Eidos' Urban Chaos: Riot Response is perhaps the violentest video game to come down the pike in a long while. Or, rather, it would be the violentest, if indeed violentest was a word.

As a duly appointed peace officer, it's your job to shoot hockey-mask wearing thugs in the face, thus exploding their heads in a spray of crimson gore and allowing you to proclaim loudly that no omelete was ever made without the breaking of a few eggs. You can also incapacitate bad guys with a Tazer, by which we mean keep applying the juice until the victim catches fire. Again, omelets and eggs.

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Here's something wholly cool: Next-Gen Online has Atlus review the reviews of its PlayStation 2 videogame Steambot Chronicles.

Normally, this sort of introspective writing is more or less a bleach eye rinse. Game critics are far too uninteresting to deserve scrutiny, and far too self-absorbed and fragile to absorb any criticism aimed at them. The "art" of game criticism is fingerpainting at best -- done by monkeys and with someone else's elbow. I know this because if you throw peanuts at me, I will dance a most merry jig and then paint you a Picasso.

Yet writer Kris Graft and a representative from Atlus do a fine job here, mostly because they treat the subject matter for the fluff that it is. There's no bogging either of them down with weighty issues, and the thing just comes off as two decently intentioned folks having a conversation.

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Game companies are nothing if not enthusiastic. They do so love their press releases and have been known to send out media advisories when one of their public relations agents finds a quarter on the sidewalk.

Well, today's news is more serious than that. This may just win two Pulitzer prizes for the journalist brave enough to pierce its subtle mysteries:

LOOK OUT!
The Evil Villains Of NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc.?s
Pac-Man World Rally?? Wreak Havoc In Pac-Land!
New Screens Of Toc-Man, Spooky and Erwin Now Available!

NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc. releases new screenshots of the maniacal creatures featured in Pac-Man World Rally??!

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SnakesonaplaneThe game world was abuzz with the news that Snakes on a Plane, the epic summer film involving Samuel "L." Jackson, snakes, and a plane was going to be made into a video game. (Read the stunning game announcement here!)

Except, well, it's not true. Two merry pranksters who shall remain anonymous made the whole story up, including the faux game's wonderful "snake engine." And maybe the game world was never really abuzz with the news that Snakes on a Plane was going to be made into a game. But it damn well should have been.

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Guy_game_cover_1I almost forgot about The Guy Game. But then I had to go and write about the Sex in Videogames Conference and there went that repressed memory.

I reviewed the game for the now dearly departed magazine Xbox Nation. As reviews editor for the magazine, I fell on the grenade; none of the freelance game writers would touch The Guy Game.

To say it was a big pile of dog feces is to greatly insult dog feces. Watching that poorly shot spring break footage; wondering exactly how many IQ points I was losing per minute; trying to fathom how the best part about The Guy Game was not the fact that you got to see naked women's breasts, but rather play Skee-Ball, fairly well wrecked me for life.


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It was one of E3 2005's most intriguing games, if not its flashiest, and now it's gone. CNNMoney.com is reporting 2K Games has canceled Snow.

Snow was a turn-based strategy game (and sadly, the CNNMoney.com article announcing Snow's cancelation refers to the game as a real-time simulation). You were a drug dealer, and you had to push coke and other drugs, hire mules, pay for assassins, and make sure you smuggled in enough product to keep you floating in $$$, yet still free from the iron grip of the man.

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There's a great scene in the Jaws Unleashed videogame where you (a remorseless eating machine) must grab a scientist with your monstrous, razor-toothed mouth, and carry his flailing carcass to a nearby card reader in order to lift an underwater gate and bust out of an aquatic theme park.

Although the game's camera and its control scheme suck like a Hoover, Unleashed does allow players to engage in a lot of everyday shark activities, such as destroying oil refineries by picking up explosive barrels and spitting them at outflow pipes, and hunting for license plates, tin cans, and model wooden ships in order to collect bonuses.

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Capcom brings a calligraphist canine to PS2 later this year with Okami. You play as a spirit wolf who rights wrongs in a stylishly rendered fantasy world. It's pretty standard adventure fare -- explore an area, talk to any friendly characters and destroy everyone else.


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