Games 4 Share: February 2008

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Tomb Raider: Anniversary

Part 1 [99 MB]

When Tomb Raider first hit in 1996, it was nothing short of groundbreaking. While years of sequels that ranged from unremarkable to borderline offensive did a lot to tarnish the Tomb Raider name, developer Crystal Dynamics undid a lot of damage with last year's Tomb Raider: Legend. It focused on the strengths of the series--exotic locales, thoughtful puzzles, and incredible acrobatics--while modernizing the gameplay, as well as streamlining the whole experience. Crystal Dynamics continues its good work with Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which effectively goes back to the original Tomb Raider and rebuilds it from scratch. Now appearing on the PSP a few months after the PC and PS2 versions, Anniversary is still a solid action adventure game. However, some control compromises and inconsistent performance issues put a small dent in the experience.

This is one of those rare cases where the remake is better than the original.
Like the original, Tomb Raider: Anniversary follows the same basic tale of Lara's hunt for the Scion of Atlantis as she does battle with conniving businesswoman Jacqueline Natlas and her various henchmen. You'll explore ancient tombs and forgotten cities in Peru, Greece, or Egypt. You'll also perform plenty of death-defying acrobatics as you work your way through massive, ancient, and often deadly puzzles. The whole experience is highly evocative of the original, and there are certainly plenty of moments that seem specifically designed to create an odd sense of déjà vu. But nothing in Tomb Raider: Anniversary has been regurgitated verbatim: Everything is bigger and better. The environments are larger and more detailed, while existing puzzles have been elaborated upon, often to dizzying effect. The experience just feels bigger; there's so much new content that it honestly feels less like a remake and more like its own game.
A big part of that feeling comes from how much more talented Lara has become since the original Tomb Raider. Aside from a few, nominal differences, she's basically got the same abilities here as she had in Tomb Raider: Legend, which made her one of the most nimble action adventure heroes this side of the Prince of Persia. Her proficiency around ledges is incredible: She can shimmy across ledges, leap from one ledge to another, and scramble from one ledge to a higher ledge. She can swing from dangling ropes or horizontal bars, perform tumbling maneuvers to avoid projectiles, or climb up, leap from, and balance precariously atop vertical poles.
All of these acrobatics feel natural and not overly difficult to pull off, with the game allowing for just the right amount of margin of error. But as good as Lara is, she's got her limits, which is a big part of what makes the action feel dangerous. If your timing is off just a little bit when jumping for a ledge, Lara might only catch it with one hand, which will have you furiously mashing a button to help her recover. But if you miss the ledge completely, Lara's likely to expire or at least incur a serious amount of damage. These misses seem to come a little more often in the PSP version, which is due in part to some imprecision with the analog stick. Other minor sacrifices were made to the controls in bringing Anniversary to the PSP. The shoulder buttons are used to rotate the camera, and you can tap the triangle button to reset the camera position or hold it down to look freely around you with the analog stick. This works well enough most of the time, though during combat it can get a little sticky because you have to hold down both shoulder buttons to lock onto an enemy.
Lara will need to exercise each and every one of her abilities to their absolute limit in Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which features no shortage of ridiculous acrobatics. The game is essentially made up of a series of gigantic, unique set-piece puzzles. Sometimes the puzzles are traditional find-the-key, flip-the-switch-type affairs, but more often than not, the real puzzle is figuring out how to use Lara's ability to get from point A to point B. Additionally, the puzzles are often nested several layers deep. While your overall goal may be to find four keys to open a door, you'll first have to figure out how to get to the bottom of a gigantic, crumbling tower, after which you'll have to figure out how to access four different doors. Then you'll have to figure out how to actually open those doors. But of course, behind each of those doors lies a series of tricks and traps that you'll have to traverse before you'll get to the keys. Solving one of these overarching puzzles can be an involved process, with some of them taking well over an hour to complete.
The environments are your biggest adversaries most of the time in Anniversary, though through your exploration, you'll regularly run into some antagonistic fauna. These include rats, bats, wolves, bears, tigers, gorillas, raptors, and the occasional tyrannosaurus rex. Combat is limited to gunplay, which operates with a simple lock-on system. Lara can also tumble and flip through the air while keeping a bead on an enemy. New to Anniversary is the adrenaline dodge, which at specific moments allows Lara to dodge a charging enemy in slow motion. When time slows, a target will also slowly move toward the enemy, and if you fire the weapon right at the moment it locks on, it'll produce an instant kill, usually when the ferocious beast is just inches away from your face. It still feels like Tomb Raider combat, which has always been a minor part of the experience, but the adrenaline dodge is a nice little touch that adds a little more drama to the action. Tomb Raider: Anniversary also makes use of the same type of interactive cutscenes seen in Tomb Raider: Legend, where you'll have to quickly react to an onscreen button cue to keep Lara alive. It allows for some beautifully choreographed action sequences, but they're rarely very challenging.

It's almost enough to make you forget about Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness.
What keeps Tomb Raider: Anniversary engaging throughout is the strength of the gameplay, as well as the quality of the presentation. Even though you're basically just going from one tomb to another, they feature enough individual detail to make them unique. The environments are also huge, using the occasional curvy hallway to mask load times. Aside from some minor gameplay contrivances, they feel pretty real. Lara looks great and moves with a natural grace that makes her incredible acrobatic feats look feasible instead of ridiculously superhuman, while the various wildlife you confront also moves convincingly. The quality of the design and the animation comes through intact on the PSP, but a few of the finer touches in the PC and PS2 versions are absent. These are specifically lighting and atmospheric effects. But of greater concern is Anniversary's inconsistent frame rate, which can obscure the game's lovely animation and also make the timing of jumps trickier than necessary. While the fidelity of the sound elements seem to have been reduced, the game's sound design still carries a lot of the weight in establishing atmosphere. You'll hear plenty of small ambient effects, such as animal calls and dripping water. Lara's grunts and yelps as she scales these incredible antiquities will also resonate differently depending on the size of the room. Music is generally used sparingly, but it always swells to a flourish at all the right moments.
Tomb Raider: Legend did a lot to make Lara Croft feel relevant again, and Tomb Raider: Anniversary is another step in the right direction. The acrobatic action is consistently exciting and challenging throughout. Thus, despite being a remake, the experience feels new and fresh. This is the best Tomb Raider game in years, and for the first time in a long time, that actually means something.

The Fast And The Furious Usa CSO Size: 408 MB

If there is one force that can be credited for thrusting modern street racing into the limelight, it's the 2001 film The Fast and the Furious. The Vin Diesel/Paul Walker movie's slick sense of style and glamorization of illegally racing highly modified production cars were cribbed almost verbatim by games like Need for Speed Underground and the handful of uninspired also-rans that followed in NFSU's wake. Namco Bandai and Eutechnyx finally squeezed out a game based on The Fast and the Furious for the PlayStation 2 last year, and now seven months later we're being treated to the predictable PlayStation Portable version. The irony here is that this game feels like one of those uninspired also-rans cribbed from The Fast and the Furious in the first place. It's not an entirely bad street racer, but it does nothing new, and it makes pretty lousy use of the license.

You know this ain't no 10-second race?
The game takes a stab at relevance by basing itself largely on the most recent film in the franchise, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, and accordingly, all of the driving takes place in and around Tokyo. Though you'll see the names of characters from the films dropped on occasion, the connection isn't overt, and the game doesn't really have a story of its own. You play as some nameless street racer, and your existence revolves around beating each member of all the different crews in Tokyo, along the way earning a lot of money to be spent on more cars and upgrades.
The Fast and the Furious is strictly about one-on-one races—which take place either on the Tokyo freeway system known as the Wangan or in the winding hills outside Tokyo known as the Touge—and where you race influences the racing style. The Touge is filled with the kind of hairpin turns that make drifting a necessity, while the Wangan is mostly straightaways littered with traffic. All across the city you'll find various hot spots where the different street-racing crews are based, and from these different hot spots you can challenge anyone in the crew to a race of his or her choosing, though there aren't that many race types to choose from and most are finished in well under four minutes. On the Wangan, there are basic point-to-point races, as well as top-speed races that simply challenge you to achieve a higher top speed than your opponent before the end of the track. On the Touge, there are drift battles, where you're scored based on how well you drift around corners, and grip battles, which is just another name for the same type of point-to-point races you'll do on the Wangan.
For a game called The Fast and the Furious, the game is frustratingly slow from the start. The cars you can initially select are painfully sluggish, and it's nearly impossible to do any worthwhile drifting. Additionally, there are only a few crews for you to challenge from the beginning. It can be frustrating to bang away at opponents who simply outmatch you, though just because you beat an opponent doesn't mean you can't race that opponent again. With a little patience, you can take on the same inferior opponent over and over again, racking up the necessary bankroll to get a better car with some high-end upgrades. In fact, there's an early top-speed race that pays well enough that after a half-dozen repeated victories, you can buy a car that will beat any of your opponents in the foreseeable future. The game encourages you to maintain two separate rides, one for straight racing and one for drifting, but by gaming the system, you can easily build a single car that capably suits both needs. And just like that, the game goes from feeling incredibly punishing to offering no challenge whatsoever.
There's an open-world thing going on in The Fast and the Furious, and in between crew challenges, you can drive around the city, hitting various hot spots, dealerships, and tuner shops. However, you can just as easily pull up the game's city map and instantly warp to a specific location, further shrinking the game's already streamlined, miniaturized take on Tokyo. There are a total of 80 different crew members for you to challenge, as well as 40 racers you'll meet out on the open road, whom you can challenge to a race on the spot by flashing your headlights. It's a good amount of racing, but even early on it seems like you're just racing on the same strips of road over and over again.

It'll do in a pinch, but there are already plenty of superior street racers available for the PSP.
To its credit, the game does feature a great variety of licensed production cars and aftermarket parts, with a focus on Japanese makes and models, which adds an air of authenticity to the game. In addition to loads of performance enhancements, you can customize the look of your cars with body kits, rims, spoilers, layer upon layer of vinyl decals, and a veritable rainbow of paint colors. For all the visual customizing you can do, in the end it's not very satisfying, due to the game's jagged presentation.
As is rather popular within the genre of street racers, it's eternally nighttime in The Fast and the Furious, and artistically, the game does a decent job of presenting you with a cool, neon-tinged vision of Tokyo. Unfortunately, on the technical side, the game can't support that vision. Cars tend to look like boxy approximations of their real-world counterparts, and the colors always seem to look flat, with lots of color banding and low-res textures in the environments. There's some wicked aliasing, too, which fuzzes up the horizon to the point that it's difficult to tell where the road goes beyond a couple hundred yards ahead of you. The frame rate is also real choppy, something that the game tries to cover up with a screen-rattle effect, though the constant shaking just makes it that much harder to look at. Save for some really unnatural-sounding squeals that you can get out of your tires, the sounds of the cars are unremarkable. The licensed soundtrack gets dragged down by some songs that sound like they're there on behalf of the marketing department, but there's also some good dark electronic music and Asian hip-hop that's more in line with the tuner feel.
More than anything, The Fast and the Furious evokes a sense of indifference. The PSP already has a wealth of similarly styled street racers, several of which offer a greater variety of driving, some semblance of a story, and a slicker presentation. Those looking for an extension of the films will be sorely disappointed, and those looking for some solid street racing have no shortage of other, better options.

Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max ISO Size: 67 MB

Part 1 [67 MB]

It's amazing what the PSP's bright, colorful screen can do to make an old game look fresh again. Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max is more or less a perfect translation of what's presumably the last game in Capcom's Street Fighter II spin-off series. It's a tried-and-true 2D fighting game, featuring a ton of different modes and a ton of different playable characters, and this particular version adds a few extra fighters and options not found in previous versions. Pulling off certain special moves and combos using the PSP's controls can be difficult, but that's really the only reason you couldn't wholeheartedly recommend this game to PSP-carrying Street Fighter fans.

Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max takes an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to 2D fighting games, and now you can play it anywhere.
There's a good chance you've already played Street Fighter Alpha 3 before if you're interested in this version. Regardless, it's worth going over some of the gameplay differences that distinguish this installment from other Street Fighter games and other fighting games in general. For starters, this is the biggest selection of characters the series has ever seen, clocking in at around 40 different faces. You've got every last fighter from the Street Fighter II era on the lineup, as well as most of the cast of the original Street Fighter game, not to mention a whole mess of other characters. It's a diverse and likable cast, especially since each fighter has his or her own story, profile, and unique lines of dialogue. Alpha 3 Max even goes as far as to throw several extra fighters into the mix, including stick-fighter Eagle and kung fu expert Yun, though these characters hail from other Capcom fighting games. On top of that, you've got three different play styles to choose from for each fighter, oddly referred to as "isms." X-ism is a simple but powerful style reminiscent of Street Fighter II. A-ism is derived from the earlier Alpha games, letting you use multiple levels of super moves when you've got enough energy. And V-ism lets you dish out powerful custom combos by stringing together all the moves and special moves in your repertoire. Some moves and tactics are only possible when using one form or another, and though the style you choose doesn't completely change the way your fighter plays, the options still add variety.
As for the action once you're in the thick of a fight, it's mostly the traditional one-on-one fighting game battle you'd expect, but with a few twists. You've got three types of punches and kicks, plus throws and a handful of special moves and super moves to use against your opponent. However, Alpha 3 introduces some new tweaks to the combat that make it feel quite different from other Street Fighter games. You've got recovery moves for use when on the receiving end of an opponent's attacks, which let you escape additional damage. There's also a guard meter that prevents overly defensive players from doing nothing but block while pecking away at their opponents with light attacks. Defend too much and your guard will be shattered, leaving you completely vulnerable for a dangerous instant. This is a welcome addition, but on the flip side, Alpha 3 makes throws unnecessarily awkward to use by forcing you to press two buttons to perform them.

There's a whole mess of different characters in this game, plus different fighting styles and modes of play for extra variety.
In fact, a bunch of different types of moves are now performed by pressing multiple buttons simultaneously, but these can be a little frustrating to pull off on the PSP. You'd think it would be easy just pressing two or three buttons at once, but it's oddly tougher than it sounds. You have the option to map a single button on the PSP to multiple punches and kicks. However, since there are six main buttons on the PSP and six different types of normal attacks in this game, you don't really have room. Also, neither the PSP's D pad nor analog stick offers quite the level of precision you'd ideally want for such a game. As if in recognition of this, Capcom created limited supplies of an adhesive D pad attachment, which gives your thumb more leverage and simply makes special moves easier to pull off. Diehard fans of this game and Capcom's first PSP fighter, Darkstalkers Chronicle, should seek this new D pad attachment out. For most everyone else, it's really not that bad tolerating the PSP controls with this game. But since it's such an exact translation of the original, you can't help but wish for perfectly precise controls to go with it. Thankfully, you can fiddle with the speed and timing of the action in order to best suit your preferences. You've also got a gang of different modes to mess around with.

Silent Hill - Origins CSO Size: 737 MB

When you think of Silent Hill, what jumps to mind? A foggy town? Cryptic dialogue? Walls dripping with blood? Well, the good news is that Silent Hill Origins has all those things. That alone should please series fans who are looking to developer Climax's prequel to provide plenty of atmosphere and further expand on the Silent Hill mythos. But in this case, the good news is also the bad news because from a gameplay perspective, Origins is exactly what you would expect, delivering an entirely conventional adventure that relies on eight-year-old franchise hallmarks at the expense of anything truly new.

If you ever see this sign, run. Run far away.
Origins is a prequel set before the events of the original PlayStation game. This time, you're in the shoes of Travis Grady, a trucker navigating through a downpour of rain on an eerie, foreboding night. If that sounds familiar, well, that's because it is. Like the previous Silent Hill games, Origins is light on scares but heavy on murky atmosphere and mysterious dialogue. In this case, it also relies heavily on nostalgia to set its mood, which may be fine for many fans, but the setup lacks the originality of prior series plots. In any case, Travis spots a little girl in the middle of the highway just in time to avoid hitting her. She runs off, and Travis, for no apparent reason, takes pursuit. If you're a Silent Hill fan, you may already have an idea of who she might be.
What's missing here is a clear sense of suspense. Unlike with previous series installments, Travis doesn't have any pressing reason to visit Silent Hill, save for pursuing the strange child. A subsequent fire rescue adds some missing urgency, but the opening never gives you the sense that Travis needs to be in Silent Hill, which makes him the least interesting of the franchise's protagonists. Nevertheless, how Travis fits in to the ongoing mystery of Silent Hill eventually becomes clear. If you're here to fill in missing pieces to series lore, Origins has plenty of meat for you to chew on and plenty of familiar locales to explore.
You control Travis from a third-person view, navigating through the foggy streets of the titular town between destinations. There's a lot to piece together here in the way of puzzles, many of which are entangled in other puzzles. For the most part, they are pretty clever, requiring you to explore every nook and cranny for scraps of clues and various items. They also require you to move in and out of the otherworld (an alternate dimension) at will by touching any of the various mirrors scattered about, which is a new mechanic for the series. It's in the otherworld that Origins is at its most disturbing. Dirty, bloody asylum walls and ragged teddy bears are series standards that still manage to elicit chills. Random groans and sudden encounters with other characters are also appropriately creepy, if not exactly scary.
You'll encounter your fair share of monstrous oddities--some new, many familiar. Unfortunately, combat is as weak as ever for the series. Melee is as plodding and unsatisfying as you remember, usually bloody but too measured and monotonous to be much fun. In all fairness, there are some attempts to spice things up. At times, an enemy attack will trigger a contextual minigame that requires you to hit the necessary buttons within a prescribed time limit to avoid taking damage. Of course, we've seen this mechanic in countless games this year alone, and Origins does nothing to make it any more interesting, so it might as well have been left out.
The other main combat addition is that of limited-use melee weapons. You can grab a television, radio, or hospital drip stand to bash your enemies with. You'll get multiple uses out of some of them, while others are done after a single hit. As long as you avoid combat, however (usually an easy task), you'll have plenty of weapons at your disposal. It begs the question, though: How can Travis carry a TV, a hatchet, a drip stand, a scalpel, a meat cleaver, a filing cabinet, and a huge plank of wood at the same time? It's not that impossibly huge inventory space is new to games, but the extent to which it's carried out here feels wildly out of place. Gunplay feels better, though again, it's wiser to simply avoid combat whenever possible and save your ammo for the boss fights. This is where Origins is at its best: Boss monsters are huge, designed well, and a challenge to take down.

Didn't we see this dance troupe on America's Got Talent?
Origins certainly looks the part, thanks to the traditional Silent Hill mist and its fine re-creation of the environments we've come to know over the years. Interior environments feature a lot of fine detail and crisp textures, and the contrast between the real world and the otherworld is palpable. However, character models aren't as well-crafted as you would hope, and Travis moves as stiffly as his straightjacketed foes. The sound design is fantastic, thanks to a terrifically disturbing soundtrack and all the menacing bump-in-the-night echoes that ring throughout the streets and hallways.
The problem with most of the game is that it's all been done already. It's like the developer had a laundry list of everything that makes a Silent Hill game a Silent Hill game, but forgot to throw in anything new. It doesn't even fix long-standing problems. Finishing blows are still a pain to pull off at times, especially when an enemy falls on top of another corpse. Getting a handle on your health status is still too vague a prospect. If any franchise has room to grow, this is the one, yet not a single meaningful element of Origins takes the gameplay anywhere the original Silent Hill didn't already go. This comfort blanket of familiarity may be welcomed by fans perfectly fine with that, but it does nothing to enhance the series. If anything, it makes you wish that the series would grow up a bit.

Midnight Club 3 CSO Size: 972 MB

Rockstar Games released Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition a couple of months back to both fan and critical acclaim. Eschewing the overly commercialized, hokey, and downright stereotypical stylings of the street racing genre, it was a most welcome offering. Now, developer Rockstar Leeds has cranked out a PSP iteration of its console racer and has managed to cram nearly the entire scope of the console game onto one of those tiny Universal Media Discs. Unfortunately, a few serious liberties had to be taken to make that happen. Some ugly load times, minimal damage modeling, a few periodic sound bugs, and one unpleasant frame rate all conspire to make the PSP version of Midnight Club 3 a weaker overall effort. Sure, it's still a mostly fun and sometimes exciting street racer, but when put up against competition like Ridge Racer and Need for Speed Underground Rivals, it seems a lot more ordinary.

Arcade-style street racing comes to the PSP in Midnight Club 3: DUB edition.
Like the Midnight Clubs before it, Midnight Club 3 offers up a huge, open-ended city for you to race in. Well, there are actually three cities. You'll begin in San Diego, but you'll eventually be able to open up the cities of Atlanta and Detroit as well. Unfortunately, it takes an exceedingly long time to load up each of these cities--upward of 70 seconds in most cases. The in-game loading times are also annoying. During gameplay you often have to switch between racing, cruising, and visiting the local garage, and jumping from spot to spot always results in some lengthy loading. The console versions weren't exactly quick when it came to in-game loading, but they were an absolute breeze compared to the PSP iteration.
Each city is chock-full of back alleys, hidden shortcuts, and special jumps that you'll be hard pressed to discover until you've spent ample time driving around. Thankfully, the game provides a cruise mode where you can just drive and explore, which isn't nearly as boring as it sounds, because there are also some hidden Rockstar logos strewn about that will earn you goodies when you collect them all. It's also useful to get familiar with all the nooks and crannies of the city, as knowing your way around is immensely beneficial come race time, since most of the races in Midnight Club 3 are checkpoint races. These checkpoints are scattered all over the place, and oftentimes there are multiple paths that will take you to each one. Half the challenge of the game is trying to find the best path to each checkpoint. The one problem with this methodology is that it can be quite frustrating the first few times you engage in a particularly challenging race because you won't know where all the required turns and potential obstacles are. This leads to a fair amount of trial and error that isn't altogether detrimental (especially since using the free-roaming mode gives you a good idea of how the city is laid out), but it definitely has its annoying moments. Fortunately, there are also point-to-point races and timed races to provide some variety to the action, and they're far less taxing to boot.
Midnight Club 3 is an arcade racer through and through. If you're looking for even a modicum of realism from this game, you might as well forget it. The physics are geared toward big jumps, taking tight corners at ridiculous speeds, big, exaggerated crashes, and frenetic action. The controls are generally tight and easy to pick up, though it will probably take you at least a little time to get accustomed to the different car classes. With more than 60 licensed cars available, there's a lot to choose from, including tuners, muscle cars, trucks and SUVs, motorcycles, and luxury automobiles. H2 Hummers, Cadillac Escalades, Mitsubishi Lancers, '64 Chevy Impalas, and Kawasaki Ninjas are just some of the many vehicles you can race with. Though nearly all the cars are fast and loose, every car type has its own strengths and weaknesses, which come in to play with the game's unique special moves system.
Yes, that's right. The cars in Midnight Club 3 actually have special moves. While that might sound a little wacky, it's not so bizarre. There are three types of special abilities assigned to the car classes. Big, intimidating cars can use an ability that knocks all the traffic around you out of your way; others can use an "agro" ability to inflict extra damage to cars you hit; and the speedier vehicles can use an effect that slows down time, letting you simply maneuver around any traffic that gets in your way. These abilities are handy, though perhaps not as well implemented as they could have been. The slow-down ability, for instance, slows down time almost too much, and it doesn't last long enough to be useful. Similarly, the intimidation ability the big vehicles use sometimes doesn't do anything except push the car in front of you farther ahead. Still, when the abilities do work, they're satisfying. And when you couple them with the preexisting nitrous and slipstream speed boosts, things can get pretty crazy.
Perhaps the best thing about Midnight Club 3's racing is that the difficulty never feels artificial. If you wreck once, or even twice, you still have a perfectly solid chance to catch up and win the race, as your opponents are prone to wrecking and spinning out as well. Similarly, if you catch the lead and can avoid wrecking or doing anything stupid, your opponents won't just magically overtake you.

The racing in the game is fast and frantic--so you'll do well to learn the city streets ahead of time, since there isn't much room for error.
The bulk of the offline racing you'll be doing in Midnight Club 3 will likely be in the robust career mode. You begin with about 20 grand in your pocket and an introduction to a local garage owner, who sets you up with a ride of your choice and an "in" to the underground street racing scene. Make no mistake, if you're looking for some kind of dramatic tale of intrigue or anything involving a lot of interaction with your typically stereotyped street racing characters, you won't find either here. The career mode focuses squarely on the racing, which is a welcome change from the hackneyed attempts at driving game stories that other similar games have tried.
There are multiple types of races to engage in during the career mode, all of which are structured around the basic checkpoint, point-to-point, and time trial races available throughout. Basically, you start by getting together with various hookmen who will challenge you to a short series of races. Impressing them will get you shots at longer series of races with assorted car clubs, each of which revolves around specific car types. So if there's a club that races with nothing but trucks, you'll need to have a truck or an SUV in your collection to participate in the races. While this might seem like a chore, it isn't, thanks to a number of tournaments that seem to ever so conveniently pop up right around the time a new car club challenges you. In these tournaments, you can win new cars. And they're almost always the precise kinds of car you need to move forward. Apart from all these main races, there are a number of side races available in each city that don't help your career but do provide you with extra cash. That's good, because you'll need it to fully trick out your whip.

Killzone Liberation CSO Size: 506 MB

Though 2004's Killzone for the PlayStation 2 might not be the most fondly remembered of sci-fi first-person shooters, Killzone: Liberation for the PSP is bound to make a more lasting impression. For one thing, Liberation has just about zero to do with its PS2 predecessor from a gameplay perspective. It's still a shooter, but the viewpoint has been switched to an isometric, top-down view and the action itself has improved exponentially. This is a game that provides a great deal of intense shooting action, with tough enemy opponents that don't lie down and die easily. Throw in an ad hoc competitive multiplayer component and co-op play for the whole campaign, and you've got a thoroughly excellent package.

The Killzone name redeems itself with this high-octane shooter for the PSP.
For those uninitiated to the Killzone universe, the series takes place in a futuristic society where humanity has taken to the stars. A militant subset splinters off from society to form its own government on a planet called Helghan. However, over time, this planet turns these people into something other than human--a race known as the Helghast. In Killzone, you were neck deep in the battle between the Helghast and the human race, fending off a Helghast invasion on a planet called Vetka. In Liberation, you're going in the opposite direction. Picking up where the first game left off, you're once again playing as the human soldier Templar. Now on the offensive, the human army is going after the Helghast, and you'll take on a series of missions, as Templar, to bring down the enemy. In truth, there's not much story progression for the Killzone universe to be found here. The game spends a small amount of time setting up the objective for each mission, and there's a basic plot involving a pesky Helghast general named Metrac and some key members of the human political and military system getting kidnapped. However, for the most part, the focus is very much on the action in Liberation, and not on the storytelling.
Were the action not so good, that'd be a real problem. Thankfully, you'll probably be too neck deep in fending off hordes of Helghast soldiers to care why you're doing it. Though at first glance Liberation looks like a Killzone-themed dungeon crawler, it's very much a shooter, and a challenging one at that. You begin each level with a specific gun--you start out with a weak assault rifle, and as you play through the game, you'll unlock more powerful starting guns--and a basic mission objective or two. Along the way, the Helghast will come at you in all forms, from groupings of grunt soldiers to rocket-launcher-wielding baddies to massive tanks. Killing them is challenging for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that they're very smart. Though you'll see occasional bad guys stand around in a stupid spot, just waiting to get shot, most of the time enemies will find cover the moment you start firing at them. They'll duck, they'll dodge, they'll launch grenades at you to try and flush you out from cover, and they'll even shoot an exploding barrel if you happen to be standing next to one.
Suffice it to say, the Helghast are very good at finding ways to kill you, so you have to be a good shot, as well as mindful of the environment. This is not a run-and-gun shooter. You have to be methodical in your movements, keeping an eye to cover points, knowing when and where to throw grenades, and basically just not walking into firefights with guns blazing.
The shooting mechanics are handled very well in Liberation. There's no specific autoaim function, but when you point your gun in the direction of an enemy, your character will lock on to that enemy. This mechanic works no matter where an enemy is standing, so if enemies are above you, you'll point up, and if they're below, you'll point there, too. Little touches like rocket launchers and tank cannons knowing where to lock their fire make aiming remarkably easier, as well.

Blowing up enemies is immensely satisfying.
That's not to say that the game can't be a bit frustrating at times. Maybe that's an understatement. Though it isn't cheap or broken, few games on the PSP will induce the same level of rage that Liberation's single-player campaign will. Because you need to figure out the environment to survive a fight, you'll be dealing with a great deal of trial and error. You will die in this game...a lot. On the plus side, the campaign has a great checkpoint system that rarely forces you to replay too terribly much of one section of a mission. Of course, that will be small comfort to those who find themselves getting decimated by scads of Helghast troops on a regular basis.
Another interesting wrinkle to the gameplay system is your ability to command non-player characters. Though you won't be accompanied by a computer-controlled ally on every mission, there are several sections where you'll have someone working alongside you, and in most cases, that's an allied soldier named Rico. By pressing up on the PSP's directional pad, you'll pull up a command menu that shows you exactly what you can make an ally do at that point. In most situations, you can simply command them to take a specific firing position, but you can also order them to, for example, attack specific enemies and plant explosives in key spots. The artificial intelligence does a great job of following orders, and you'll almost never have to give an order twice to get them to do what you want. In fact, the worst complaint you can say about the allied AI is that they have the ability to shoot you if you get in the way, and vice versa--and that will happen every now and again.

Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories ISO Size: 476 MB

Call it Grand Theft Auto Gaiden. While there have been handheld takes on the GTA series in the past, none of them have ever properly captured the things that made the modern installments in the series so popular. Things like the sprawling environments, its fast-action freestyle mayhem, and, of course, the series' great sense of humor just haven't come across on a handheld before. Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories is not without its problems, either; but it gets enough of the series' signature features in there to do you right.

Toni Cipriani is a no-nonsense kind of guy.
Liberty City Stories brings you back to Rockstar's fictional take on New York City, first seen this way in 2001's revolutionary GTA III. This time around, the year is 1998, and you play the role of a returning wise guy named Toni Cipriani, who works for Salvatore Leone. Upon your return to town, you get right back to work, because the Leone crime family is about to start getting it from all sides. As you ascend to become Salvatore's right-hand man, you'll start and finish gang wars with other mafia types, a few triads, the yakuza...pretty much all of the usual suspects are present.
If you're familiar with the various mafia presences over the course of the past three GTA games, you'll recognize a few of the names and faces here. But the story stands alone and doesn't require you to remember the various cast members. That's a good thing, because the mafia characters in the other GTA games have been largely forgettable. The game's storyline really isn't up to par with the console installments in the series, because very little actually happens. Even potential plot points, like when Toni finally becomes a made man, are squandered by a bad cutscene that doesn't actually show the ceremony. The game's mission path doesn't deviate into crazy territory, and most of the characters are fairly lifeless. There are no enigmatic weirdos like Truth, the crazy hippie from San Andreas, or Steve Scott, the porno director from Vice City, to break up the heavier-handed mafia tasks. This dulls the game's personality, preventing its characters and events from becoming as memorable as we've come to expect from GTA games and their excellent storylines.
If you stick to the missions and don't mess around too much, you can finish the game's story mode in 10 to 12 hours. But the deceptive game-progress counter will only report around 40-percent completion if you stick close to the missions and don't do much else. The game has some rampage side missions and the standard pizza delivery, vigilante, taxi service, and ambulance missions, too. You can seek out ringing pay phones to get into street races. You can report to car lots to sell cars or motorcycles by test-driving vehicles for prospective consumers. And, of course, there are 100 hidden packages to find. If you get into all this optional stuff, there's a lot more city to see, and plenty of different cars to see it in.

The game's different outfits let you change your look from time to time.
Over the years, the missions in Grand Theft Auto have gotten more complex, but the overall difficulty has lightened up. The missions in Liberty City Stories, however, are extremely simple for the most part. Most of your given tasks are one-dimensional, such as stealing a specific car and driving it back to a location without wrecking it, or taking out a series of gang members and blowing up their prized tank. A few missions get a little deeper, but at some point, the missions just start to all run together because they aren't very interesting. The combat-heavy missions tend to be a little tougher than the driving tasks, because the game's control scheme occasionally gets in the way. The lock-on targeting in GTA games has always been a little squirrelly, but when you add a less-than-optimal target-changing control to that mix (left and right on the D pad, by default), you end up with some frustrating moments. In missions where you're given a large number of targets to take down, you're better off doing it from a distance with a sniper rifle, if possible.

Full Auto 2 CSO Size: 223 MB

Part 1 [99 MB]

Part 2 [99 MB]

Part 3 [25 MB]

The Full Auto series has produced two lackluster console games that at least had a hook to them: When things didn't go your way, you could rewind time a bit and attempt to get it right the second time around. Full Auto 2: Battlelines is now available on the PSP, but it doesn't have that hook to it. Without the ability to rewind time, which, granted, never really worked well in the first place, this PSP game is just a generic-looking and poor-playing combat racing game that has very little appeal to it.

Full Auto 2 on the PSP doesn't deliver any of the things that set the console game apart from the pack.
The game opens with a series of text-filled screens that talk about a weather computer gone awry, and how if you're the best combat racer, you can take control of that computer and rule the world, or something. It's convoluted at best and doesn't really matter at any point after that. From there, you're dropped into a menu with different parts of the world to visit. Each part has a series of races and events associated with it, and by completing the objectives in these events, you unlock new items and events.
Winning a race is rarely your goal, as most of the game is focused on destruction. You can select different cars and outfit them with two weapons. From the start, you're given access to a machine gun, minirockets, and mines. The PSP's triggers are used to fire your two weapons, while the face buttons handle gas, brake, and turbo. Your goals change from level to level, but most of them require you to eliminate a set number of enemies, while others require you to blow up specific targets, random objects, or oncoming traffic. You must complete every objective to proceed. After completing an area's races, you'll be able to go into an arena level for more-direct combat. This turns the game into a bad Twisted Metal-style combat game. It's bad because the cars don't handle well enough to make the rapid turns you need to make in an open arena. When you're done abusing yourself in the single-player, you can bring the thrill-less gameplay of Full Auto 2 to a group in the multiplayer mode. Four players can play, and the game does support game sharing. None of it is any fun.

The multiplayer mode lets you race or fight against three other players.
Visually, the game is drab, but at least it moves quickly. You get a decent sense of speed out of the cars in the race mode. For a game that's so focused on blowing things up, you'd think it'd have better explosions. It's difficult to tell what's going on out on the track, and when you do see things blow up, they're really unimpressive. Large hamburger stands and other buildings fall apart in a very unspectacular way. One of the things that Full Auto got right on consoles was its explosions, and this version has none of that, either. The soundtrack is decent, though, and the explosions and gunfire sound effects come across just fine.
Overall, this is a generic, poor-playing combat racing game that isn't deep enough to please even diehard fans of the genre. While it isn't aggressively broken, there's nothing in Full Auto 2 that makes it a particularly appealing game.

Ford Street Racing LA Duel ISO Size: 120 MB

Part 1 [99 MB]

Part 2 [21 MB]

In making the leap from joypad to handheld, the perennially unremarkable Ford Racing series finally has something to crow about - it's one of the few games to actually expand during the transition, rather than being crudely chopped down to size. That's not to say that the flaws apparent in the most recent console edition (which I also had the honour of reviewing) aren't still present and incorrect but, for what it's worth, if you were ever tempted to give the series a spin, this would probably be the best version to try.
Exclusive to this version are six new Ford cars, bumping the garage roster up to a respectable 24 vehicles, while seven new tracks have also been included, making for 37 in total. Despite this generosity, the game itself is pretty much the same as the PS2 version from earlier this year, which makes it very tempting to just cut and paste huge chunks of that review. That would be devastatingly cheeky, of course, so I'm forced to say the same thing using different words.
With its not bad graphics, passable track design and acceptable handling, the core problem which has blighted Ford Racing since its debut remains intact: it's not exciting. It is the most middle of the road racer around. Never so bad that you throw up your hands in despair, never so good that you feel compelled to keep playing. It's simply... there. Functional. Practical. As dull as digestive biscuits, dunked in weak tea.
Guiding a car around a course is something so ingrained in our gaming DNA that, without at least a spark of adrenalin, it's very easy for your brain to just disengage leaving your thumbs to play the game on auto-pilot while your higher intellectual functions grapple with more exciting tasks, such as remembering what time Tesco shuts. The uninspired course designs here seem to actively encourage such mental laziness, their predictable corners and generic urban backdrops offering nothing for your imagination to latch onto. Even in the midst of what would normally be a nail-biting neck and neck dash for the chequered flag, you're left curiously uninvolved. With no va-va-voom to speak of, there's precious little incentive to keep plugging away around the same tracks, all in service of... unlocking more tracks.

FACT! Rotating a screenshot by 15 degrees makes it 32 times more exciting.
Structurally, everything is much as you expect. Arcade races let you choose the vehicle and location for a three-lap challenge, but victory earns you nothing beyond the mild flutter in your stomach you get for completing any simple test of hand-eye co-ordination. Quick Race is exactly the same, but randomly assigns you a car and track, thus saving you those agonising seconds spent selecting menu options. That'll be why it's "Quick", I suppose.
The one glimmer of originality in the Ford Racing set-up is the Team Racing mode, introduced in the latest console edition, and it remains an intriguing idea poorly implemented. In the console version it put you in charge of a three-car team, allowing you to switch control from one to the other in order to work your way up the pack. The number of cars has reduced to a more manageable two for the PSP, but the potential is still squandered by the game's biggest Achilles' heel - some bargain basement AI that does a great job feeling artificial, but fails to convince on the intelligence front.
As you'd expect, team racing relies heavily on the idea of two vehicles racing in unison, blocking and flanking other cars in order to both achieve high ranking positions. Naturally, this requires teamwork - and that requires the ability to react to a situation intelligently, something these buzzing drones singularly fail to do.

SEE! It's true. Rotated screenshot equals enhanced excitement.
Just as in the console version, the other cars are tedious slaves to the racing line. First time out it's easy to believe that the rival cars shunting and jostling you are doing so out of directed aggression and competitive purpose. Oh, the challenge! Only when you play with an AI team mate - and find they do the exact same thing - do you realise that you've simply strayed into their preferred path and, rather than reacting to your presence, the cars are simply slamming into you because you're in their way. Should you fight back, and knock them off course, they simply click back into the racing line and carry on as if nothing happened.
But it's not just a question of shuttling from one car to the other. There are numerous orders that can be given to your team mate when not in direct control, but "try not to lose" shouldn't need to be one of them. Time after time you'll work a car into pole position, only for it to plummet down the pack the moment you switch away. Rather like having a racing duo made up of Michael Schumacher and a confused monkey, this makes it rather hard to develop any race-long strategy or employ any serious tactics. I can understand having these cars not try to automatically force their way up the pack, since there are situations where you want to keep the vehicles together, but it'd be nice if they were at least able to hold their position. As much as the idea of tactical racing appeals, it's hard to avoid the fact that the Ford Racing engine allows for as much independent thought as the average Scalextric set.
While this bone-headed AI makes the Team Races an absolute chore to win, it does mean that the Solo races are an absolute walkover - with your opponents reduced to the level of mindless drones, victory is merely a matter of memorising each simple track, and then using that knowledge to shave seconds off while the other cars go through their predictable turns. The reward for your endeavours is just more of the same, so it's something of a mixed blessing, really.

PROOF! No rotation, and you've already dozed off.
Compounding all of these omnipresent niggles is the drab, flavourless presentation, sucking what little drama you manage to generate out of the races. While the gameplay favours neither the carnage of Burnout nor the precision of Gran Turismo, the inclusion of Street in the title, and the woefully inaccurate LA Duel suffix, both position the game as gunning for the Need for Speed crown. It simply doesn't have the snotty Redline attitude required to pull it off and, in attempting to play with the cool kids, ends up an out of touch and misguided exercise - a game that would clearly be happier taking a Mondeo on a Sunday afternoon drive to the garden centre than tearing up the midnight tarmac in a souped-up Focus with a bevy of council estate slappers.
So, another adequate yet uninspired entry for the Ford Racing brand. Weak-hearted gamers who need to avoid undue excitement may be happy to see it return but, with at least five preferable racers already on the PSP shelf, the only reason to give this a chance is the low price. Even then, it'll probably be the least interesting twenty quid you'll ever spend.

Exit CSO Size: 65 MB

Part 1 [65 MB]

Substance and style shake hands in Exit, an engaging new puzzler for the PSP where a striking visual dialect and outside-the-box-of-blocks puzzle design collude to create a spirited and oft-challenging experience. Name-checking puzzle classics like Lemmings and the original Prince of Persia make for convenient, fairly accurate shorthand when describing Exit, but they don't give the game due credit for the way it forges something fresh out of familiar elements.

Mr. ESC is an expert on sticky situations.
Exit has less a story than it does a premise. You play as Mr. ESC, a professional "escapologist" with a serious caffeine addiction who lends his agile frame and sharp mental faculties to paying customers who need people extracted from dangerous situations. Over the course of the game's 10 stages, you'll puzzle your way out of a burning building, a flooded mall, a quake-rattled hospital, a blacked-out underground facility, a hotel that has been hit by an avalanche, and more. Though the types of hazards you'll have to surmount can range from bare electrical floor panels to flooded caverns, your goal is always the same: to find the survivors and get them to the exit.
Finding the survivors is usually pretty easy, since you can use the analog stick to scroll around the area near Mr. ESC. Hitting the select button will bring up a simple map that pinpoints the locations of the survivors and the exit. Mr. ESC is nimble and strong, but he's not superhuman. He can run and jump across small gaps, jump and pull himself up onto ledges, push boxes, crawl through low passages or under clouds of smoke, and swim underwater for less than a minute. However, contact with fire, electricity, or a fall from a great height will cripple Mr. ESC instantly and will end the mission.
The survivors you'll encounter often have even greater physical limitations, which will regularly mean that it's easy to get to them, but getting them out of the building is a trickier situation. There are four different types of survivors you'll encounter: young adults, grown adults, children, and the injured. Young adults are about as strong and spry as Mr. ESC, though they can't jump as far. Grown adults are stronger, which means they can move objects that Mr. ESC himself wouldn't be able to budge, but they also require assistance getting up and over higher ledges. Children, who can't jump far and need help getting both up to and down from higher ledges, can traipse across surfaces that would shatter under the weight of a larger person and crawl through passages that are too tight for Mr. ESC. The injured survivors are the biggest liability. They cannot move on their own, so either Mr. ESC or an adult survivor has to carry them, which severely slows them down, whether they're walking or using a rolling stretcher, which are hard to come by.
There are a few somewhat arbitrary limitations, like when survivors can get into elevators on their own but can't actually operate them. However, the abilities of your survivors are a major factor in figuring your way out of a building. You can use the analog stick and the triangle button to select any survivors you've made contact with and give them destinations and various tasks. Sometimes having a survivor helping you out just makes the work go faster, but in most levels, there are situations that require the talents of multiple people at once, making for some seriously devious puzzles.
When survivors are in "follow" mode, they're smart enough to not do anything life-threatening, though if you directly command them to walk into the middle of a blazing fire, they'll do it, no questions asked. They also seem to have trouble reconciling vertical and horizontal space at the same time, which means they'll sometimes get stuck when given the broad order to climb a flight of stairs. At worst, though, this just means they require a little extra babysitting.
Exit turns up the volume on the difficulty and complexity of the puzzles at a nice, steady pace, but it always requires you to be diligent and pretty methodical, since pushing a box too far or hitting a switch out of turn can leave you stuck, with no recourse but to retry the level. While precision is valuable, the game also injects the proceedings with a sense of urgency with a countdown clock that will end the level if you don't get everyone out before it reaches zero. Though we rarely found ourselves really racing the clock, the time it takes you to exit a level will affect your overall score for that level, which we often found to be inspiration enough to be as economical with our time as possible. On a few extremely rare occasions, the game will focus on action more than puzzles, which isn't Exit's strongest suit. The controls, while responsive enough for the puzzle-solving majority of the gameplay, are a little too slow and clunky to support pure action gameplay.
Including the first 10 levels, which amount to a surprisingly comprehensive tutorial, there are 100 individual levels in Exit, which will take even the most cunning of puzzle-solvers at least 10 hours to finish. Considering how the bulk of the game has you bossing other characters around, Exit could have benefited greatly from some kind of co-op play, but unfortunately, this is a single-player affair only. The game does feature an online mode, where you can download additional levels. There are 11 bonus stages that you can download, with each stage containing 10 levels--do the math, and that's 110 bonus levels, 10 more than what's originally included with the game. On top of that, almost all of the bonus-download levels are far more demanding and devious than the starting 100, which means that those bonus levels will last you a long, long time.
The puzzles themselves are definitely engrossing and challenging on their own, and the game's playful visuals help make things feel especially original. The characters are little more than wire-frame models with some minimalist unique traits. Mr. ESC himself is totally nondescript, save for his yellow hat and the red tie, which seems to always be blowing over his shoulder. Despite some lean designs, the people in Exit are imbued with a bit of humanity by way of smooth, realistic animations. The buildings themselves are caricatures of modern designs and are always rich with small background details and little bits of cartoony flair. With its penchant for primary colors it's hard to deny the comic book influence in Exit, but all of its pieces come together to create an incredibly unique look.

Even those that typically shy away from puzzle games will find it hard not to like Exit.
The soundtrack supports the game's urgent but good-humored nature with an upbeat fusion of break beats and jazzy melodies that occasionally have a "Secret Agent Man" vibe to them. The music stays thematically consistent, but it changes up often, staying fresh throughout. Sadly, the otherwise enjoyable sound in Exit is marred by grating, plaintive voice clips from both Mr. ESC and the survivors that repeat over and over again. Sometimes these voice clips are useful, as survivors will let you know when they're confronted with an obstacle they cannot get past. But constant chatter about how they're hungry and cold and want to go home doesn't help anyone.
Exit is inherently a very likable game. The premise and presentation are light and fun without being cute or cloying. The puzzles will put your logic to the test, but without being condescending or overly punishing. And, the puzzles stay varied and interesting, which make them a nice reprieve from the well-worn Tetris-derived puzzle games and the infuriatingly dense item-based puzzles common in adventure games. Puzzle fans will love Exit, and with its conventional side-scrolling platformer presentation, people who don't think they like puzzle games may find themselves enjoying a puzzle game without even knowing it.

Driver 76 EUR CSO Size: 872 MB

Ever since the 2004 release of Driver 3, the Driver series has made a habit of trying to mimic the unique success of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto series, achieving marginal success. Last year's Driver: Parallel Lines wasn't terrible and was a big step up from the much-maligned 2004 release of Driver 3. However, it still failed to do anything as well as the series it was aping and came off as the also-ran that it was. Development duties have been passed off to Sumo Digital for Driver '76 on the PlayStation Portable, but once again the series comes up short.

Ripped from the funny pages!
The story in Driver '76 is sort of a prequel to Driver: Parallel Lines, in that it focuses on the exploits of two supporting characters two years before the start of Parallel Lines. You play as Ray, a two-bit wheelman who's voiced by someone that seems to have mixed up their Jack Nicholson with their Ray Liotta. Predictably, you're partnered up with a jive-talkin', afro-wearing cat named Slink. Ray's interest in the daughter of a Triad boss inspires him to do a bunch of dirt to impress the old man, which ends up getting both characters on the bad side of several different gangs, the Triads included. The story itself is all perfunctory crime business with a few unsurprising botched jobs and double-crosses along the way. By presenting them as pages from a '70s-era comic book, the game at least keeps the story sequences interesting to look at.
Though the game plops you down in the middle of an open-world version of New York City circa 1976, the story itself is a straight shot from beginning to end. Occasionally, you can choose to take on one mission before another, but none of this effects how events unfold. The missions themselves are all painfully unimaginative, with loads of rudimentary tasks like driving to a destination within a set amount of time, escorting another car, or evading the cops before taking your passenger to a specified destination. It's rare that the game asks you to do anything on foot, which isn't entirely a bad thing.
Driver '76 isn't bad when you're behind the wheel of an automobile. There are more than 50 different types of vehicles to drive, from dirt bikes to big rigs, each with a different handling profile. The camera is a little loose, which is generally OK, but it can be difficult to see where you're going in some of the race missions. When you're on foot, the game's not nearly as much fun, because there's really nothing to do. Ray can run at a decent clip, though he can't sprint and he can't jump--the latter of which can prove to be a real hassle when you catch a little heat while on foot, since it's real easy to get pinned in a corner. You'll get access to standard weapons like a handgun, a shotgun, an assault rifle, and so on, and lock-on targeting makes it easy to take down your targets, but the weapons don't pack much punch--you can expect to unload nearly a full clip from your assault rifle into your enemies from a couple of yards away before they go down.
On top of all this, the story is real short and can be easily blown through in five or six hours. You can take on side missions at any point, which include closed-course and open-road racing, as well as tow-truck, taxi-driver, and straight-up wheelman missions, among others, but they're no more fresh or original than any of the story missions. You can conceivably use the cash from the side missions to buy car upgrades or weapon ammo, but the game's just not challenging enough to warrant it. You might expect to get some fun from causing as much damage and chaos as possible, but the police in Driver '76 as so ineffective that it doesn't take much to lose them. The lack of in-game consequences makes going on a kill-crazy rampage pretty boring.

The visuals in Driver '76 are a bit of a mess.
The big underlying problem in Driver '76 is that it simply doesn't flesh out the world with the details that can make this type of game so immersive. Its take on New York City isn't quite 1:1, but it's still pretty sizable. There are unique areas that represent Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Harlem, Manhattan, and New Jersey, but it all feels like a ghost town. Pedestrians are few and far between, and you rarely see more than four other vehicles on the road at once, though this might be due to the game's already-shoddy performance. The draw distance is great, but everything looks flat and boxy, with blurry, washed-out textures, and it seems like the frame rate is in constant flux. The load times leading up to missions regularly push a full minute, and it's not uncommon to have the game randomly seize up for seconds at a time while simply driving around. The game sounds a good bit better than it looks. Weapon fire is weak, but the engine noises are distinct, though the real highlight is a solid, late-'70s soundtrack that puts a heavy emphasis on funk. Sure, it recycles the soundtrack from Parallel Lines, but it was the best part of that game, too.
So the Driver franchise once again misses its mark, though it's about as close as the series has gotten so far. Driver '76 isn't a bad game, but it's certainly a derivative one, and the details that it fails to capture end up being the ones that really count.

Death Jr. 2 - Root of Evil CSO Size: 528 MB

The original Death Jr. received quite a bit of attention because it was one of the first PlayStation Portable games shown in video form. Its impressive 3D graphics gave consumers their first glimpse into the capabilities of the PSP. Unfortunately, when it was finally released, Death Jr. didn't live up to the hype. Just over a year later, the follow-up, Death Jr. II: Root of Evil, has been released, and it shares many of its predecessor's problems. The great characters and mostly interesting level design are no match for the lousy camera placement, frustrating controls, and shallow story.

Death Jr. plunges to his doom. Cause of death: A combination of being forced to fight on a catwalk and lousy controls.
It's puzzling that both Death Jr. games have hardly any story in them, yet there's a comic book series based on the characters. The game opens with Death Sr. being captured by a raging Hulk-like female creature named Furi, who is trying to take over the world. It's then revealed that Death Jr. and his girlfriend, Pandora, were responsible for releasing Furi when they accidentally broke her cocoon open while trying to complete a science project. The duo is unaware that Death Sr. has been captured, but they do know they're responsible for the sudden changes to their world; so, with the help of their wacky bunch of friends, they set off to right their wrong.
But the story is weak. The likable characters are underutilized, as is the game's great sense of humor. There are a few laugh-out-loud moments, but with wacky characters like the Seep (a limbless fetus-type thing in a formaldehyde container) and a dead fish named Dead Guppy, there was potential for much more.
When the game begins, you can choose whether you want to play as Death Jr. or Pandora. Once you've started, you won't be able to switch characters--you have to play with the same character all the way through. Other than a few of the cutscenes relating to Death Jr. being removed when playing as Pandora, their adventures are identical. A new feature this time around is co-op play. If you've got a friend with a copy of the game you can play through the entire adventure cooperatively. But the co-op version of the game is exactly the same as the single-player experience--and there aren't actually any instances where cooperation is required (though it can be nice to have some help killing the game's many bad guys). It's disappointing that you're unable to load a saved single-player game and play it with a friend--you'll have to start a new game.
Despite the fact that each character is touted as having its own weapons and moves, both Death Jr. and Pandora play almost exactly the same. Death Jr. is once again armed with a scythe, which he'll use to pummel enemies and grab hooks. He can also spin his weapon rapidly over his head to glide gracefully through the air. Pandora uses her whip in the same way. At first their attacks are limited, but DJ (as his friends call him) and Pandora can use energy orbs they get from fallen enemies to purchase new moves. Both characters can use guns to perform ranged attacks. Hidden throughout each level are parts that can be used to build new guns or upgrade existing weapons.

Some of the levels, like the World of Waffles, are really cool.
Death Jr. II: Root of Evil is an action-platformer, so you'll do plenty of running, jumping, and shooting. Both characters can use their weapons to swing from hooks, and they can even grab on to vines and use them as zip lines. It's confusing that grabbing on to hooks requires one set of button presses, while doing almost the exact same thing on a horizontal pole involves a different combination. Sliding on vines is a piece of cake most of the time, until the game randomly decides to not require you to hit the square button to latch on to the vine--resulting in numerous deaths until you figure out what's going on. Most of the game's challenge comes not so much from creative level design (though there are some cool areas), but more from it being so difficult to manage the controls and camera at the same time. You can pan the camera with the shoulder buttons, and while this is a more manageable solution than in the first game, it's still tough to do when you're on the move, and sometimes you just can't get the camera where you want.
There are plenty of platforming elements, to be sure, but Death Jr. II's primary gameplay focus is on combat. You'll fight hundreds upon hundreds of creatures, from psychotic toys and clowns to overgrown plants and crazed chickens that shoot lasers. Swinging your scythe like a madman is entertaining for a few levels, but despite the impressive variety of enemies there are to kill, the combat quickly grows old thanks to enemies that spawn from thin air, and it's maddening to be constantly under a barrage of lasers and bombs that come from enemies just off camera. You can purchase new attacks by trading in energy orbs, but because the new moves are mostly just variations of hitting and holding the attack button, it seems as though pulling off a specific move is more a result of luck than of skillful play.
Many of the gun upgrades are similarly useless. Some of them are weak and difficult to aim, and there's really not much incentive to look for more weapon parts once you've bought and upgraded the rocket launcher, since it gets the job done in any situation. There's an auto-aim feature, but it's poorly implemented as there's no way to easily switch from one target to another. It's possible to manually aim your weapon; however, the controls are so clunky you'll generally end up blown to bits by enemy fire before you line up your target. Just swinging your scythe can result in instant death if you're too close to the edge of a cliff, because your momentum carries you forward every time you swing. Nothing's more frustrating than trying to fend off a horde of enemies and then plunging to your death courtesy of the unfriendly controls. Early on in the game the platforming segments aren't too difficult and there are plenty of checkpoints to keep you from having to replay large segments of a level over should you die. But the game is downright ruthless near the end thanks to fewer checkpoints as well as the prevalence of lava, which results in instant death if you come into contact with it.
Root of Evil's graphics are mostly great, marred only by the troublesome camera, a few unsightly textures, and a couple of bland levels. The occasional boring area is an exception to the rule, as the majority of the levels are creatively designed and have interesting themes. The World of Waffles level, with its bright colors, crazy circus themes, and larger-than-life pinball machine area, is particularly noteworthy. Most impressive, though, are the game's lighting and particle effects that constantly light up the screen with an array of fire, sparks, and explosions. The frame rate always remains steady, no matter how many enemies and explosions are onscreen at once.

Now you and a friend can enjoy trying not to fall off the pointless balance beams scattered throughout the world with ad-hoc co-op play.
Death Jr. II's audio is also quite good. There aren't any big names voicing the characters, but the voice work is easily as good or better than a typical Saturday-morning cartoon. Unfortunately, you don't get to hear enough of the great voices. Outside of an occasional quick bit of dialogue during a level, the characters speak only during the brief and all-too-infrequent cutscenes. Sound effects are decent, but there's not much variety to them. Death Jr.'s screams and wails are particularly grating on the nerves. The soundtrack has a couple of standout tunes, but most of the time it takes a backseat to explosions, screams, and gunfire.
In spite of the gameplay being riddled with annoying problems, Death Jr. II has its share of fun moments. On the rare occasion when the controls and the camera work in harmony, you'll have a good time running, swinging, and shooting your way through the levels. Even combat is sometimes fun, provided you're not near a cliff, and as long as there are only a few bad guys around and they're not flying or shooting anything at you. It's during these few moments of joy that you wonder why the whole game isn't that way. The potential for an enjoyable game exists, but Backbone has once again been unable to capitalize on it. If you managed to find a way to enjoy the first Death Jr. game, you'll probably be able to do the same with the sequel--but unless you consider yourself extremely patient, you'll want to stay away.