Consoles, Games and Emulators.

Avid fans of King’s Field and Shadow Tower will likely love Eternal Ring, but others may want to try the game out first.

Eternal Ring marks From Software’s first attempt at the first-person action-RPG genre for the PlayStation 2. Like From’s other titles, it’s being published in the US by Agetec. The game’s opening sequence begins with the main character - an adventurer named Cain Morgan - walking through a palace surrounded by water. He notices a glowing object on one of the pedestals and picks up a ring. A dragon immediately swoops down out of the sky, preparing to attack. Cain raises his arms high above his head to ward it off, and the ring blasts the dragon with tremendous force, destroying it utterly. Yes, you’re going to want to get more of these rings.

The game itself begins with a narration introducing the character Cain and a background story using a series of pictures that are drawn in a style reminiscent of medieval art. After the narration, you see Cain on a sailboat heading toward an island. Cain and the boatman begin a brief conversation, which you expect to be voiced-over since the narration featured voice, but unfortunately they aren’t. Instead you just see characters opening their mouths and moving their lips as the dialogue text scrolls on the bottom of the screen. Despite some lackluster sound effects and the absence of voice-overs, the game’s soundtrack does manage to set the appropriate mood and atmosphere for the game.

Eternal Ring runs at a faster frame rate than From Software’s previous first-person RPGs (King’s Field, King’s Field II, and Shadow Tower), which clocked in at 15 to 20 frames per second. In the beginning, your movement is relatively slow, but once you obtain a special object from the first boss, you’re able to move faster, and the rate becomes satisfactory.

The graphics in Eternal Ring are a leap from its PlayStation predecessors, but there is still room for improvement. Considering that some of the most recent PS titles (such as Vagrant Story) have been visual marvels, one can’t help noticing that the graphics on this PS2 game could’ve been better. For instance, the faces on many of the characters are very plain. On the other hand, the environments, though not incredibly populated, are really well done. The waterfall inside the caverns and the transitions from daytime to sunset to nightfall really are very impressive looking. The biggest mistake in the game’s graphics is the collision detection. When enemies throw projectiles like a stone or even magic spells, your instinct is to hide behind a wall or an object to avoid getting hit. Unfortunately, these projectiles or magic spells go through walls, so you still get hit by them. If you have played From Software’s previous first-person RPGs, you’ll have an idea as to how Eternal Ring plays - for the most part. The game uses a first-person perspective, and you, as Cain, use a variety of weapons and magic spells to defeat your foes, though more of the latter than the former since the only weapons in this game are swords and you will not come across a whole lot of them. Instead, the game focuses more on the usage of magical spells. While you had a gauge for both weapons and magic spells in King’s Field, only magic spells are available in Eternal Ring. The gauge indicates the charge time to cast spells. Magic spells can be obtained by equipping up to ten rings. More than 120 different kinds of spells can be created by producing different combinations of the rings’ elemental jewels. Other rings may not provide you with magic spells but instead may enhance your abilities, such as increasing your stats. There are countless combinations for creating rings that have magic spells, and you could spend endless hours trying to complete the entire set. In that sense, there is potential for replay value. The Dual Shock 2 controller features analog buttons, including the D-pad. The default setting in the game has the analog buttons turned off, and the sensitivity is on five (on a scale of one to ten). It’s really quite necessary to have the analog button turned on and the sensitivity at one. This makes movements much smoother and faster during gameplay, and you don’t have to press the buttons as hard as you do in the default setting. Tapping the attack button during a fight supposedly induces lesser damage compared with pressing the attack button, but the difference was hardly noticeable.

The gameplay has not changed much since the creation of King’s Field, and if you are an expert at the game, then the usual routine of strafing around enemies in a circle and slashing enemies as you approach them still works in Eternal Ring. If you have experience with previous From Software titles, you will probably finish the game in ten to 15 hours. As you may expect from this genre developed by From Software, there is a good story integrated into the game, but somehow your character, Cain, lacks personality and the ability to interact with the rest of the characters in the game. For instance, in one case Cain watches a man getting killed by a monster and doesn’t react in any way.

Eternal Ring is definitely a leap from its previous title Shadow Tower and is promising what King’s Field IV may offer in the future, but it’s certainly not the type of game that pleases every player. Avid fans of King’s Field and Shadow Tower will likely love Eternal Ring, but others may want to try the game out first.

Japanese history buffs will definitely love this game, and even novice players will appreciate the game, with its stunning visuals and sounds.

Koei’s PlayStation 2 strategy title Kessen, published by EA here in the US, was one of the better Japanese launch titles. While there are definitely a few better games out here in the US, Kessen still stands up as a good-looking, interesting strategy-simulation game. Koei is well known for its console and PC strategy-simulation games, like those in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series, but the average player tends to shy away from them due to their complexity. Kessen happens to be somewhat of an exception.

Kessen, roughly translated as “Decisive Battle,” is a strategy-simulation game based on the samurai era in Japan. Although some of the elaborate costumes are fictional, the plot and setting for the most part are true to the history books. You initially take the role of Ieyasu Tokugawa, leading your troops to battle against Mitsunari Ishida (whom you can play as once you finish the game). Watching a brief summary of the first battle at the start of the game is like watching a documentary. The narration and presentation are superb and very television-like in style. A real-time cutscene then shows Ieyasu and his generals discussing battle strategy.

The game progresses in real time as you control a group of armed troops led by a general and face a similar group. Your general’s decisions are AI based, and while the game is in progress a tutorial can be displayed to help explain the game system. In the later half of the battle, you take control of your troops and make your own decisions. It is easier to pick up the control at that point since the enemy forces have thinned out enough for you to finish the job.

When you’re engaged in battle, the triangle button lets you switch from the field map to the battle view. First it shows an overview of the battlefield, with all the troops shown from far away. You can use the D-pad to move the cursor to particular areas of the battlefield and then hit the triangle button to zoom in on the area to show the troops battling against each other in real time. You can also switch to different areas by using the L1 and R1 shoulder buttons. Aside from the normal attack, you can execute special battle tactics, which range from making your cavalry charge, to shooting cannons, to even performing a dance to taunt enemy troops. There are also occasions when the generals of each cavalry will duke it out one-on-one, or a general will run across the battlefield swinging his ax-spear, hacking dozens of enemies. Although giving commands on the field map can be quite boring, it pays off when you can see the battles up close. Koei has definitely made use of the hardware capabilities of the PlayStation 2 here - you will see hundreds of troops on one battlefield, and you can view them up close in real time.

There are not enough voice-overs during gameplay, but the cutscenes have much more speech, which balances the game out. The English voice work is quite good, and definitely fits in with the rest of the game’s audio. The soundtrack is so amazing - even if you weren’t watching the game, the music alone could bring the epic battles to mind. The sound effects are also realistic, but unfortunately the graphics don’t always match the high marks achieved by the sound. Seeing hundreds of soldiers in one battlefield is indeed an accomplishment and a good use of the PS2 hardware, but there are some details that can’t be ignored. There is no blood in the game at all. Sometimes, the cutscenes really have very good animation, but not seeing blood when one soldier slashes another is pretty unrealistic. After playing the first few missions, you might even find the battle animation to be a little redundant. It may be captivating the first few times, but you’ll probably get to a point where you’ll want to skip the animations. Although the gameplay may become redundant, there are different scenarios, depending on your loss or victory during a battle - which also means straying from the history-based storyline. You will also be able to play as Mitsunari Ishida after you finish the game once and experience a different point of view of the story. So, in that sense, there is a decent amount of replay value in the game.

Japanese history buffs will definitely love this game, and even novice players will appreciate the game, with its stunning visuals and sounds. The only question is whether you are willing to sit down and play the game, with its continuously redundant nature.

Ridge Racer V all but ignores most of the gameplay refinements that the series has seen over the years, returning to the general driving style of games like Ridge Racer and Ridge Racer Revolution.

The original Ridge Racer was the meat in Sony’s launch sandwich when the original PlayStation hit the States. The arcade driving game came home and introduced console gamers to the next big thing. But today, those halcyon days seem like ancient history. As the Ridge Racer series evolved, it became much more than a simple arcade port, adding more tracks and cars, and refining the game’s trademark powerslide style of driving. The last installment of the game, Ridge Racer Type 4, really seemed to be as good as the series could get on the existing hardware. Thankfully, Sony has come along with a new box, and Namco is keeping pace with a new Ridge Racer game. But Ridge Racer V all but ignores most of the gameplay refinements that the series has seen over the years, returning to the general driving style of games like Ridge Racer and Ridge Racer Revolution.

When the PlayStation 2 launched in Japan back in March, Ridge Racer V was the most impressive game on shelves, graphically speaking. Now, eight months later, we have games like Midnight Club, SSX, and the newly revamped Tekken Tag Tournament to consider, and Ridge Racer V definitely looks dated when compared to more recent PS2 efforts. The game looks like the other Ridge Racer games, but without as much pop-up or pixelated vehicles and environments. Little things like trees on the sides of the track, and the glow that emanates from your red-hot brake pads as you brake while driving around corners really bring a lot to the look of the game. You can even see the gauges inside your car light up when your headlights come on in a tunnel or while night-driving. The cars are well designed, and the environment mapping that creates the almost-too-shiny reflection on your car is pretty amazing. The display isn’t flawless, though. The entire game has a very aliased appearance, making the edges of the cars and tracks look really jagged. The better your TV is, the more noticeable the aliasing becomes. The game still sports only two camera angles, a first-person and third-person view. The third-person view is much tighter and closer to your vehicle than in the previous games, and it takes a bit of getting used to. The two-player mode runs at roughly the same speed as the single-player game, though the draw-in distance is a bit closer in the splitscreen mode, making the two-player races look a bit foggy. Also worth mentioning is that the game has horrendously slow load times between races.

The gameplay in Ridge Racer V is centered on the grand-prix mode. This is the mode that will net you additional cars, trophies, and new engines. You start out by picking one of three difficulty settings and entering the standard grand prix. Then you go on to the extra mode, a collection of four grand-prix events. Standard mode lets you pick any one of the game’s base-level cars, then as you progress with that car into the extra ranks you’ll earn upgraded versions of that base car. The track design is pretty standard Ridge Racer fare. Each track uses lots of the same portions of road, and certain sections of track will open or close depending on which track variant you’re racing. This makes all the tracks seem a little too similar and limits the game’s replay value. As in R4, the final track is an oval-shaped racetrack built for sheer speed. Another knock against the track design is that a lot of the sections are lifted from, or at least heavily influenced by, the track from the original Ridge Racer. You’ll recognize the tunnels and turns the first time you see them. It would have been nice to see multiple environments and a more varied track design instead of being limited to racing the tracks both forward and backward. The car-handling is similar to that of the older Ridge Racer games in that it places a much heavier emphasis on powersliding around corners so you can traverse the tracks at high speeds. The sliding is emphasized by reducing the turning radius on most of the game’s cars, which all feel a little sluggish when you’re maneuvering back and forth across the lanes, when compared with any of the previous games in the series. Even the grip cars require you to do a decent amount of sliding around turns. The drift cars lose traction at the blink of an eye and really force you to play to perfection. Luckily, the control is excellent with the Dual Shock 2, and the game supports both of Namco’s driving controllers, the Negcon and the Jogcon. The game uses the analog buttons of the Dual Shock 2, but it’s extremely hard to notice when the analog gas and braking make a difference. Some of the later drift cars in the game seem to slide a bit differently depending on how hard you tap the brake button.

The sound effects in Ridge Racer V are pretty nice. The squealing tires and engine noise of the cars sound realistic. The game has an announcer similar to the ones in the previous games, but he repeats himself a little too often (for instance, he almost always says, “That was tight” whenever you pass the second- or first-place car) and mispronounces a few words, like “comfort” and “rookie.” It’s almost funny.

The music has always been a large part of the Ridge Racer series, and Ridge Racer V offers up a bit more of a variation than usual. Rather than sticking solely to various forms of electronic music, RRV delivers some poppier tunes from the Boom Boom Satellites, as well as some pretty hot techno numbers. One of the best tracks is the music that plays in the menus before the race actually starts.

Ridge Racer V is a fun, great-looking game that will please older Ridge Racer fans. Players that picked up the series around the third or fourth game may be a little disappointed with the way the cars handle, but not so much that their fun will be ruined. Overall, the game feels a little rushed with its easy-way-out track design, and it’s really a shame that Ridge Racer V wasn’t given the same treatment that Tekken Tag Tournament received when it was translated for the domestic market.

DrumMania is just as much fun as the other games in the series, but it definitely has a steeper learning curve than any other game in the Bemani line.

Konami’s Bemani series has always demanded that you have a real sense of rhythm to succeed. But at the same time, the games aren’t really all that demanding when it comes to musical skill. You don’t need to spend any time at the Guitar Institute of Technology to excel at Guitar Freaks, and Beatmania didn’t exactly require that you know how to cut it up on the wheels of steel. DrumMania, however, is significantly more demanding and is more like the musical instrument it is trying to emulate than any of the other games in the series.

While you can play the game with a standard PlayStation controller - in fact, some may find the game easier when using a pad - Konami’s drum controller is really the true way to play the game. The DrumMania controller is essentially a five-drum pad that rests on a metal stand (putting it about three feet off the ground) with a small, pressure-sensitive foam pedal that serves as the bass drum. It is a pretty high-quality item, with one glaring exception: The bass-drum pedal is annoyingly flat and pretty unresponsive.

The gameplay is identical to that of Guitar Freaks and Beatmania. The screen scrolls in time to the music, and bars, separated into six columns, move from the top of the screen down to the bottom. When the bar reaches the line at the bottom of the screen, you hit the appropriate drum pad. Miss too many beats or drum off-time with the song, and your excite meter slowly drains. When it runs out, you lose.

Aside from the game’s main mode, free mode, and all the other options we’ve come to expect from Konami’s Bemani games, there is also a session mode. Session mode lets you plug a guitar controller into the second port (or, if you have a PS2 multitap, you can plug in two guitars) and jam along with the drumming action in most of the game’s songs. Now if you could just hook up a DDR dancemat and maybe a Beatmania controller too …

Graphically, DrumMania is arcade perfect. No big surprise there. The music contained in DrumMania includes some old favorites, such as a few songs from Guitar Freaks. The style of music on DrumMania is distinctly more varied than other games in the series, including styles such as ska, punk, fusion, metal, samba, and rock.

Overall, DrumMania is just as much fun as the other games in the series, but it definitely has a steeper learning curve than any other game in the Bemani line. Plus, once you’ve gotten pretty good at the game, there’s the added bonus of actually having a head start on the basics of playing real-life drums.

EX3 may feel a bit rushed in some spots, but overall it’s a fun and great-looking fighting game that won’t disappoint longtime EX fans.

Capcom’s Street Fighter EX series, developed by Arika, takes the standard Street Fighter 2D gameplay and throws it into a 3D world, adding a few new characters and moves along the way. The original Street Fighter EX fared pretty poorly in arcades, but after a few revisions it found a greater audience at home on the PlayStation. Street Fighter EX2 added a few new moves and characters, but it never really made much of a splash. Street Fighter EX3 takes the gameplay and additional moves of EX2, adds a tag-team element similar to that of Tekken Tag Tournament or Capcom’s own Marvel vs. Capcom, and drops it onto the PlayStation 2 for a quick and dirty fighting game that seems a little rushed but still manages to be a lot of fun.

The game’s main mode is original mode, where you’ll pick one character and dive right into a short but sweet fighting quest. Your first match is against three competitors - all at the same time. After winning this, or any, match in this mode, you’ll be asked if you’d like to recruit one of your opponents. You can recruit up to three partners as you progress through the six-match quest, which comprises tag battles, team battles, and a two-on-one match. Completing the final battle nets you a screen full of text and the ending credits. The ending credits serve as a sort of bonus stage, where your main fighter is put on the screen with six or seven generic fighters whom you can beat with only one or two hits. The game gives you an infinite combo meter and keeps track of how many of the generic bad guys you can knock out before the credits end. The other fighting modes in the game let you set up tag battles, dramatic battles, team battles, and four-player matches at will.

The game’s other real bonus is the character edit mode, which is an extention of the expert mode that appeared in EX1 and EX2. Instead of having a set number of missions to complete with each character, EX3 gives you Ace, a generic-looking fighter who looks a bit more like a fighter out of the Rival Schools universe than a Street Fighter. When you first start playing, Ace has no special moves whatsoever - he is a completely blank slate. As you complete the expert mode-like tasks (block all attacks, perform a three-hit combo, execute a combo that does over 90 points of damage, and the like), you earn experience points. You use these points to buy Ace’s special moves and super combos, which you’ll need to complete tasks later in the edit mode. Once you’ve beefed up Ace, he’ll be able to hold his own in the game’s other modes.

While the character graphics used in EX3 look pretty amazing when standing still, the animation is the same as it was in EX2. Granted, you can’t exactly add lots of frames to all the special moves and keep the game’s timing as faithful to the Street Fighter series as EX3 is, but now that the 3D Street Fighters don’t look all blocky and pixilated, the jerky animation really stands out. Also worth mentioning is the appearance of B.A. Baracus himself. Yes, what appears to be Mr. T’s picture adorns the walls of one of the arenas. It’s a strange yet heartwarming tribute to such a master thespian.

The audio portion of EX3 is packed with great effects, such as deep, bassy whooshing noises that accompany super-combo fireballs and the like. All of the hits and misses sound terrific, and the character voices are nice and crystal clear. The music, however, doesn’t always fit the action. Also, in an annoying demonstration of audio streaming, the music changes tunes on the fly when other characters get tagged in, so you never listen to one song for long - one track fades into another as soon as the action on the screen dictates a change.

Street Fighter EX3 is the game that EX2 should have, and probably would have, been, had this kind of hardware power been available sooner. The tag-team fighting adds a nice new element that the previous game totally lacked. EX3 may feel a bit rushed in some spots, but overall it’s a fun and great-looking fighting game that won’t disappoint longtime EX fans.

A superb single-player story mode and online support for up to 16 players make this the best Grand Theft Auto game yet.

Stepping off a boat in the shoes of illegal immigrant Niko Bellic as he arrives in Liberty City at the start of Grand Theft Auto IV, you can tell immediately that Rockstar North’s latest offering is something quite special. Yes, this is another GTA game in which you’ll likely spend the bulk of your time stealing cars and gunning down cops and criminals, but it’s also much more than that. GTAIV is a game with a compelling and nonlinear storyline, a game with a great protagonist who you can’t help but like, and a game that boasts a plethora of online multiplayer features in addition to its lengthy story mode. It’s not without some flaws, but GTAIV is undoubtedly the best Grand Theft Auto yet.

One of the many things that set GTAIV apart from its predecessors is Liberty City, which is more convincing as a living, breathing urban environment than anything that you’ve seen in a game before, and bears little resemblance to its namesake in 2001’s GTAIII. Liberty’s diverse population believably attempts to go about its daily business, seemingly unaware that several criminal factions are at war in the city. Niko has no such luck. He’s compelled to start working for one of the factions shortly after arriving, when he learns that his cousin Roman has some potentially fatal gambling debts. Niko’s military experience makes him a useful freelancer for employers in the business of killing each other, and though his reluctance to carry out their orders is often apparent, he does whatever is asked of him in the hope that completing missions for other people will ultimately give him the means to complete his own.

Actually, Niko doesn’t have to do everything that is asked of him. On several occasions as you play through his story, you’ll be presented with decisions that afford you the option of doing what you think is right rather than blindly following instructions. You don’t necessarily have to kill a target if he or she promises to disappear, but you have to weigh the risk of your employer finding out against the possibility that the person whose life you spare might prove useful later in the game, or even have work for you in the form of bonus missions. To say anything more specific on this subject would be to risk spoiling one of GTAIV’s most interesting new features, but suffice it to say that every decision you make has consequences, and you’ll likely want to play through the game at least twice to see how the alternatives unfold.

Grand Theft Auto IV’s story mode can be beaten in less than 30 hours, and there are so many optional activities and side missions to take part in along the way that you can comfortably double that number if you’re in no hurry. The majority of the story missions task you with making deliveries and/or killing people, and play out in much the same way as those in previous games. With that said, most of the missions are a lot easier this time around, partly because Niko is a more agile and efficient killer than any of his predecessors, and partly because the LCPD seemingly has better things to do than hunt down an illegal immigrant who’s gunning down undesirables all over the city. Some of the more imaginative missions sprinkled throughout the story include a kidnapping, a bank heist, and a job interview. The cinematic cutscenes associated with story missions are superbly presented and are the sequences in which the game’s characters really shine. Without exception, the characters you encounter benefit from great animation, great voice work, and superbly expressive faces. They’re not always so impressive when they join you on a mission and refuse to do what they’re supposed to (for example, not following you on an escort mission, or failing to negotiate a doorway). Nevertheless, these problems are few and far between, and they’re made less painful by the new “replay mission” option that you’re presented with whenever you fail.

New abilities in Niko’s arsenal include scaling fences and walls anywhere he can get a foothold, shimmying along ledges, and, most importantly, taking cover behind objects. The ability to stick close to walls, parked cars, and the like at the touch of a button makes GTAIV’s gunplay a huge improvement over that in previous games, and, in tandem with the new targeting system, it also makes it a lot easier. Enemies are rarely smart enough to get to you while you’re in cover, and given that you can lock your targeting reticle on to them even when they’re hidden, all you have to do is wait for them to poke their heads out and then pick them off with a minimum of effort. Locking on to enemies targets their torso by default, but you can use the right analog stick to fine-tune your aim and kill them more quickly with a headshot or two. Playing without using the lock-on feature make things more difficult, but you’ll need to master the technique so that you can shoot blindly at enemies from positions of cover when you dare not poke your own head out to line up the shot.

Given the amount of trouble that you get into as you play through the story mode, it’s inevitable that the police are going to get involved from time to time, even when their presence isn’t a scripted feature of your mission. Liberty City’s boys in blue are quick to respond when you get flagged with a wanted level of between one and six stars, but they’re not nearly as tough to deal with as their counterparts in previous GTA games. They don’t drive as quickly when pursuing you, they rarely bother to set up roadblocks, and you’ll need to blow up practically an entire city block before the FIB (that’s not a typo) show up. Furthermore, you’re given an unfair advantage in the form of your GPS system; when you’re not using it to plot a valid route to any waypoint of your choosing, it doubles as a kind of police scanner. Any time you have a brush with the law, the GPS shows you the exact locations of patrol cars and cops on foot in your area, and highlights the circular area (centered on your last known whereabouts) where they’re concentrating their search. To escape, all you need to do is move outside the circle and then avoid being seen for 10 seconds or so, which is often best achieved by finding a safe spot and just sitting there. It’s not a bad system in theory, but in practice it makes dodging the law a little too easy, especially when your wanted level is low and the search area is small.

When you’re not running missions for criminals, taking part in street races, stealing cars to order, or randomly causing trouble, you’ll find that there are plenty of opportunities to unwind in Liberty City. Some of these optional activities offer tangible rewards that can prove useful in missions later on, whereas others are just a fun way to kill time and take in more of GTAIV’s superb humor. For example, you can watch television, listen to numerous different radio stations, check out some genuinely funny shows (including some big-name acts) at cabaret and comedy clubs, and use a computer to surf the in-game Internet.

GTAIV’s Internet is filled with spoofs of all the kinds of Web sites that you’d only ever look at accidentally or when you know there’s no danger of getting caught. Some of them can be found only by clicking on links in spam e-mails, whereas others are advertised prominently on the search page. There’s plenty of amusing stuff to find if you spend some time in one of the “TW@” Internet cafes, but the most interesting site by far is an online dating agency through which you can meet women who, if they like your profile, will agree to go on dates with you. Dating and socializing with friends is something you can spend as much or as little of your time doing as you like, and though the people you meet can occasionally be demanding to the point that they become irritating, keeping them happy invariably benefits you in some way.

UEFA Euro 2008 plays a better game of football than anything else on the market, but only just.

UK REVIEW–First things first: UEFA Euro 2008 plays a better game of football than any other game currently available for either the Xbox 360 or the PS3. EA Canada’s gameplay team has been hard at work on the core engine since it finished FIFA 08, and its work shows. UEFA Euro 2008 isn’t that far ahead of the latest FIFA offering, but minor improvements are apparent all over the pitch.

As you’d expect, Euro 2008 features a much smaller roster of teams compared to FIFA, only featuring the international teams that are eligible for the European Championship, without any reduction in the sticker price to compensate. The football is slightly faster than in FIFA 08, the animations are smoother, and the addition of a manual celebration mechanic lets you control your player after scoring. All of these things add up to make UEFA Euro 2008 a slightly better match experience than FIFA 2008, but not that much better.

Euro 2008’s single-player modes are as varied as could be hoped given the limited nature of the licence. You can play through your chosen team’s qualifying campaign or just jump into the finals with your team. You can also play through in the Be A Pro mode or its new cousin, Captain Your Country.

The Captain Your Country mode expands on the Be A Pro mode introduced in FIFA 08. You create a player and control him during the course of the qualifying campaign rather than in just one match. The aim is not only to see your team through to qualification, but also to rack up a large enough number of good performances to be made captain by the time you reach the finals. The weaker the team, the easier it is to become captain, but the harder it is to make it to the finals. Your personal score for each match is based on how well you perform in your allotted role; as a defender, you can run forward to knock in goals, but you’re more likely to do well staying at the back and waiting to put in that goal-saving tackle instead.

You compete against three other players bidding to make the transition from B-team unknown to captain, with your scores out of ten displayed as you go along. This leads to some interesting gameplay, as there are a number of factors to bear in mind. Firstly, you want to perform as well as you can in your chosen position. Secondly, you want your team to get through to the finals and then win. Finally you want to do better than your fellow captaincy candidates, which can lead to a certain amount of gamesmanship as you try to ensure that they don’t get the chance to impress. This is an interesting take on co-op play, and it works really well in both single player–where the other players are AI controlled–or in multiplayer, where the mode really takes off as the competition hots up.

The football itself is very similar to FIFA 08, complete with its advanced trick system that allows more skilful players to skip past multiple defenders when mastered. As with FIFA 08 this system can seem overpowered in multiplayer games when one player has mastered it and the other has not, but the online skill matching does a good job of ensuring that this is rarely an issue.

In addition to regular matches and competitions there are a number of scenarios to play out, which put you in control at moments from the actual qualifying campaign that were particularly significant. For instance, you might be tasked with coming out on top after having been dumped into a game 2-0 down with 10 minutes to go, or you might be required to replicate Scotland’s famous 1-0 victory over France in Paris. Winning the European Championship with any side unlocks a batch of new scenarios from Euro 2004.

In previous midseason football titles released to coincide with major championships, playing through the full qualifying campaigns was a nigh-on pointless experience when playing as a high-ranked team, because you would steamroller the poorer international sides, but that isn’t the case here. The opponent AI changes are noticeable from the get-go of your campaign, with weaker teams defending in numbers and making your life in front of goal very difficult indeed. Crowds are more vocal than before, too, and are more hostile both home and away. When you’re already a goal down in a match that you have to win, hearing even virtual fans chanting “We want our money back” does nothing for your confidence. These changes do really give the game a lot of added value as it

The other significant gameplay factor that has been tweaked is the weather, which now plays a more significant role than before. Rain has noticeable effects on the speed the ball skids over the surface; if you hit wet turf, your pass will fly off faster than you’d expect, but if you hit a muddy patch, you will howl in dismay as the ball slows down and a defender slips back to cut out that seemingly perfectly weighted pass to your advancing centre-forward.

The multiplayer game has also received a certain amount of attention. The most obvious change is presented to you front and centre: UEFA Euro 2008 features a metagame that will tally up the performance of the various European nations throughout the tournament, with daily prizes for those who perform best. This performance is measured with a new in-game scoring system that attempts to quantify the skill you’ve shown. This is based on not only the number of goals you score and let in, but also on pass completion, shot accuracy, and more. It’s adjusted for the skill of your team and the skill of your opponent’s team. This may help to address the main problem FIFA 08 has had online–where Barcelona, the best-rated in-game club side, are the most popular team to play because they’re so good–but we’re sceptical. More significant is the introduction of quick 16-player tournaments, which can be set up among friends or with random people over Xbox Live or the PlayStation network. This is a compelling addition to the series’ basic multiplayer modes and is something we hope to see replicated in FIFA 09.

Despite its smaller scope, Euro 2008 replicates the drama of a major international cup competition very well. The gameplay isn’t a significant enough an improvement over FIFA 08 to make it easily recommendable as an upgrade given the sticker price, but if you’re yet to experience EA’s football offerings this season then now’s the time to start.

Chosen One isn’t what Skee-Lo had in mind when he wished to be a baller.

EA and Midway share the rights to NBA-licensed arcade basketball games. As a result, the NBA Ballers franchise is released every other year, with EA’s NBA Street series occupying the year in between. This year is NBA Ballers’ time to shine and that didn’t happen, which means it’s a down year for arcade hoops. NBA Ballers: Chosen One has some interesting ideas, particularly with regards to its presentation, but it’s ultimately a disappointment thanks to repetitive gameplay and needlessly complex controls.

You can single-play games of 1V1, 2V2, and 1V1V1, or sharpen your skills in practice, a shootout, or three-point contest. You can also play ranked and unranked matches online using your custom character, which is pretty cool. The bulk of Ballers’ content, however, is found in Story mode. Here you create a player, give him a nickname (we went with “Beans”), and choose from hundreds of different shirts, pants, shoes, jewelry items, and more to customize his appearance. You’ll unlock more gear as you progress, but you can make a truly unique baller with just the stuff that’s unlocked from the outset. Your created player will be terrible at first, but his attributes will improve slightly after each game. These attribute boosts are supposedly based on your performance in the previous game, but they seem more random than anything else. Story mode’s premise is simple. Each year after the NBA playoffs, the top players in the league take part in a street ball tournament, the winner of which will be known as the “Chosen One.” Story mode is divided into six episodes, each of which contains five chapters. Episodes are introduced by short video segments that feature Public Enemy’s Chuck D as a host of an NBA Tonight-like show. He doesn’t have anything particularly riveting to say, but the segments are nicely produced and add a bit of realism to the mode.

Although the game’s six episodes have diverse themes, they don’t feel that different from one another. Most of the time you go up against other players one-on-one and try to beat them. Sure, dunks might be worth three points in a round, you may have to pull off a particular special move, or you might play to 21 instead of 11, but after a couple of chapters you realize there’s not much variety, or at least variety that matters. Even the media mogul chapter, where you’re vying for a spot in a soft drink commercial, isn’t interesting. You spend most of the chapter beating guys head-to-head and then the last chapter performing specific moves against LeBron James while the commercial is filmed. But this just ends up feeling like the rest of the game because the moves are presented in list form before the round (once you start playing, you can’t reference them again, either), you’re doing the same combos you’ve been doing for the last few hours.The “commercial” that plays when you’re done doesn’t even look like a commercial, nor does it feature the moves you performed while shooting it.

Most people don’t expect a great story or a lot of variety to the game modes when they play an arcade-style basketball game. They want the best players, over-the-top dunks, hard fouls, diverse court locales, as well as fast-paced, fun gameplay. Chosen One delivers most of these. There are more than 80 current NBA players as well as legends such as Wilt Chamberlain, Moses Malone, Daryl Dawkins, Dr. J, Larry Bird, Magic, Bill Russell, and more. The basketball courts are spread out among a number of interesting locations including an airplane hangar, a penthouse suite in Boston, the Chicago lakefront, a rooftop in Dubai, South Beach, and the mountains of China. Dunks are suitably outrageous. Even someone like Steve Nash can throw down some crazy dunks and pass the ball to someone standing courtside for a long-distance alley-oop. Toss in plenty of blocks, steals, and physical play, and you have a game that should be a lot of fun, at least on paper.

But NBA Ballers: Chosen One isn’t fun, and there are a number of reasons for this. To start with, the controls are much too complicated for this style of game. You can juke with the right analog stick or a face button, but you can also hold down any of the shoulder buttons to further modify your jukes, dunks, and alley-oops. Eventually you’ll learn all of the moves, but you’ll still have a difficult time performing them thanks to frequently unresponsive controls, especially when you’re forced to hold two shoulder buttons in conjunction with another button. Like in NBA Street you must perform flashy jukes and dunks to fill a meter. The twist here is that this meter serves to fill another meter, which, depending on how many levels are full, gives you a guaranteed steal, successful juke, made shot, block, or game-ending super dunk.

These super moves, particularly the game-ending super dunk, are so effective that you’ll spend most of your time trying to fill your meter with the game’s worst feature: act-a-fool combos. You begin an act-a-fool combo by holding a shoulder and face button together while standing near a player. Once the combo starts, button icons appear onscreen, and you must press them as quickly as possible. The defender can also try to press the buttons, and if they do so before you, the combo ends. The AI won’t stop you very often, though, and once the combo has ended after five moves, there’s usually an open path to a dunk, which will be worth five points thanks to the bonus points awarded from the combo. Not only do you get bonus points for the combo, but you fill your meter as well. It takes just three or four successful act-a-fool combos to fill the meter to the point that you can end the game with a super dunk. Playing the game this way is cheesy and boring, but you’re forced to do so because some of the challenges, like coming back from 20 points down with three minutes to go, and beating T-Mac in a game to 11 without letting him score, are absurdly difficult.

The problems don’t end there. For some reason there are fouls in the game, and though you aren’t penalized for the first four, when you get your fifth foul, the other player gets a foul shot that’s worth three points and they retain possession. The defensive fouls may be annoying, but they do serve to keep you honest. The fact that you can get called for charging is just plain annoying and has no place in this kind of basketball game. One particularly terrible game variation gets rid of the checked-ball rule, so you don’t have to take the ball back on a change of possession or after you score. The game devolves into both players standing under the basket trying to catch the ball as it goes through the net, and then immediately putting up a shot when they do catch the ball. It’s mind-numbingly stupid. Toss in inconsistent goaltending calls, repetitive cutscenes for super moves that often end with you facing away from the basket, and horrific clipping problems that see the ball go through the rim on dunks so that you don’t even know if you made them or not, and you’re left with a flashy-looking game that isn’t much fun.

NBA Ballers’ strongest aspect is its presentation. Even the menus are attractive. The cutscenes that introduce players like Kobe, Agent Zero, and LeBron look cool and inspire a sense of awe when they play before a big matchup. It’s a shame that big-name players like Shaq, Kidd, and Gasol, who were recently traded, aren’t on their current teams. Nevertheless, players look lifelike and have a swagger to them that only NBA players seem to have. There’s little variety to more routine actions like running, diving for the ball, and shooting from one player to the next, but there’s no shortage of great-looking dunk and juke animations. While the “normal” moves generally look great, the developer got carried away when it comes to the cutscenes for special moves. These noninteractive clips that play for every special move are repetitive and do nothing but interrupt the flow of the game. To make matters worse, there’s no way to turn them off.

Chosen One’s audio is surprisingly subdued. The soundtrack by Just Blaze stays mostly in the background and doesn’t stand out as particularly good or bad. In addition to hosting the TV show in the game, Chuck D also provides play-by-play. He gets a little repetitive, but he’s better than most of the announcers found in other street games. Plus, hearing him yell “They call him Mr. Beans!” when our player threw down a dunk never got old.

NBA Ballers: Chosen One deserves credit for trying to bring some new ideas to a genre that isn’t known for mixing things up. But while many of these ideas may have seemed good during the design phase, they don’t work in the context of the actual gameplay. There’s no reason to pick this one up, regardless of how bad you need a basketball fix–there are plenty of cheaper, better options available.

Imagine the Landmake system from Legend of Mana (where you basically take little bits of land and create your own custom world), but in full 3D with much more ability for customization.

Sony’s Dark Cloud is a 3D role-playing game that sports incredible graphics (no surprise there) and an interesting game system. Basically, try and imagine the Landmake system from Legend of Mana (where you basically take little bits of land and create your own custom world), but in full 3D with much more ability for customization.

Basically, you create your own world and then explore it. The viewing distance from what we’ve seen is amazing - the game switches from the overhead ‘creation’ map to the actual 3D world on the fly (there’s no changing of screens or anything - it just zooms down until you’re in the actual world). It’s very cool. For those of you who care, SCEI is calling this a “Georama RPG,” which we can only imagine means “geographical drama RPG.” What will they think of next?

We can’t answer that, but we can tell you that when more Dark Cloud details are available, you’ll read them here.