The MySims look is very different from previous sims games, very similar to animal crossing. But the plot of the game much reminded me of The Sims 2 on DS. As this game has a new cute look, it will appeal to more of a younger generation of fun-loving DS players.

The game drops you into the role as the town hero, as you’ll have to get this ruined town back on its feet. Like the Sims 2, you have to work for the mayor and improve the towns rank. It lacks a creative side though, as it only involves dressing your character and furnishing your new home.

Players have a map of the town, showing the villagers living there. Its very similar to animal crossing in that respect, as you have to introduce yourself to villagers, and save up for things. Overall, i can’t wait to buy it for myself. But it does sound like a game i could quickly get bored of!

For those of you that don’t already own Civilization IV, a game that allows players to take over the world on a turn-by-turn building and attacking basis, and those of you that just must own these Collector’s Editions, Civilization: Gold Edition is coming out! So start mowing lawns or working overtime.

This version will include Civilization IV as well as the Warlords expansion pack. As well, like most collectors editions you will also get some little extras. The extras include:

• Fantasy style poster from Greg Hildebrandt, world famous artist
• As expected, a behind-the-scenes DVD with developer interviews and a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the game as well as a history of Sid Meier’s video game history
• A tech-tree poster
• Game Manual

Finally, your release date. You’ll be seeing this on shelves July 17th. Though if it would make you feel a bit better you can pre-order a copy on Amazon.

The latest sims game for DS, The Sims 2 Pets was released on 27th November 2006 (UK release date).

I, who’s a great lover of the sims and DS, brought the game straight away. When I first got the game, I was terrified of the awful graphics of Create A Sim. The people looked like freaks.

The game only lets you play as a vet running a vets surgery with your only pet. Treating patients is ridiculous, it seems pets in the sims may only have approx. 5 things wrong with them. Most of the time its fleas or worms. Very rarely you get the odd fractured limb.

This Sims game has only 3 areas, the vet clinic (attached to your house), your house, and the park which is not very fun at all.

There are over 200 objects, and many other recipes.  This game is fun and adventerous to begin with, but after a few hours of endless diagnosing and curing, the game gets very repetitive.

This game has almost put me off Sims games completey. I don’t see why they can’t create a normal sims 2 game for the DS. Sims 2 Pets is a big letdown, hopefully EA will make better sims games for DS in the future.

Sound: 8/10

Good sound, plenty of background noise filled up with animals whining.

Graphics: 4/10

Poor, so bad I refuse to play it any longer.

Overall: 5.5/10

Boring game, awful graphics, suprisingly great sound though. Big dissapointment from EA.

By

XxKittyxX

Another amazing game for the Sims. It was released the 19th of December, 2003 across Europe and I’m still playing it!

The game features 2 modes, Bustin’ Out and FreePlay. Bustin’ Out lets you live your life, but it sets goals for you. You have to make friends, get promotions, earn money and finally get the Mansion of evil Malcom.

When you first play as Bustin’ Out, after creating your sim, you start living with your mum. She naggs you to get a job, as you get jobs you get friends. Eventually you’ll be able to move out into one of your friends houses. As you social life develops, so will your work life. You will start getting promotions, and all it takes is 10 promotions (in a career of your choice) to get Malcom’s Mansion. This mode is pretty fun, but too easy to complete.

Whilst you’re getting bored with that, freeplay is great. It’s normal Sims, with lots of unlockable items and new careers.

Graphics: 7/10

Not great graphics, but they do the trick.

Gameplay: 7.5/10

Its a great game, but gets pretty repetive.

Sound: 7/10

Not too much sound, but enough.

Overall: 7.5/10

 

 

Spore is the latest game from the brain of Will Wright- the creator of The Sims. Not only does Spore look amazing, it relies on a very new kind of playing, a very new technology.

 I’m talking about procedural generation; the downloading of other peoples creations, picked from an online database and used to create your world. This will make much more sense when we get to the actual game.

You begin, in Spore, as a micro-orgasm living in a drop of water, steadily building yourself up and clumbing the food chain in pac-man like gameplay (3D though.) As you become stronger, faster and smarter you eventually grow into a larger creature, completely (I mean completely) made by you. Every time you progress you can edit your creature with an amazingly in-depth editor. It allows you to scale parts (feet for example) with the mouse wheel, mould them to any shape with the mouse, twist spines and bones. In the demo Wright creates a snake-like fish that swam around eating smaller fish (all created by other players- they are downloaded and streamed to your computer- via the internet I would presume. The same applies to the plants and weeds in the ocean.) You can pick whether your animal is a carnivore or a herbivore, even omnivore.

 Soon enough this fish lays an egg, and clicking on this egg re-opens the editor. Adding three legs to the underside of his creature, twisting the spine a bit and sticking a ‘clamp’ on its tail Wright has the next generation of his animal. It now has legs, so it walks out of the water onto a beach. After a short period of annoying some nearby bouncing (almost Kirby-like) animals and eating one, (remember, this was a live speech given by Wright, so everything’s speeded up.) Wright continues to show us more of the editor. He shows an extremely tall dog, and one with a mouth at each end of its body. What is amazing is they all move properly, animation created for them on the fly. As you make creatures they are instantly made to walk / fight / eat / dance / drag etc according to how you make them.

 From here you have to survive, and soon evolve into a sentient creature. A small tribe of your creations band together and make a hut (again, completely customised by you) and can upgrade their society with new weapons and other items such as log fires and drums. When you give these things to your tribe (which are now fully evolved in every aspect except from intelligence) the game works out how your creatures will react to and use these things. Depending on how you played your animal originally they will react differently. Perhaps they will prefer peace and trade with other tribes, or war against them?

 We now move to the city level- (again all vehicles, buildings roads and walls are created completely by you,) and you are in control of many more of your creatures. You have to tend to them as in Sim City and such, and soon you will begin to seriously interact with other cities around you that do not belong to you; peacefully or otherwise. At this stage, you are working towards taking over your planet, city by city. This can be done diplomatically or by war, it’s your choice. After taking over your planet, you reach the second last stage of the game: The space stage. With your new UFO, designed by you again, you can fly from your planet and explore the 3D space around you. To begin with you only have a good enough engine to explore the immediate space around you, visiting planets and sometimes civillisations nearby. Now things get really amazing. The whole universe around you is full of planets, blank canveses for you to populate, experiment on (perhaps a cross-breed zoo? You do have an abduction beam and the ability to unlimitedly edit animals now…) Some of these planets are occupied by aliens, ready for you to interact with however you like. Wright demonstrates a nifty death-ray that wipes out an entire planet very beautifully.

 Now, having gained the ‘Steller-Drive’ you can venture from your solar-system and explore the rest of the universe. Zooming out Wright displays the size of it all. It is huge. Hundreds of clusters of stars, all housing their own solar-systems and possible alien-races. You can terraform planets with the ‘Genesis Device’ and make them liveable, dropping domed cities into your new world.

  If done right, Spore could be huge. Very huge indeed. I for one can’t wait for it’s late 2007 release.

 

 

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The Xbox has had many great games but none such as Halo: Combat Evolved. In this game you play as a cyborg named Master Chief, which you know nothing about but everyone else does. You play in the future of the Human race when they have come into contact with a hostile alien race known as the Covenant. You fight to preserve all of Humanity’s right to live as you face countless foes and destroy all that oppose you in an effort to save Earth and the Human race.

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Yes, that’s right. Introversion have merged two great concepts together to form one intriguing game. What are these two concepts you ask? Simple: Strategy and Nukes. I played this game, expecting it to be mediocre. I was wrong. The main driving concept to this game is to seek other players, and then nuke their cities, take out their defences, and kill millions of their civillians. Seems violent, no? Well, it’s not. There is no blood or gore (thankfully, or I’d just pass out). To play this game, you start out by choosing a few (depending on amount of players) continents for your bases/territories/land, and begin building up your defences by creating missle silos, and then dotting radars around the coastlines. Radars detect enemies, although only have a certain range. This is the one of the strategic parts. You also can build airstrips, to build fighters, bombers etc. In addition to radars for scouting, you can submerge subs, and move across coastlines undetected. Then, when they’re least expecting it, rise up, and shoot nukes (yes, more nukes) at their cities, silos, you name it. Do whatever it takes to take them out.

Build carriers, and send fighters and bombers to engage in battle with other enemy fleets. While building fleets, it is best to keep all of the naval units of the same type, so you can move around, plan with seperate units, to make it more accessible.

However, it’s not all-out war. Don’t forget the 5 stages of DEFCON. You cannot fire nukes until a certain amount of time has passed (around 30 mins real-time, but of course, my memory is terrible…). But to speed the process up, you can just click the x2/x8/x16 speed buttons after planning your attacks etc. But, if playing against humans, all players must agree on what speed to go at. This can be very annoying (in my experience). DEFCON 5 means that Naval units are allowed to be used in battles. DEFCON 4 means the same for aerial units. This is a very good system in my eyes. it means that you can’t just nuke someone off the spot, and wipe them out. You have to go slowly, and plan out your movements.

Remember: Slow and steady wins the race!

The online Element is a good one. You get to nuke people all across the world, and that is real fun, believe me. But don’t go around nuking people in real-life now, or who-knows what’ll happen? The online gameplay is fun, and added twists such as alliances, and betrayal (seeing as you can’t see them, you don’t know what they’re thinking!).

While being strategic and having a lot of nukes, DEFCON: Everybody Dies is an interesting game, with a unique system. I like it very much for this. Although it has flaws, such as slow pace, which everyone might not enjoy, it is a very good game. This deserves a good, clean, crispy…juicy:

 8/10

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review by James a.k.a. Rengarg

First of all I would like to start by saying that this is the best starfox game since the N64 version. All of the game’s action takes place flying and shooting.

The game has several Starfox trademarks, such as the Text box’s below screen, and the ability to choose which path you take, and the game is just as fun as the N64 version. As well it is even rumble pak compatible (awesome).

Where Star fox takes a daring step where no talking fox has gone before is with the addition of strategy. It is quite simple actually, draw a line with the stylus to where you want your troops to go, if they come in contact with an enemy a battle takes place, where you must destroy a certain amount of enemys in an allotted amount of time. These battles is where star fox let me down just a little bit. There are free roaming environments (linear free roaming, if that makes any sense)! This is obviously a shock to any Star Fox faithful because we are used to Flying through straight forward levels and blasting whatever surprise came our way. Despite what a huge change this formula is to Star Fox, it still manages to provide fun, and controls like the N64 version. If you are concerned with the controls, don’t be. I was very skeptical of the controls of this game myself, but controling the ship with the stylus works like a dream.

Another thing that definetly hasn’t changed is the bosses. They are exactly the same. They insult you while battling, they have glowing weak points, and are a joy to watch blow up.

Replay value? LOADS! there are 9 different endings (which all have some sort of soap-opera thing wound in theme, the ending where slippy has grandchildren is especially sad, and in one ending, Star Fox retires to become an F-Zero pilot!) Anyway, grade-wise, I’d give it about an 8.5 outta 10.

No, it’s not a typo, the title is Global WARming. Combine the frantic panic as Antartica is melting. Water has risen 80 metres, harbours are gone. Icebergs are gone.

You land that you had control of is now mostly missing, covered in water. No fertile land and millions of hungry mouths to feed.

However there’s a new continent that you can lay your hands on. However others want it too. It’s WAR!

Antartica Global Warming is a new game from Savita Games. The game involves a constantly changing map as play goes on and constant weather and storm changes. It’s a very strategic game, like Risk.

Or if you just want to play with the effects of Global Warming you can

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