Launchball is a new flash game that’s presented by the Science Museum in London. The game plays like a version of the old DOS game “The Incredible Machine”.

The goal is to get a ball from one part of the screen to the exit at another part. It features a dozen or so of different “blocks”, which each having different properties, such as conducting electricity and heat, or being able to bounce the ball. You have to combine the blocks in certain ways, such as using a magnet to propel the ball onto a piece of rubber, in order to move it in front of a fan that shoots it to the exit.

You have to think though, because you can also use a complex block as something to bounce off of, making the game sometimes challenging. The game also states an entertaining science factoid every time you beat a level, making it so that you can grasp the concepts behind the game. There is also a level creation feature, which makes it so you can expand the fun past the games 30 levels.

It’s not often that games use physics, and even less often that they use it right, which is what makes Launchball an fun puzzle game.

Launchball gets an Aa

Launchball is a post from: Gameologic

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Monsters’ Den is the newest dungeon crawling RPG on the Internet, and it is also one of the best. It can absorb you for hours at a time. If you prefer action games though, it can be rather tedious.

The game contains a fair amount of calculating statistics, and using strategies. It starts out by asking you to create a party of four adventurers using the standard RPG class system. You can choose from Warriors, Clerics, Mages, Rangers, and Rouges. After picking a group, you choose a difficulty, and are thrown into a dungeon. You have to navigate through the dungeon, with various paths being available.

You can either head straight towards the dungeons “Boss”, or you can try to fight through every other creature and find vast amounts of items, in order to make your characters stronger. Every time you beat a dungeon, your characters level up, and gain new skills and become stronger. When you encounter enemies, you enter into a combat mode, and use your skills and weapons to take down enemies.

Combat consists of each character being assigned a turn in the attack order, with fastest characters attacking first. Each class offers different play styles, with clerics healing teammates, mages casting powerful and deadly spells, and warriors causing devastating amounts of damage. The game has a large amount of polish thrown into it, and it shows, with everything from the maps, to the combat, to the inventory management being incredibly easy to learn and use. It can easily entertain you for hours on end. This is the flash RPG that has yet to be beaten.

Monster’s Den gets an A+

Monsters’ Den is a post from: Gameologic

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Command and Conquer 3 is the almost 8 years in the making sequel to 1999′s Tiberian Sun. While I personally would have preferred for EA to make Red Alert 3, I guess that this game can hold me over. It maintains all the control, game play, and storyline as the previous games, and has several improvements to make it a fun game.

The game consists of playing with three different factions; Nod, the bad guys who have weak, fast, stealth units; The Scrin, which is an alien race that has slow, huge, deadly air units; and finally GDI, the average, beginner friendly, good guy side with standard units. The single player campaign features a great story with several actors like Billy Dee Williams and Michael Ironside in the video sequences.

The story is that Kane, the incredibly evil bald guy, comes out of nowhere and he and the rest of NOD start picking fights with GDI. A few asteroids happen to be heading towards the Earth at the same time, but they end up being an alien invasion force. And theres also a precious ore called Tiberium that all the factions want to fight over.

You spend the last half of the game dealing with aliens, in addition to your normal enemies, so it gets pretty fun towards the end. If you ever played a real time strategy game before, you already know what game play is like, if you haven’t, then let me break down the game play; Create buildings, create better and better units as you get further into your technology tree, attack the enemy or defend from assaults, and rinse and repeat until you win.

I particularly enjoyed the defensive levels better than the attacking levels when I played GDI, since they have rather bad units until you reach the Mammoth Tank, which is essentially death on wheels. When I was NOD, I liked to rush out and attack as soon as I could, since they aren’t good at fighting in large battles. As the Scrin, I just built up my defenses and waited until I had a large amount of airships, since each one can take out dozens of enemies.

The real fun though, comes from multi-player. Instead of having to fight a predictable computer, you have to deal with human minds that can try out new strategies, and take you down fast. My first 4 games were loses, but after I figured out what strategies I could use against certain types of players, I started winning more rounds than I lost. The competitive spirit makes multi-player matches cause you to think on your feet, and adapt old your strategies to fit with the enemies new ones. It all adds up for a very entertaining experience. The single player story lasts around 30 to 40 hours, and the online mode is fun for at least 50 to 100 rounds, which last anywhere from 5 minutes to a half hour each.

Command and Conquer 3 is definitely the best strategy game I’ve played in years. It looks and sounds great, the strategy elements are refined from previous games, and the game play makes you keep on coming back for more. I’d recommend that anyone who enjoys strategy play this, but it’s a bit too fast paced for anyone who hasn’t played another online strategy game before.

Command and Conquer 3 gets a B

Command and Conquer 3 is a post from: Gameologic

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Bioshock is the heavily anticipated successor to System Shock 2, and it manages to live up to the hype. Now while Bioshock is an incredibly good game, and it has everything that a good shooter needs, it still feels incomplete. Maybe it’s just my habit of nitpicking everything, but it seems as if things like inventory management, balance, and a flashlight would have severely improved the game. Although, despite those issues, I would still say that Bioshock is a great game, and a recommended buy, it’s just that that its not everything that it was promised to be.

The story starts out with you being the only survivor of a crashed plane in the middle of the ocean, with a conveniently placed, underwater dystopia nearby. After going to said dystopia, you find out how everyone and everything went crazy after a new and coveted substance called “Adam” could make you have superpowers and whatnot.

The game play consists of you running from point A to point B, and along the way you find three different types of enemies; The “Splicers” which are really just Adam addicted druggies, the “Big Daddies” which are super strong enforcers of peace, and the “Machines” which are just turrets, cameras, and security drones. There are six guns, a wrench, and a camera for you to choose from, with each being good at certain things, such as the shotgun for close range, and the crossbow for shooting from afar.

You also get to choose various powerups, such as shooting lightning from your fingertips, or turning invisible when you stand still. The element that makes this different from most shooters is that you can set up the conditions of meeting most enemies.

You can hack a turret or security camera to prevent someone from stabbing you in the back, and you can put down proximity mines and electrified trip wire to make mince meat out of tough enemies. Hacking is a bit tedious, as it is really just a 50 second version of the old Lucasarts game, Pipe Dream. You could play this just like a normal shooter, but you would keep getting killed every 10 minutes. In this game though, death doesn’t mean anything since you just revive at a point 10 seconds away from where you got killed. Also, the game offers you choices, but it only changes the story by changing which of the three endgame movies you see. The game lasts about 20 hours, if you take your time, and around 12 to 15 if you just rush it.

Bioshock is a finely polished and fun game, but it seems as if some of the game play elements were shoehorned in, or rushed a bit. I’d recommended you get this,  but keep in mind that it isn’t as perfect as it was promised to be.

Bioshock gets an A-

Bioshock is a post from: Gameologic

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And Yet It Moves is another game that utilizes the natural fun that you can have from manipulating physics, and combines it with all the traditional running and jumping from your typical Mario or Sonic game.

It’s short, looks unique, and has a decent amount of replay value, but it’s main selling point is that it’s completely free. After getting AYIM from the website, installations was as simple as a right click.

I figured that a small game like that would be shallow, ugly, and easy to forget, but it turned out to be one of the best 2D platformers I’ve ever played. The game has only 2 levels, with the only objective being to get from point A to B, but the real fun comes from getting there.

The game lets you control gravity rotating which direction your character will fall. This lets you turn even the smallest jumps into gigantic, multi-directional leaps. I learned the hard way that if you fall too far, you die. The game uses a checkpoint system that lets you recover from death at a nearby area.

There are a few objects besides you in the level design, so besides from falling to your death, you can also have a boulder squash you. One of the puzzles involves using your mastery over gravity to fling a nearby rock towards a breakable wall, letting you proceed.

There’s even a monkey who throws things that you need to dodge. After completing a level the game tells you how long it took to finish, and lets you try to beat your previous record. Manipulating gravity is neat, but another thing that sets AYIM apart from the competition is its distinct visual style. The graphics consist of colored paper cut outs that really differ from normal life-like graphics. If you have a spare 20 minutes, then you really need to check this out.

And Yet It Moves gets an A

And Yet It Moves is a post from: Gameologic

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Valve’s latest collection of games, “The Orange Box”, lives up to the high standard of quality that was in their previous games. Half-Life 2 was the ultimate game of 2004, and Half-Life 2: Episode 1 was a good expansion pack.

They’ve been out for a while though, and if you haven’t played them, then I can instantly recommend this collection to you. If you already own those games, then the 3 new games: Portal, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and Team Fortress 2, are still worth playing. You can also give a friend the 2 old games so they can see why so many people called Half-Life 2 the “Perfect” game.

Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is essentially a mini version of Half-Life 2, but with a few improvements. It features the standard shooting and gravity manipulation fun from Half-Life 2, along with all the dark tunnels and sudden action.

There are a few minor game play tweaks, such as having the flashlight run on its own battery, rather than the suit’s energy. It also features a new car that you get about 2 hours in, which lets you drive around the world and crush over any zombies or enemies you see. It’s easy to beat it in around 6 or seven hours, but the last hour of the game is the only place where it seems to capture all the fun and adrenaline of the Half-Life series.

Portal is a very funny, entertaining and witty game. It only lasts around 2 or 3 hours, but you can play the bonus maps and replay the game to get a total of 10 hours from it. The concept of Portal is simple: you have a gun that makes a “doorway” on walls, so that you can jump from one side of a room to another in a split second.

The puzzles are challenging, but fall somewhere between “easy” and “impossible to aim.” The best part about Portal though, is the humor. There is a computer that talks to you throughout the game, and says dry, but hilarious things to you. The jokes often contain emotionless references to your death. The last game to make me laugh so hard was Psychonauts.

Team Fortress 2 is a fast paced and addictive class-based shooter, with unlimited hours of game play, and 9 different classes to choose from. Everyone can enjoy this game, and it’s impossible not to find at least two classes that you are good at; from the fire crazed Pyro and defensive Engineer, to the walking tank that is the Heavy.

Every class is fun to play as, and the game is so perfectly balanced that you never feel that someone gave you a cheap kill. There are only six maps to play, making it so that selection is limited, but each one has been tested so much that you can get stuck for hours at a time on a single one. Team Fortress Two is the best part of The Orange Box, and the most online fun you’ll have for a long time.
Overall, this is the game to buy in 2007. It has 5 good games, with each one satisfying a different gaming need. Each game alone is great, but having all five is the perfect combination.

The Orange Box gets an A+

The Orange Box is a post from: Gameologic

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After hearing several people tell me about how great Overlord is, and how it’s got all the comedy of Psychonauts combined with the gameplay of Pikmin, I finally decided to try it out. I have to say, I’m not disappointed. Although the game gets a bit tedious, and you can easily throw away twenty minutes of work by accidentally clicking in the wrong place, it still managed to entertain me.

Overlord is different from the typical video game in two ways: It’s funny, and you play as the bad guy instead of the hero. The introductory video and tutorial show you how you have inherited an evil empire from a previous Overlord who was killed by a group of seven heroes. Your evil lair, a tower, has been ransacked, damaged, and most of the minions have left.

Your main goal throughout the game is to repair your tower, find the three lost minion tribes, and kill the seven heroes. Game play consists of commanding legions of Minions to solve puzzles, attack enemies, carry objects, and perform other tasks to expand your evil empire. You start out with brown minions who can fight well, and you have to find red minions who can throw fireballs, green minions who can turn invisible, and blue minions who can revive dead teammates.

In addition to that, red minions can walk through fire, greens can go through gas, and blue one can swim. Your character is a skilled fighter, but you can die easily if an enemy gets in a good shot, which makes your minions a valuable asset to protect yourself. You simply look at something, and give your minions the “go” command, and the game’s AI is smart enough to make them figure out what to do.

Minions can attack enemies, carry objects, and disperse barriers. You can control more and more minions as the game progresses, making it easier to handle such a large group. You can also use your minions to upgrade your armor and weapons. You do this by making hundreds of different minions sacrifice themselves by jumping into the forge, which then makes you have more damage, defense, fire damage, regeneration, magic, or health.

You can learn several spells, such as a fireball or shield spell, and your spells change depending on whether you decide to be extremely evil, or just a tiny bit evil. The setting is the typical magic filled land of most fantasy games, complete with Elves, Dwarves, half-lings, trolls, unicorns, zombies, knights in shining armor and, of course, an evil overlord.

What makes the setting unique though, is how the game has a light, humorous attitude, which makes it much easier to play than grisly, dark games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Doom. The music isn’t phenomenal, but it’s good enough to keep me from using my own music. The graphics are also good, but it’s been years since a game had “bad” graphics, so it doesn’t really matter. Despite all the good things tossed into a single package, Overlord manages to have a few bad things to turn a good game into a sub-par one.

The controls are a bit difficult to wrap your head around, especially when you try to make a few groups of minions do several things at once. The “manual” control of minions is difficult, since they stop go to whatever you’re guiding them towards in order to attack a random enemy, break open a box, or some other trivial task. The camera controls are flaky, and it seems to jump every now and then, even though you aren’t doing anything.

You can only recall minions one at a time, or all at once, and there’s no way to easily recall a select group of minions, or separate them into any categories other than color. It would be much easier to play if you could make a group of minions from two different colors, a group of 10 of one color, and then a group of 3 of each color, and assign each group to a key, but instead you have to manually select each group every time.

This makes it so you have to often send out a group of minions unprotected while you quickly change to a different group. Later levels become slightly repetitive, and the controls make it easy to kill off have your minions before you realize what’s happening, and the AI continually has minions accidentally burning, drowning, or poisoning themselves to death.

Despite all it’s shortcomings, Overlord manages to pull off a nice blend of action, role-playing, and strategy to create a great gaming experience. If you feel like taking a break from more traditional serious games, then Overlord is for you.

Overlord gets a C+

Overlord is a post from: Gameologic

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:Shadow of Chernobyl is the latest game from the Ukrainian developer GSC Game World. Stalker has been in development for 6 years, and it could have benefited from another 6 months.

Although the game was released almost nine months ago, it was very unstable, and had various bugs and glitches. Recently, there have been several patches released to fix those problems, making it a much more entertaining game, instead of a constant annoyance. I waited for these patches to be released before I reviewed this game, because otherwise I would have given it a very poor rating.

Stalker is set in an alternate time line, where the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster caused massive amounts of damage and mutations. Various anomalies start showing up, and rare artifacts appear in “The Zone”: the area around the reactor. The game makes you take the role of a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: the name that is given to the treasure hunters in Chernobyl. You wake up with no memories, and you have to figure out who you are.

The game is mainly open ended, but it still has very linear and tedious sequences in old military bases and laboratories. The game is different from most shooters because it offers you an inventory management system that lets you hold a limited amount of items. You have to carry guns, ammo, armor, food, medicine, and artifacts. Artifacts are items you find in anomalies, such as mini tornadoes, and grant you both benefits and drawbacks.

One item lets you run for longer amounts of time, but you take more damage from electricity. If you try to carry 5 different guns, and balance ammo for them, you end up not having any room for other items. You are able to take the guns and items from defeated enemies, and then sell them to traders, making it so that you have to always leave room for things you steal.

The game consists mainly of finding animals and bandits, taking things you find, and then selling them for better guns. You are able to explore the world, and the game rewards you buy placing rare artifacts and dangerous enemies everywhere you go. It took me around 15 hours to beat the game, and it was well worth it to play another 2 times.

The game has several different endings, although only two of the endings feature a “conclusion” to the game. The atmosphere of the Zone makes for a great story, and it’s great to just go exploring and seeing what things are around. Weapons are more realistic than in other games, with recoil and gravity being taken into consideration.

Aim is more realistic also, making it so that bullets will have a greater chance of missing when you shot from far away. Weapons and armor wear out with use, and become less effective the longer you have them. The game has incredibly smart AI when you play on the harder difficulty settings, but the easy setting causes enemies to be incredibly stupid.

On hard, I had an enemy hide behind a crate when I wasn’t look, and then jump out 2 minutes later, when I had thought everything was dead. Enemies sometimes fire in turns, making it so you have to take cover. When you try to hide behind an object, enemies are capable of flanking you on the other side, making it sometimes frustrating, but still fun. The biggest problem though, is that enemies are able to receive massive amounts of shotgun blasts, smg bursts, and pistol shots at point blank range and still keep running towards you, without even falling.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. isn’t for the faint of heart, so I wouldn’t recommend you play it unless you are really into shooters. If you’ve played games like Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Deus Ex and Fallout, then you’re going to love S.T.A.L.K.E.R. And if you do get it, also be sure to visit the game’s website, and download the patch. Otherwise, you’ll end up spending more time looking at bugs and glitches than playing the actual game.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. gets a B-

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a post from: Gameologic

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Most game reviews are based on a 1 to 10 point system, with 7 or 5 being average. The only problem is that, well, they don’t use 1-5, they only use 6-10, which makes everyone associate a 6 or 7 as a bad rating.

Since eliminating the rating system altogether would be a mistake, reviews would need a fair system. I aim to use the whole spectrum, so just keep in mind that on my ratings, a 5 is “Average” or “Okay”, and a 7 is “Pretty Good” or “Great”.

Another thing is that no one uses the perfect 10 more than once or twice every few years, which makes the real rating range only 7-9. I’ll give a game a 10 when I feel that it has done many things well, and that it actually does what a game is supposed to do: Entertain.

A rating of 10 would mean that I suggest you play it as soon as you can. It would be best if you  read a review, but since numbers seem to make people feel more informed, I left in a rating system.

Rating System is a post from: Gameologic

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