Tom Clancy's End War Demo: but she didn't know how fortune swings, the price you pay when disaster sings

The one type of game that is great to play on a computer but a pain or poor port when it's brought to the consoles has always been the strategy genre.  The use of precise 

mouse targeting for troop micromanagement and multiple keyboard commands that all can't be crammed into just a controller has always been the factor holding back quality console strategy games.

So how can this be solved? Well by making you sound like you have become a resident at the local loony bin yelling things out at random that all sound nonsensical. Literally.

Tom Clancy's End War brought to us by Ubi Soft is the first game to utilize the idea of giving commands through headsets instead of blister forming button mashing. To be released on 11/4 and availble for PS3 or 360, I decided to give the demo a try.

Many jokes have been made from comedians to TV shows showing the usual results of a voice recognition program in use. This game had very little issue understanding what I was trying to tell it to do.  I noticed a problem with differentiating of the numbers 4 and 5 but that may of been my own fault trying to talk so fast.  I must admit, it was an awkward feeling that the game understood me as if it were really a new robotic friend that liked telling me, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

The game uses a walkie-talkie button to start the voice recognition and then a simple tiered if/then set of command choices is used.  For example the first word can be things like deploy or unit but thankfully not deploy unit.  If unit is picked then the number associated with that type of battle group can be chosen.  Lastly the action for that group can be picked.  In the end commands are read just like sentences such as unit 4 move to whiskey, deploy tanks, unit 3 upgrade foxtrot air strike, or unit 12 attack hostile 3.

Good strategy is done by fast micro managing troops and overall action is pretty fast paced.  Beyond the single button for voicing your opinion to your troops, the other controls are mainly for camera control to help simplify everything even more.  

The story is the typical futuristic world war 3 inspiring type game where resources are short, super powers rise up, and the fighting begins.  Three main factions are shown in the game and they are the US, Russia and the European Union, each with slightly different units.  A pre-order at Gamestop of this game also qualifies you for additional unit downloads on launch day and therefore would imply other possibilities from Xboxlive at later dates.

Not sure if the game will be worth the full price of the game, it's at least worth checking out some videos to see someone playing the game in action to give you a good idea of where games are heading these days with hardware possibilities.  I had a lot of fun playing the demo spouting off R Lee Erney commands and the action scenes showing the destruction were visually rewarding.  And hey, the cover of the game sports a picture of an explosion behind the Eiffel Tower so it really can't be all that bad. 

Far Cry 2: we burnt to the ground left a grave to admire.

What continent haven't we picked on in a while? Africa? It looks like I'm going to have to put my mind on my diamonds and my diamonds on my mind for the next few weeks.

So besides trying to balance play time between Fable 2, some recent demo additions, finishing previously unfinished games, watching a slew of television shows and movies, and that thing we all do to be able pay for all this entertainment, I did set some time aside for Ubisoft's PC version of Far Cry 2. And then some was quickly adjusted to more and before I knew it I was watching my wife play Fable 2 as I sat and played through what is one of the best 1st person shooters since Crysis.

Thrown into a civil war that no one else in the world cares about (Jagged Alliance ... wink wink) you select one of 8 or 9 playable characters as you become intent on putting an end to a weapons dealer, the Jackal without a Y, who has supplied weapons to all sides of civil wars in Africa for years. After a very short tutorial on the controls you are let free to try to find and assassinate the Jackal purely however you want to. Different NPCs appear (characters you didn't choose to be) that you can befriend as well as faction leaders that are involved in the civil war who open side missions and clues as you try to track down the Jackal. Weapons dealers are found around the 50 Km map and sell loads of weapons, ammo belts, etc, for big shiny diamonds that can be found or gained from completing missions. And saying 50 Km seems irrelevant until you start trying to get from one corner of it to the next as jeep patrols chase you around with the tenacity of a coffee drinker in sight of a Starbucks on a Monday morning.

A lot of that description sounds like a glorified RPG game so to focus on what sets the game apart start to imagine other great FPS games you've played in the past. One thing that sets it apart is the fact that it's in Africa and is a great rendition of it. Landscapes full of trees, rocks, tall grass, weather, sun, wind, and wild animals with a bit of orchestrated African music in the background make it seem like it's truly set in an almost unlivable place. The graphics are below Crysis but above HL2 or Rainbow Six Vegas. One great thing that does set it apart from dine and dash FPS games is the large focus on transportation involving mainly jeeps. The sounds of laying tracks in the sand and throwing dust in the face of enemies giving chase sets it apart from previous urban or jungle FPSers and helps give the open and vast space feel to it and even more so when you have to travel on foot. There is no loading screens as you traverse the landscapes and only a few for small changes like mission completion, death, etc. Overall it still isn't as big as the entire territory Operation Flashpoint throws at you but that game has loading screens for separate missions and I haven't seen an FPS that big and probably won't until OF2 comes out next year.

The usual FPS physics are used with ragdoll deaths, explosions that throw anything not bolted down outward (with a new introduction in gas bottle physics where a bottle will flail around wildly and eventually torpedo into something and explode), and guns that act very much like you are in a dirty sand environment. Fire will spread through grass and other flora and even through wood and other flammable objects which allows for added tactics to try to flush enemies or for escape purposes.

Guns can wear over time, will have random quality when found shown by rust, dirt, scratches, etc, and can jam or sometimes break entirely beyond use. Vehicles too have the same properties but can be repaired by using a simple torque wrench on the engine. Overall combat is a little loose on the aiming and has the realistic sway of any person's aim like having to wave and use a ten pound AK against multiple enemies. The usual differing weapon physics is very apparent to the point where you can tell the stopping power of caliber of weapon after you burn through an entire clip of 9mm vs a single 30.06 bullet or trying to fire a Desert Eagle accurately with kick of the .50 vs a 9mm. Very tight hit boxes are on all characters and at times the useful headshot is very difficult to pull off as enemies will stay in motion quite often. The flip side is the rewarding feeling when you do pull off a headshot with tiny iron sights from a long distance.

The AI is pretty good as some enemies flank, wait till they have a good shot, sneak toward you before opening fire, and keep good focus while others are piss poor combatants that are easily flanked to give a nice mix of random battlefield experience in a would be civil war. There are some great features such as sniper baiting where you can wound an enemy and let his fellow comrades come to his aid after they think the coast is clear to soon find out you've got both of them in your crosshair.

Far Cry 2 does do some differing minimization of the HUD. Very little is shown and quickly fades to keep the feel for a better first person experience. Health, ammo/clips and small messages like weapon jams are about the only things that really show up and are only very small pictures in the corners. Maps are shown by actual small handheld types and can even be brought out in your lap as you drive the winding dirt roads. This HUD feature really keeps your eyes focused on your surroundings more than forcing your pupils to watch aiding indicators like a radar the entire time. No more chasing little dots in the little circle in that one corner of the screen that so many lovely games seem to find necessary.

Health is somewhat regenerative and large chunks have to be patched by using syringes full of friendly morphine. If your health falls very low you can bleed to death so an interesting bandaging system is used where you randomly have a bullet placed beneath your skin somewhere on your body. It then has to be dug out out by oddities such as with a knife or pliers to stop the impending death by blood loss.

As you do missions for weapon dealers, more available purchases can be made and things chosen appear in the always next door "armory". For weapons it is an unlimited amount after purchase. Unlike other FPSers where you can somehow carry a gigantic barrage of weaponry you can only carry 1 primary, 1 secondary sidearm, grenades, and 1 special weapon at any one time. This makes for interesting choices and combinations as distances between armories and mission objectives can get quite lengthy and ammo for certain choices can be minimal. Full ammo is very few extra clips so quality shots have to be taken at almost all times to clear areas to be able to pick up extras from fallen enemies. And yes, the Mac-10 is among the available weaponry which has it's beautiful sounding full 30 round clip burn in 2 seconds when you whip out in a pinch.

Missions can be done in what ever order the player wants to do them (can't really tell which is which until they are accepted) and can ignore them almost entirely if one wishes to just drive around and burn things down just hoping to happen upon the Jackal. Freedom always plays good in the red, blue, and white states.

I really couldn't find too much to dislike with Far Cry 2. I did notice that at times it is very hard to tell who is who in situations where friends are helping to complete missions and look oh so headshotty similar at a distance. Other than that silly friendly fire incident that my mission log described as a "lost in the fray of battle" death, there wasn't anything else really to complain about. Well that is of course unless you are so reliant on those little dots in the corner that you have panic attacks without them.

I never did get to finish the first Far Cry game since I never wanted to spend the money on it. If you purchase Far Cry 2 from gamestop's website you can download both for the price of one. This is also a great alternative if your comp really can't handle Crysis too well but you still want to play a great looking and entertaining FPS. This is probably the best realistic FPS games (not counting Crysis or FC1) since Rainbow Six Vegas, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Operation Flashpoint, Black, or HL2. So get out there and look for what sounds like a horse, smells like a horse, looks like a horse, but is actually not a horse; it's a zebra and it's a whole hell of a fun and exciting one to ride.

Fable 2:and then they show me a world where I can be so dependable, clinical, intellectual, cynical

Man's best friend... No, not the remote. No, not the Bears unless we're talking about the Super Bowl. Wife? Oh hell no. No Honey I wasn't talking about you.

What were we talking about again? Who's man's best friend?

That's right my little Lassie, my Rin Tin Tin, my Benji, my Jerry Lee, my... Clifford, my... Scooby. And why not create a game in which children can learn to love the mangy puppy that licks really hard and smells like how bad he looks.

Fable 2 does just that. It does more too. Like helping me to realize that a new focus on games (don't forget Fallout 3) today is to reinforce what I should be for Halloween which is Mad Max and my wife can be his faithful companion.

OK, back to the actual game at hand; Fable 2 is a sequel in which all the goody goodness was kept and new ewwy gooey goodness was added brought to us by Lionhead Studios. The original had a few features that I have yet to see in very many others. The choices and actions that are made throughout the game subtly change your overall appearance. I've seen games maybe focus in on single large decision changes where all of a sudden you notice something different(hair where there was no hair before) but Fable was able to watch how you even fought your enemies and very slowly change the look of your character as if all the fighting was truly taking a toll on you. My character from the original was focused heavy on spell usage and ever so slowly started to have deep scars, eyes became colorless, and hair faded from a deep black to white.

F2 uses that great feature and with a little help of Hi-Def capability amplifies your ugliness to the extent where you realize you are your father. And yes, if you decided to be a red-headed step child of destruction, you would later turn into a semblance of Satan and continuing upon that path would give you full blown Texas longhorns.

And it wouldn't be a RPG unless there was, well, some sort of role playing involved to get you those two sharp pointers out of your forehead. Fable was able to take some funny emotive actions and allow you to interact with any NPC that you came across including drawing your weapon and kill said NPCs. This presented nice opportunities in which shopkeepers or homeowners would suddenly have an "accident" and therefore leave their property up for sale for anyone to come along and take control of. NPC townsfolk would hear of your previous reputation and then already fear and whisper to one another when you strolled along the streets. F2 again builds on the management of emotes, reputation and worldly renown even to the point where crowds will gather around you in town just to get a look at you or run away screaming. The only downside is the repetitiveness of things spoken as you wander around. Families (plural on purpose) can be made, prostitutes can be visited, and the ever so Sims favorite same-sex marriages can be obtained. A new addition, since you can now choose to be a female, is figuring out how to become a pregnant Frances McDormand Fargoian hero.

Another feature that companies don't want or can't figure out how to mimic is the adaptive difficulty that Lionhead implements. It's something that can only really be understood by playing firsthand. What adaptive difficulty does is take into account how fast you kill enemies, how much health you lose, and how easy it is for you to take on multiple enemies (watching all targets and switching between them). It then constantly tweaks the overall difficulty to the point where the game isn't easy but is still achievable by adding/subtracting enemies, making them stronger/weaker, and giving more/less health gain opportunities. This allows for anyone to pick up and play through the game no matter what their skill level is (finesse vs button mashing) while still having fun.

The storyline is immense, British voice acting {in a non-mocking British accent} quite literally stupendous, and graphics a solid example showing off the beauty of Hi-Def with Hi-Fidelity environments and sound/music. The addition of a traveling canine companion is, as I hinted to earlier, ideal for adding personality and a friend to situations where loneliness is coupled with survival. If your Underdog isn't enough of an Alpha Dog for you, there is a Co-op mode available which can make for even more confusing situations such as what to tell your co-op buddy's now orphaned son after you decided to shoot the child's mother (in-game spouse of your buddy) when your co-op buddy left the room to drain the little buddy.

Congratulations Lionhead, you've created another amazing RPG that should be played by everyone in the hero hot seat whether you prefer playing as a baddy bo baddy or an Adam Ant goody two shoes. Even if you don't own a 360 go buy a few cases of beer and play the game co-op with someone that does. In my case it is actually my wonderful (no sarcasm implied or intended) wife and thankfully all the beer is for me.

Early Oct Demos: he can't believe the love I give is not enough to end your fears

Instead of finishing some games that I'm so close to finishing I decided to search for a couple new ones to try.

360

Star Trek Legacy -

Created by Bethesda and me being a large fan of The Next Generation series I decided to give a crack at this one. Being able to play through the entire "40" years of Star Trek isn't for someone who decided there were better things to watch on TV. And even if you did watch any Star Trek shows this game probably isn't for you. After playing through a few skirmishes against some Klingons I felt that ship battle games are best left to those with sails and cannons. The controls are simple to pick up but overall it seems like a 3D version of Sid Meyer's Pirates with little enjoyment. The only real gratifying thing would be to replay through some old battles from the series to remember them but if you want to do that why don't you go and rent some DVDs.

But I believe in science..... ^^^^^^^^

Robert Ludlum's: The Bourne Conspiracy -

Now one thing you have to be careful with is creating a game that is so terrible in comparison to its movie counterpart that you just piss people off that are fans of the movie. I've always had a constant apprehension to even want to try games based off a movie since almost all are sad attempts at trying to get more money from people, but I decided to give this one a chance since Goldeneye is one of the best N64 games out there and Bourne is in the spy business too.

The movie series is very successful and at least gives you a feel for some spy work without the chauvinistic suit wearing, smug smiling, one liner, heavy drinking, and womanizing parts that 007 likes to prance around with.

Brought to you by Sierra, Activision, and Ludlum entertainment, you play as good ol' Jason through the movies with a lot more added action as you unravel added missions from the books to figure out more of the story. The action is pretty steady and the same suspense felt watching the movies is felt while playing the game. The gun combat is a bit weak compared to some games and the hand to hand is too until you do the "takedowns". These are done after landing a handful of blows to an enemy and takes into consideration where you are in a room, what the enemy is holding, and what random objects are sitting around. One of the beauties of the Bourne series is in his adaptation to his surroundings. This game takes that idea and builds on showing off the fighting style which is much likeKrav Maga, the fighting style taught to Israeli forces, even though his is probably more than just that style (I see some escrima type fighting too). All takedowns seem choreographed and are fun to watch. There's also a lot of action moments where slow motion occurs and a button must be pressed to evade danger or land some quality bone cracking blows.

I'm assuming that there's not much point to playing this game through more than once so I'm going to say it's very quality for a rental and play through.

Fracture -

Well Lucasarts needed to get in on the Gears of War and Halo type games so here's there rendition. It's another run of the mill pile of rubbish that has a couple neat ideas but they don't out weigh the fact that the game seems thrown together for cash without the reward of fun. The story seems like Gears of War except instead of an underground alien race it's just another made up faction we're at war with in this 3rd person shooter. Weapons are all ripoffs from previous game with a new idea called the extractor or something similar to an anal probing device or dentist's favorite tool. What it does is allows you to change the loose ground around you to either raise or lower it letting you make fox holes or hills to help reach spots or add cover where there isn't any. The rest of the play isn't anything exciting therefore this lands in the forget pile.

PC

Hired Guns: The Jagged Edge - (sorry but the information is scanty) This game is another turn based grid strategy installment. This time coming from the company GFI (Game Factory Interactive) Russia (who the hell are they?) and originals came from Talonsoft who made the Battleground series and Sirtech the canadian company who made the Wizardary games.

Jagged Alliance was a great series involving mercenaries going to foreign lands to rape and pillage for cash and fun (cash sets them apart from mongols) and freeing poor civilians from the clutches of evil dictators because the rest of the world gave up on them. It was mainly focused on urban and jungle warfare techniques from a bird's eye view using natural and man made cover utilizing the accuracy and stealth of your mercs. That is where the beauty lies because it is quite unique in comparison to all other games even other strategy games. It is an older series which very few will find pleasure in for such things like the plethora of weapons and the reality of having problems of finding the right caliber and clip size for the weapons available from an internet vendor and dead enemies.

Not getting the Bethesda level upgrade like Fallout, this game feels and looks a lot like the originals. The demo that's available is a good amount of play involving 4 missions but also shows the amount of work still needed before it is complete. GFI Russia seems to have a slight issue with English translation and even I would love the job of proofreading for them to make it less annoying trying to figure out what they are saying or is that an added difficulty when going into foreign lands?

JA took place on a made up ex-nuclear testing island called Metavira probably somewhere in the Pacific. JA2 took place in a made up country that was much like the eastern side of Europe surrounded by mountains away from the rest of the world (Albania?) and Hired Guns takes place somewhere on the western side of Africa (looks like Nigeria). JA mainly was focused on only the evil military and the civilians that lived wherever you were and this version has what seems like 4 new factions to have to balance yourself against or with including a local African tribe, rebel marauders, the UN, and the evil dictator's army.

The only thing I really found disheartening is that original mercs from the series are now no longer available or at least from what I could see. There were always about 7 mercs that have been through the series and now all look like they are gone and maybe just aren't into going into Africa. Each merc used to have a distinct voice, very unique personality, strengths and weaknesses and now those have been started over and will have to be relearned hopefully with the same great voice acting as the originals. The individuality of each merc was so good that replaying the game and picking different mercs to use made it very fun. There were even a couple amazing characters like brothers Ivan and Igor Dolovich that spoke and grumbled mostly Russian through the entire game. I do hope that some of the voice acting improves as some was quite annoying with the demo to the point that all voices ended up muted.

In the end this will not be a show stopper for anyone unless the originals were a part of your playlist in the late 90s. I really don't see this being a game people will want to try for the first time either for where most games are at technology wise. For those that had the pleasure of playing all the originals it is nice to see that this series is being reborn again since there aren't many games like it.

I did see though that JA2: Gold edition is available on Steam.