Review- Burnout Paradise PC

Burnout Paradise reinvigorated Criterion's ultra-successful smash-up racing series when it launched this time last year on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box brings the series' trademark racing action to the PC for the first time. With solid online and offline play, an almost staggering number of events, and more than 70 vehicles, Ultimate Box is at the front of the PC racer pack.

The amount of variety in the game is huge, and how you approach it is up to you; explore Paradise City's open world at leisure, unlock the 70-plus vehicles one at a time through single-player events, or join other players for races and challenges online. Couple this deep variety with the fact that it's hugely fun, and Burnout Paradise is easy to recommend. In addition to all of the content from the original console game, Ultimate Box also includes all of Burnout Paradise's downloadable content released to date. First up, there's Codename: Cagney, which adds the Stunt Run, Marked Man, and Road Rage modes to online multiplayer. The Bikes pack adds two-wheeled racing and a day/night cycle to the series for the first time. And last, there's Burnout Party, the first paid-for content to hit the game. Burnout Party is a pass-the-controller-style offline party mode for two to eight players and is a fun new way to experience Burnout.

Gameplay options are largely unchanged from the console version and include normal race, Stunt Run, Marked Man, Road Rage, and Burning Route. For those new to the Burnout series, in Stunt Run you chain together drifts, jumps, and boosts to achieve combos; in Road Rage events you need to eliminate opponents by smashing them into traffic or objects; and in Marked Man you have to reach the finish line before your opponents can destroy your car. Burning Route consists of time trials from point to point, and by completing them you'll unlock an upgraded model of your current ride. Unlike in Burnout 3, The crash mode and aftertouch takedowns from Burnout 3 are missing from Paradise, but it does have the Showtime mode, which lets you take control of a wreck through the streets of Paradise City and rack up a damage bill in the process. Showtime mode isn't as strategically crafted as the challenges in Crash mode, but you'll still get to dish out plenty of carnage on unsuspecting traffic.

The biggest new feature this time around is the Burnout Paradise Party Pack, which adds an offline pass-the-controller multiplayer challenge mode for up to eight friends. Once you've set up the number of players and game types, you'll compete in a series of minigames where you earn points for successfully passing a challenge or beating your opponents' scores. The Party Pack offers instant gameplay for when you and your friends don't want to compete in longer, more demanding events, and it consists of three challenge types: stunts, skill, and speed. Stunts are a collection of insane tricks, such as successfully landing a cliff-top jump. Skill challenges include driving into oncoming traffic with boost on for as long as possible. Speed challenges might have you smashing a few billboards and then racing back to the start within a designated time limit. The Party Pack is a great addition that finally brings offline multiplayer to Burnout Paradise.

Some challenges involve nothing more than reaching seemingly inaccessible areas.

Getting online is as simple as hitting a button during gameplay, at which point you'll join your friends or enter a random lobby. The online mode is seamless, and there are no loading times; you can drop in and out of online games at will. You can set up simple point-to-point races all over the city when hosting a multiplayer session, or tackle a Freeburn Challenge set by the developers, with different challenges depending on the number of players. Burnout Paradise included 350 challenges, and there are now an additional 140 challenges with the new packs. The challenge types are varied and include straight races, beat-the-clock events, jumping over other players' rides, and other more-complex multipart challenges, such as meeting at a designated place and racing a route to an end point while hitting specific jumps along the way. Challenges are a lot of fun, especially when you have a large group of friends to play with, and they give the online play a lot of longevity.

You'll spend the majority of your time in Paradise City on four wheels, but there's an option to use just two. Bikes are a great addition to the game; and while you can only compete in time trial events, there are different events for daytime and nighttime. Bikes come without boost since they're already blisteringly fast, and they won't take damage either. All of the bikes are extremely light and nimble and are so fast that they almost make the cars feel a tad sluggish by comparison. While it would have been great to see damage modelling on the bikes, and more bikes included, you're guaranteed to have a blast with the two bikes at the start and the two upgraded models you can unlock after completing all of the time trials.

Visually, the PC version is even more of a sumptuous feast than its console brethren. Running at its highest resolution, Paradise City has never looked crisper or more vibrant. Cars smash, pop, scrape, and deform just as you'd expect, and the particle effects make the wanton destruction seem real. The weather effects brought in with the Bikes pack look great, with fog, glowing nighttime neon, and the half-light of dusk all rendered with style.

It wouldn't be Burnout if the wrecks weren't superbly detailed and satisfying.

The audio is also top-notch, with traffic and ambient noises providing a backdrop for the high-pitched whines and throaty growls of the game's cars and bikes. Unfortunately, DJ Atomica is back again from Burnout 3 and is still an irritation for the most part. With its bland and generic rock soundtrack, the audio certainly doesn't live up to the high standards set by the visuals. While there are a few notable artists, including Guns N' Roses (providing the game's title track), Jane's Addiction, LCD Soundsystem, and Faith No More, these are outnumbered by the generic guitar rock and electronic tracks from past Burnout games and tracks from a number of less-illustrious artists.

Emerging a year after the original console release, Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box doesn't just manage to keep up with the pace of the competition; it's at the front of the pack. If you own one of the console versions and already have the DLC packs, there's no major benefit to upgrading, but if you're new to Burnout Paradise, The Ultimate Box is the best Burnout experience to date. With a mass of online and offline events and modes, dozens of cars, the addition of bike and night races, and an all-new party mode for up to eight friends, The Ultimate Box is instantly gratifying and long-lasting high-octane entertainment.

source- www.gamespot.com/pc/driving/burnout5/index.html

Review : Need for Speed ProStreet

EA's Need for Speed series has long been an ever-evolving franchise, one that changes up its focus, mechanics and style every couple of years. Though the game sells incredibly well, the developer/publisher doesn't like to sit still. This obviously means that the series has had its ups and downs, and unfortunately Need for Speed ProStreet isn't one of the ups.

ProStreet is a game that doesn't really seem to know what it's trying to be. It's been years since we've seen a Need for Speed title that focused solely on track racing, with the franchise branching out into open world settings with a story, cop chases and all sorts of other things to make it stand out. ProStreet, however, goes back to the track-based racing, putting the player into race after race on closed circuits, and then sending them back to a menu after each race is over.

This setup is perfectly fine and, in this case, does work well to some extent, but there's not really a whole lot of extra "stuff" outside of the races that makes it seem like Black Box had a good idea of exactly what it was trying to accomplish. Yes, the fundamentals are there and the setup does work well, but the bulk of the presentation doesn't feel all that robust, especially when compared to what we've seen in recent years.

As well, the control scheme and arcade vs. sim aspects feel a bit confused. ProStreet adds a ton of great customization options to the franchise, which we'll get to in a bit, but the driving physics are anything but realistic. They're an odd in-between of the two and wind up in some place that really just does not work very well at all. The series has generally had strong racing controls, but those were somehow lost in the latest game.

Most of the cars in the game feel like caricatures of their real-life counterparts, but not in a good way. Most every vehicle drives like a boat and feels very reluctant to want to turn at all. Even vehicles in hardcore driving sims like Gran Turismo turn with much greater ease than most any of the vehicles found here, and yet the game isn't even trying to be ultra-realistic.

A few of us around the office drive some of the cars that you'll find in the game, like a 2007 Civic Si (which is identical to the '06 in the game) and a 2006 Pontiac GTO, and none of them handle anything like the real deal. ProStreet's version of the GTO barely turns at anything above 30mph, and doesn't really instill any sense of its 400hp engine. The real Civic Si is a nimble little car, but ProStreet's Si feels very top-heavy and slides around corners like they're covered with ice.



And though we don't drive every car in the game, it's clear that most of them, if not all, do not drive like what we would expect from the real thing. It's sad, too, because this one, huge fault brings down a game that would otherwise be fairly solid.

Though there's not a lot of pizzazz and whatnot to it as we mentioned before, the Race Day progression does offer up a nice assortment of race events for you to partake in. Each Race Day features a handful of events -- be they grip races, drag races, sector challenges or what have you -- and pretty much all of them are good fun.

Drag races start out with a mini-game where you heat up your tires before heading to the line, and then it's all about timing your shifts, using your nitrous at the right time and keeping your car in a straight line, which can be tricky when you get to the really fast cars. The tire heating mini-game can get a little old, especially since each drag race event has three runs, so you'll play the game three times in the span of a couple minutes, but it's fun to try and shave a couple hundredths of a second off your time by getting a perfect start.

Review, Counterstrike Half-life 2

It's hard to believe that, prior to Half-Life 2, Valve had really made only one game. Of course, it was a masterpiece. Half-Life single-handedly reinvented the first-person shooter, putting the emphasis on cinematic pacing and complete immersion in the experience. As a result, it paved the way for many of the outstanding first-person shooters that have followed. And while there was little question that there would eventually be a sequel, no one could have imagined the long and torturous development process that led to Half-Life 2. Well, it's time to forget about that, because Half-Life 2 has arrived. And, in many ways, this big-budget sequel does what it sets out to do: Half-Life 2 is a technically amazing, sharply honed first-person shooter that pulls all the tricks that made Half-Life such a beloved experience. With that said, many of those tricks feel more than a bit familiar now, and the game itself is saddled with a disappointing story. Still, that doesn't stop Half-Life 2 from being a very impressive and engaging shooter, and a faithful follow-up to one of the greatest PC games of all time.

It's time for you to once again take up your submachine gun and take out all the foes threatening humanity.

In Half-Life 2, you once again assume the role of Gordon Freeman, the theoretical physicist and dimension-hopping commando who saved the world from an alien invasion at the end of Half-Life. Or did he? Half-Life 2 starts you off facing the infamous G-Man, the mysterious blue-suited character from the first game. At the end of Half-Life, the G-Man offered you a choice: work for him or die. Since there would be no sequel if you chose the latter, Half-Life 2 assumes you chose the former, and you start the game in a train entering City 17 for your introduction into this new world.

City 17 is a run-down urban center that's the equivalent of the Warsaw ghettos during World War II, but instead of Jews being rounded up to live in City 17, it's all the remnants of a defeated humanity. Half-Life 2 takes place an untold number of years after the Black Mesa incident, but it's clear that much has changed. A mysterious enemy known as the Combine has conquered the planet and installed a human puppet government to carry out its rule. Black-clad security forces patrol the streets, while propaganda blares endlessly from omnipresent video screens. If there's one thing that Valve does extremely well, it's capture a sense of atmosphere--this vision of a dystopian police state is chillingly effective. But you won't spend a lot of time soaking in the scene before you're thrust into the struggle to defeat the Combine and free humanity.

As soon as the shooting begins you'll join an essentially nonstop battle that will last the remainder of the game. Like the original Half-Life, Half-Life 2 is presented as a nearly seamless experience--you play entirely from Gordon Freeman's perspective, there are no cutscenes or perspective changes to take you out of the moment, and are there no narrative jumps that skip ahead in time. (At least, there are none from your perspective.) There also aren't very many long loading times to interrupt the flow of the game, as all the levels are discreetly broken into sections, and when you transition from one section to another, there's only a slight pause for the new section to load (at least, on a high-end PC). Put it all together and the game's single-player campaign, which will probably take you between 15 and 20 hours to complete, comes off as a very long day in the extraordinary life of Gordon Freeman.

In case of alien invasion, find Gordon Freeman and break glass.

The original Half-Life was highly cinematic in nature, the virtual equivalent of starring in your own blockbuster sci-fi action movie. Who could ever forget the first time a headcrab leapt out at you from a dark corner? Or the moment when the commando tossed a satchel charge into the sewer pipe you were hiding in? The movie analogy is apt, not only because Half-Life 2 packs a few cinematic moments of its own, but also because, like most movie sequels, it plays it safe and doesn't deviate much from its storied predecessor. Half-Life 2 doesn't revolutionize the genre, instead sticking with the familiar formula of run-and-gun action, occasional puzzle-solving, and scripted sequences established by Half-Life. And it's an effective formula, for the most part. The game gets off to a rousing start, as the opening levels combine these three ingredients masterfully. You start off on the lam from the Combine, armed with only a pistol and your wits, and embark on a chase through a train yard and tunnel system that's filled with all sorts of hairbreadth escapes. The sense of pursuit hurtles you forward so quickly that you don't have much time to admire the cutting-edge graphical prowess on display.