The game also has a large amount of tuning options, just about anything can be optimized in your rides. You can build insane vehicles with performances that go through the roof.

Forza motorsport 2 is a very good sim racer, but personally, I'm more of a fan of the adrenaline pumps you get from games like Burnout. If you like collecting cars though, this game will definitely give you your fill.

God Hand can be very challenging, especially before you learn how to duck and side-dash effectively. This game features a dynamic difficulty system that's truly a work of genius. There are 4 levels of difficulty. On the easy setting, you can only get levels 1 and 2. On the normal setting, you get all 4 levels, with level DIE! being the fourth and hardest level. On the hard setting the game is locked on level DIE!. It's safe to say God Hand on the hard setting is one of the most difficult games I've ever played. The reason this system works so great is because newbies will likely stay at levels 1-2 at all times, while experts will keep getting challenged on level DIE!. This system can really get you sometimes, like when you are beating up a boss with ease on level 2 and then suddenly the game turns level 3 and the boss' attacks become way faster and harderhitting. It really keeps you on your toes throughout the game, even against the most basic enemies, which can become a serious threat on level DIE! if you don't know the ins and outs of the combat and juggle system.

This difficulty system serves to support God Hand's excellent fighting system. You've got over a hundred moves in this game, and they can be assigned to the triangle button, the X button or the square button, which you can create combos with. And the best combos aren't necessarily four or five of the game's strongest moves in a row, you have to consider the speed, power, how these moves will link into each other and what kind of effect it may have, so that you don't put a knockback at the start of your combo for instance. The system is really fun to work with and there really is a lot of depth here.

The other side of the combat is the roulette wheel. Roulettes are superpowerfull attacks that Gene can unleash with roulette orbs. They're really cool and funny and can really turn the tide in a battle. There are also a couple of context-sensitive button-mash sequenses that will have Gene hammering away at an enemie at mach 3.

The story in God Hand is nothing special, but it's likely intentionally weird and bad. There are some really cool references to all kinds of stuff, as you can see on the GB main page for this game, and it's mostly a hilarious game.

I reccommend it to everyone that likes a very challenging, but very fair and funny game.

GHII is the followup to the vastly popular Guitar Hero. I haven't played the original yet, but I did play GHIII before GHII. II and III are very comparable, but III has a tiny edge for me; I like the song selection on GHIII better. At least, there are more songs I really like on GHIII, but GHIII has some truly awful choises as well, whereas GHII has no absolutely terrible songs. Ofcourse this is just a matter of music taste, if you find yourself wondering which of the two to get, just look up some of the song lists to decide what appeals to you most. 

Bear in mind though that 95% of GHII's songs are covers. These covers are decent, but sometimes it feels like they picked the wrong type of voice for some songs. Some of the covers are actually for the better though, I liked the GHII Freebird more than the original version. GHIII on the other hand has some covers, but a fair amount the of the songs are either master tracks, or rerecordings by the original artists. This is slightly more fun IMO. 

GHIII is known for it's rather hard difficulty on Hard and Expert. GHII is probably somewhat easier, but this also depends on which of the two you played first. GHIII's difficulty kept me coming back for a good challenge though, while I grew tired somewhat faster from GHII.

GHII is a really fun game, addicting and with some great songs to play. I really recommend it to anyone who feels like some mindless fun.

The Darkness is a FPS from Starbreeze, the developers of Chronicles of Riddick. In the game you play as Jackie Estacado. On the night of his twenty-first birthday, Jackie finds out he's being possesed by a demon called The Darkness. Manifesting as two demon snakes sprouting out of his shoulders, The Darkness helps Jackie out in taking revenge on his Uncle Paulie, who has wronged Jackie, and at the same time attempts to manipulate him. And you eat hearts from fallen enemies in this game. It's awesome.

The Darkness has a very compelling story, with interesting characters that are voiced really well by the voice-cast. Jackie's voice gets the rasp in the voice just right, which is good because Jackie narrates the story during load times, which there are quite a lot of. You will see quite a bit of repetition in the random stuff you get while you take the train for example though. Overall though, the voices are great and even the side characters are fun to listen to.

Graphics are great, the New York setting is very recognizable, and the "WWI in hell"(you heard me) is also very good. The characters look quite lifelike and the ragdoll when you use your Darkness Powers, which I'll get to later, is impressive. It's a very goodlooking game overall.

The gunplay in The Darkness feels somewhat weak, and your pistols are pretty much the best guns in the game. Making dual pistols more effective than a shotgun, even when shooting an enemie from upclose, is lame. The weak gunplay is more than made up for by the Darkness Powers. You get Creeping Dark early on, which allows you to send out one of the snakes on your shoulders to sneak around, even on walls and ceilings, breaking vents and taking dudes out from a safe spot in the shadows. You've also got a demon arm, a giant spike jutting out of your side with which you can impale enemies. The demon are is hands-down the coolest abilitie in the game. Casually throwing aside an enemie with the arm is awesome and makes you feel like a powerhouse. There's also a blackhole that will suck up enemies, kill them and then send their limp bodies flying. You also get demon pistols which have unlimited ammo but take up Darkness Energie, which you regain by standing the shadows. In fact, you'll always want to be in a dark place to use your full power. You're much weaker in a light locale, so you'll find yourself shooting out a lot of lights, which can get annoying after a while. In the end, The Darkness doesn't have the twitch-gunplay games like COD4 boast, but the powers make the combat enjoyable.

The Darkness can be compared with games like Bioshock, that have it's atmosphere as a main selling point. I'd say if you liked Bioshock, you'll The Darkness. It's not terribly long, but it's a fantastic experience. 

DMC3:SE is a remake of Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening. The games has plenty of new features, most notably a new playable character and a survival mode called Bloody Palace that has a mindblowing 9999 floors.

At its core though, this game is the same as the original DMC3, but a bevy of new features make this remake worth it even if you already played the hell out Dante's Awakening. Most of the extra content is actually already unlocked if you have a save file of the original on your memory card.

DMC3:SE is a game I could recommend to any action game fan.

5 out of 5 stars.

Fifa 07 for X360 was supposed to revolutionize the franchise with an all new ball physics system. However, the EA focused too much on creating this new physics system, and forgot about the other components to the game, such as tricks and a decent passing system. Even Fifa's main selling point compared to PES; lots of liscenses of players and teams, was forgotten as the game only featured 5 leagues. However, Fifa 08 is looking to fix all those complaints.

Fifa 08 plays a great game of football on the pitch, although some players may find that the tempo of play is decidedly lower than that of its predecessors or PES, once you get used to it, the action on the pitch has a great feel to it. Players now feel like they have weight, compared to the 07 players who felt utterly weightless. Speedrunning with the right stick has been largely removed, a feature that made online play unfair in 07.

F08 offers a new mode of play, called "Be a Pro". In this mode, you take controll of a single player on the field while the AI controlls the rest. You can give basic commands to other players such as tackle or you can ask for a pass. If you are in a bad position to recieve a pass, the AI player may ignore you though. However, the AI just isn't very effective at tackling or shooting, so you may end up having to act like a defender while you chose position of attacker, and then have to run all the way up the field to attack. The AI is also a terrible shot, so you're always better off shooting yourself. Overall, BaP is a nice addition to the series, but you'll probably stick to the oldschool way of playing the game.

F08 has a nice range of modes, such as create a tournament and manager mode, and they're all familiar to fans of the series. It's still not possible to play matches of 90 minutes real time though, and I hope they will implement this again in Fifa 09.

Online is pretty much always lagfree for me, even when playing against people from China, so that's saying something. Next to the standard Ranked and Unranked matches, you can also play BaP online. It's 5 on 5, and it can be great fun when you've got 4 other people on your team that don't want to dribble all the time. For now it's 5 on 5, but EA will likely implement10 vs 10 or 11vs 11 en a future instalment. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Overall, F08 is arguably the best footy game out right now, and it has great value.

4 Stars out of 5.