Saints Row will return in 2008 with a sequel entitled Saints Row 2, designed and developed by Volition and published by THQ, promising more action, being "set to revolutionize player freedom and open world online gameplay", according to THQ.



<-234x60 Half Banner - left->The sequel will come for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 platforms.
The game is still in developing phase but until then you can see the first screenshots.



In the follow-up, the action brings you back to Stilwater, where in the first part the player had to involve in a war between rival gangs, which were fighting for supremacy.
During the gameplay, players took advantage of features like deep player customization offering nearly infinite options, four story lines, earning respect in 200 different levels of activities and evolving to create their own gangs.



In the second part, "the explosive conclusion to Saints Row has left the player wounded, betrayed and thirsty for revenge, and now it's time to take back the city that has forgotten him", as THQ said.
All this is happening in an "expanded and fully transformed city and true open-world online multiplayer".



THQ adds akimbo and the possibility to play as a female character, and it “will be playable online in two-player co-op through the entire single-player campaign or in the all new open-world competitive multiplayer mode never before seen in the genre".

NCSoft released Guild Wars Chronicles in early 2005, a game to take up the many challenges of the MMORPG scene and setup a different subscribtion plan to target players that don’t feel comfortable with paying monthly fees. Different way of making the franchise a commercial success have been devised and the main idea was pretty straight forward. ArenaNet developers will release a steady stream of stand alone expansion packs to be sold at full price, thus Guild Wars Factions, Guild Wars Nightfall and Guild Wars Eye of the North since followed.

Story

<-250x250 Square - left->The lands of Tyria have ever been in conflict, some say since the very creation of the world. War took many shapes and forms but continuous evolution of the human kingdoms presented it with the finest: the guild wars. They were the expression of power hungering within the magical races of the land, as guilds grew stronger than kingdoms and kings alike. The Guild Wars raged for decades, never did the peace accords last long, never did the negotiations take root. The conflict claimed the lives of many hundreds of thousands. It uprooted families, made neighbors into enemies and soured the relations between the human nations. Eventually, as all things do, the wars did come to an end. But there were neither the swaying words of peace negotiators nor the sharp blades of conquering heroes that ended them. The resolution was instead presented by an even greater war brought by the Charr. In unprecedented numbers, the beasts from the north swept down through all three human kingdoms. Ascalon, Orr, and Kryta, embroiled in conflict with one another for more than fifty years, dropped their grudges and turned their attentions to defending their borders against the new threat. With great sacrifice, the ravaged human kingdoms eventually repelled the invasion in Guild Wars Chronicles, but this has not yet come to pass. Factions takes place on the continent of Cantha, way south of Tyria, roughly two years after the Charr invasion, while Nightfall welcomes you to the exotic continent of Elona, Land of the Rising Sun. In the Eye of the North campaign however you can return to Tyria and tie up the loos ends in the sotryline.

Gameplay

You can meet new friends in towns or outposts, form a party, and then go quest together. Your party always has its own unique copy of the map, so camping, kill-stealing and long waiting times to complete quests are all obsolete. It is a feature and a problem in itself as it kills off both solo PvP and a large part of player interaction. I always gave quite an importance to the “massive” factor in MMO and over instancing the game’s areas is not the right way to ensure it. This does open up the way for some interesting tweaks, such as instant travel between map areas. It is all there, in the grand scheme of things, where NCSoft wants us to enjoy ourselves without the burden of excessive downtime or boresome walks to remote key zones. Unlike other MMORPGs, here you are paired up with a number of NPC teammates right off the start in order to plan a strategic approach to the game’s combat challenges.

The vanilla version (Chronicles) has a rooster of sex classes available, with four more being added through the addons. Thus we initially have the Warrior melee damage dealer, the Monk healer and holy damage dealer, the Mesmer master of curses and lockdown, the Ranger huntsman which uses pet along with bows and arrows, the Elementalist magic user and lastly the shadowy Necromancer, a master of minions.

If you are the kind of player that prefers to meet head on his opponents in battle, then the Dervish profession is tailored for you. The Dervish could be termed holy warriors as the character not only has some powerful spinning attacks that can take on several opponents but also special skills that can increase their abilities in battle.

Holymen just the same, Paragons are bent on the spiritual part of life, most efficient while fighting close by their comrades for encouraging and support. They bear heavier armor and deal moderate damage, as the main asset is their chants, shouts and echoes. Natural born leaders, it is through faith they manage to effectively use healing powers. Paragons look as the name implies, almost like the offspring of gods among men, revered for their actions and attitude alike.

The assassin is a powerful yet versatile killing machine, that can use the added benefits of dual wield, teleportation and stealth to bring down his foes. Clearly a fighting profession, it lacks most of the defensive capabilities that are available to the Warrior. It makes up through special combo moves and the added ability to cripple and do extra damage on cursed opponents. This way the Assassin is most suited for team combat as the main damage dealer with excellent support for Mesmers.

The ritualist is a master of the spirit. With the help or his otherworldly companions he uses his powers to protect and heal allies. The impact of a ritualist’s spells is directly linked to the number of spirits he calls forth, otherwise is in many ways a profession similar to the Monk. Not a good damage dealer at all, the ritualist is a healing and support class. The Ritualist is a spirit summoner who will use lots of minions to attack, heal, defend, buff players, or power up spells.

The current level cap of 20 is not going to get higher soon due to balance issues. There are the six professions available from Prophecies and four extra from the expansions. Over 600 skills can be unlocked through quests and once you have them, subsequent characters you create for either PvE or PvP can use them at will. This is to say, you can’t be the best out there unless you have the right in game skills on your cast bar, so there’s plenty to do while you complete the campaigns a couple of times. With the addition of Guild Wars: Eye of the North, we saw a lot more content being developed for maximum level players, unlike the two previous expansions. 18 new areas were tailored for this exact purpose of enhancing your character with new set armors and unique items, along with new elite skills to change the high end gameplay mechanics.

With Guild Wars Factions saw the introduction of Alliances between up to ten guilds. Once an Alliance obtains a city, it will have access to elite PvE quests. The challenge level of those missions scale to the size of the city. Over the course of 24 hours, whichever faction wins the most battles for a city will own it. These Alliances will share a chat channel and be able to visit each other's guild halls. More importantly, Alliances will have access to a real-time map of the struggle between the Luxon and Kurzick factions.

The ladder system involves guilds rather than individual players. In the end game, Guild Wars Factions is all about team play and team tactics. Most character skills can be acquired with relative ease in player versus environment play. The great thing about this skill system is that players can easily change their secondary profession to better suit their purposes, be they cooperative PvE missions or PvP frenzy. Combined with the free point reallocation system, the versatility of your avatar’s powers is limited only by the use of imagination. Guild Wars was not designed to be a colossal time sink, neither early nor late game. As the developers stated on numerous occasions, the main goal was to give an equal fighting chance to the casual player as well as the hardcore gamer, a goal splendidly achieved. Of course, this does mean that the average lifespan of a Guild Wars account will be lower than, let’s say, a World of Warcraft account, purely because farming and lenghty instance runs will keep the player glued to the seat for longer periods of time.

Video

Character customisation is one of the assets Guild Wars made itself known for and I have to agree, characters look simply amazing. Having breathtaking detail and full freedom of choice regarding the way your body, weapons and clothes look is good for the ego, be it in game as it is. It even went so far that armor and weapon dyes are sort of a second type of currency, besides regular gold. Players go out of their way to paint themselves using black dye, being the most expensive. After all, you can’t look grim and evil without putting some effort into it. Designers put extra care into the drawing and rendering of those models. Their effort can be widely appreciated especially when you do some non standard moves, by emoting sitting, sleeping, dance, laughter or salutes. Overall, the game has beautiful graphics that will look just fine even if you’re using an older video card. Often enough you’ll find yourself pausing the gore filled action for a minute or two and simply admire the landscape. Either tall mountains, covered with vast forests, bare rock where waterfalls descend into oblivion or deserts filled with trickery, they all have an exotic, oriental feeling about them that you will learn to enjoy.

Conclusion

Guild Wars is a subscription free online roleplaying game where players explore a huge fantasy world, build personalized characters in both appearance and skills, compete in head-to-head guild battles with players from around the world. The game has done the seemingly impossible task of surviving World Of Warcraft‘s obliterating grip on the gaming scene. It’s managed to pioneer a whole new type of MMO business model and gather up a dedicated fan base of over a million players. The long term asset of GuildWars has always been guild PvP, so expect many exciting hours of player versus environment play that will eventually result in a full player versus player showdown.

Recently, Intel has acquired Havok, a company that has developed physics rendering technology for video games. What’s the obvious conclusion is that Intel might have more complex plans for developing more productive applications.

The price of acquisition is unknown, but the smaller unit of Havok will run independently in order to keep the game developers happy. And how exactly are the game developers using this technology? Well, the Havok physics-game-engine give the ability to send very complex calculations to the graphics chip of the video cards hosed into the computer in order to produce a more realistic display in movement and rendering (for example in explosions), because such tasks cannot simply handled by a CPU as good as a GPU - the code of Havok is tightly linked to functions in the GPUs made by AMD and Nvidia.

The capabilities can be extended even more, to advanced scientific applications (like the ones in engineering) – and the GPUs from AMD and Nvidia could very well take the charge, offloading the main CPU. At this moment, Intel creates graphics cores only for its chipsets but with the acquisition of Havok we should expect something more – maybe even some Intel graphics cards that would compete with the already existing cards that have graphics processing units from  AMD and Nvidia.

Hungry for some horror action?
Prepare yourself for the release of You Are Empty, a Mature-rated FPS which promises to attract the player in a fascinating, unusual world.
Involve in this parallel approach of the facts that took place in the Soviet Union, in the 1950’s, when the Russian nation was wrapped in communism.



<-125x125 Button - left->On this imaginary side of the history, the Soviet scientists are building some super humans with supernatural powers, able to spread the communism around the globe.
At some point, something happens and they lose the control of these monsters.
People die one by one and a new rase evolves: the mutants.
Your role will be to find a way to save the humanity.



After waking-up in a hospital in ruins, the game will carry you through a dark and obscure ambient where you’ll have to fight to stay alive.
Encountering with the mutants will take place in arias with lots of monuments, Stalin architecture, plants and factories.

Main features of the game include authentic weapons like Mauser pistol, Maxim chain gun, PPSh, Mosin Rifle, and futuristic electrical gun prototype.
The enemies are unique, very distinctive and vivid and there is a very high level of details and realism created by the DS2 Engine.



Developed by Digital Spray Studios and Mandel ArtPlains studios, and published by Atari, You Are Empty will be released in October 2007 in US.

<-120x240 Vertical Banner - right->This is one of the games that you will often see as a testing tool (HL2 and HL2 Episode 1) in order to discover the processing power of new generations of video cards due to visual effects like HDR (high dynamic range imaging) or the shader lighting that gives a realistic look. The Original Half-Life shooter-game introduces us to a world where we see Gordon Freeman (as one of the PH. D. assistants at the Black Mesa Research Facility – they did everything but pure research there – but we will get to that later on). Even the name is interesting – it gives you the idea that somehow when you’re always in the middle of a shooting you will end up to have the health-bar at half of its length most of the times – which is not entirely far from the truth – it can get very “hot”, especially when you’re running out of bullets and a silly zombie or monster refuses to drop dead. From the point of view of the recommended hardware requirements, you would need a 2.4 GHz CPU, Windows 2000/XP/Vista, a DirectX 9 video card, 512 RAM (or more) and 4.5GB hard drive space.

The Story in the Game:
An experiment gone wrong (another typical insertion in the story with the purpose to make the transition to the SF-area) sends Gordon in the middle of a cosmic battle – angry aliens are killing Black Mesa members of the staff or they turn them into zombies. The (good old) government forces arrive to swipe them off, but they also intended to “reduce to silence” any witnesses as well. Gordon survives due to an experimental hazard suite that protects him. In the end of the first story, he kills what he thinks to be the source of infestation but the victory moment is spoiled by the mysterious G-Man, an “interdimensional bureaucrat, who seals Gordon into a stasis, away from Earth and time itself.

In the second story (Half-Life 2), the G-Man awakens Flash Gordon, but not exactly with good intentions. Gordon gets back on a destroyed Earth where he feels he is just a powerless citizen of City 17, a grim city. He becomes the center of resistance led by the former Black Mesa rebel scientists – Dr. Isaac Kleiner and Eli Vance. Gordon finds his hazard suite and with the help of Alyx (Vance’s daughter) and her pet robot, Dog, goes against the Combine Alien war lords, their machines and the modified humans that represent the force of the Combine. When he reaches the Citadel, Gordon finds the big human traitor – Dr. Wallace Breen. Our hero escapes, with Alyx, but the G-Man shows up again and throws Flash into the timeless dimension again. This character reminds me of the “smoker” character from the X-Files TV show.

After a while, Gordon and Alyx come back to reality and discover they have escaped the big explosion of the reactor. They are also out of G-Man’s reach now as well. This is where the third part of the story begins and where the Episode One takes place. The City 17 had come back to life somehow only to initiate a self-destruct sequence – and so Alyx with Gordon must escape. This is what gives the game an always-on-the-go feeling because you have to run or walk fast in most cases – it’s how the action script has been written – you’re not supposed to jump over a hole and stay a little to rest or admire the surroundings.

The Levels:
This “continuation” of Gordon’s adventures, named “Episode One”, is divided into 5 big chapters that do not have loading times only between them, but also when you leave an area and reach the point of entry of another. The “commentary mode” is also very interesting as you will not receive damage while you move around with this option that can be set from the game start panel.

In the first chapter, “Undue Alarm”, Alyx will be happy as soon as Dog takes you out of some scrapes of metal, and after some more chit-chat – and the recovery of the Gravity Gun you will reach an area with no bridge towards the next stop. You jump in a car with Alyx and Dog literally throws the vehicle onto the point of entry where you wanted to arrive. But hold on buster, this isn’t where the ride ends – hold tight – you about to slide down with the car through a lot of holes and passages before you actually can jump out of it. It’s the on-the-go and the highly unstable shaking grounds that make you move from one corner to another with a fast speed.

“Direct Intervention” is what you have been prepared for in the previous area and this is where you actually use your suit to reach the highly protected reactor core. As you might have gotten used to taking energy balls and throwing them around, it’s what you will have to do again (with the temporarily enhanced Gravity Gun). When you reach the top of the core, you will have to destroy it after you activate all the pillars. You will end up boarding a train that will crash, making you to crawl out along Alyx to the next room.

“Lowlife” – yes, that’s what you will feel like when you will have no real gun and Alyx has to do all the work as her ammo is unlimited (!). So obviously she will shoot the zombies while there is nothing much you can do but throw boxes at them. Eventually, you will find a Pistol, oh yeah, a “normal” gun, after such a long ride. On the way, you will meet some more zombies and some Antlions (the name is pretty suggestive). The elevator area is where you will have to start the shoot-out frenzy with the help of the Shotgun and the flashlight (just make sure you got the keyboard mapped out correctly from the game settings).

It’s time for some “Urban Fight” now – it’s just that in order to reach the urban surface – you will have to find a wheel to mount it in the switch and rotate it to open slightly the mechanical door. Yes, this game gives an “industrial” feeling as well – all you get to see most of the times is pipes, and tight areas with loads or devices, machines and mechanisms working in an apparently “perfect” simulation of reality physics and movement. Get your guns loaded and head out to do some heavy damage. You will meet some human allies on the street, members of the resistance.

You will think that time flies by as soon as you reach the “Exit 17”, the final chapter – obviously the level where most of the guns will be found and put to intensive use. First you will have to take a few squads of resistance members (citizens as Alyx calls them) from the starting area to a train station. Damn those stupid squad members who like to jump in the way and sometimes in the front of Gordon’s gun! Like I said earlier on – you just have to move along all the time, there’s not even a second left for taking photos! After you bring all those silly people to the required place, you will go on to the next area where you will have to fight against four big 3-legged and ugly metal beasts. Try using the “rocket-launcher” as often as you can and aim strait to their heads. After you blow them up in smoke, you will go with Alyx onto the train to get out of the station. There is a very nice cinematic movie after this sequence where you can get some insight on what is about to happen in the “Episode Two” of the series.

The Sound in the game:
I was very pleased to notice the extremely realistic sounds of the gun-shots – I even gave the impression to a friend of mine outside the room that there was actually a shooting! It is so precise that you even hear the bullet shells falling down on the floor from the heated machine-gun. The music is pretty much absent from the game (!), but the fast-paced intense actions do have some, and it is quite fitting.



DivX Web-player is Required for watching the Video

Digitainment Mark: 8 out of 10
Developer/Publisher: Valve Software
Buy: for as little as $9 from the Steam Store