In search of a new Half-Life 2 and its Source Engine, we may bump into “Smash Ball’s hours of fun to play game. It is a game that combines soccer with field hockey, only that it uses guns and gripping hooks. As a player you are given the possibility of chhosing one of the four characters available: speedy but weak forwarder, a slower halfback, a full back loaded with mines, or a fat man wrecking ball, called goalie. The round begins as a contest between the Team Blue Balls and Team Red Socket that are in a mad crowded rash to get the ball. The goal is the job of ball carrier, meaning that he is the only one to shoot the ball into the opponent’s gate.
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The fun comes when you begin throwing weapons and gripping hooks, their type depending on what player you are using and so is the health. Your weight also marks your falls, the bigger you are the harder will be for you to fall. For getting the ball in a much easier way is the tools you can use called modifiers. You will have the skills to cut your knock-out time in half, double your health recovery feature, increase and decrease chances of advancing in the line or fumbling the ball while being hit from another player respectively.

Pressing the shift key (through default controls) you are able, due to gripping hook and turbo features, to explode forward and also jump higher, run faster at he enemy’s goal whenever you control the ball. The grappling hook provides you means to travel further. By clicking the right button of your mouse you can draw a connection line from the aimed surface to the point where you are at. Then a leap forward follows across the map with the only condition that your line isn’t shot at.

Everything is happening at a frenetic pace of action. As a teamwork play sometimes is hard to get a successful effort in scoring the ball, since the fast rhythm gives the feeling of a wayside passing of the ball. Playing as a fullback allows you, more than other characters, to draw a strategy due to the spidermines that are meant to be key defensive installments.

The visuals are quite good thanks to the built off of the Source Engine. There are explosion effects and rockets blasts, characters design is well defined so long as you realize the difference between your team players and the opponent’s. As a conclusion, we may say that Smash Ball delivers a fun game to play that takes you out of the ordinary gaming habits. It is too bad however that you can miss the beauty of defining strategy since the rhythm of the game is too fast paced. But you don’t need to worry too much since there are still a lot of other things to do as you are assigned to different character types and power-ups. Altogether Smash Ball has got an IGN Rating of 7.9, which in the terms of the gaming world is translated as a GOOD rate.

“The Conduit” is created as first-person shooter game for Wii and is reported to be an undeniable success with its visuals that display explosions, lighting effects, enemy fighting in a highly rated manner. But there is however a certain dullness that governs the single-player campaign, while the multiplayer option is not worth minding as a way to be entertained for long time. The game is notably structured but yet it lacks distinctiveness in the area of technical features.
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The action goes like that: your character, Michael Ford - a Secret Service agent – has a leaning toward shooting hostile alien forces. During the game you have allies that at certain moments they reveal their true identity, being transformed into supernatural creatures, and the impression is that further you are left without any plausible reason to involve yourself in the plot. The communication is rendered by dialog boxes that connect to the next level conferring a dull energy to the action. Other noise filling is given by scattered radios that broadcast the backstory of the land and pieces of commentaries when you put down enemy forces.

The control scheme of the game apparently looks simple, but has a power of execution that proves flawless. The controls give access to 10 different actions, at the same time enabling you to customize them in case you need to upgrade them to your play style. Unfortunately, the rest of the game is not as impressive as the control system proved to be. It is a fact that you can move from one level to another, each level having different settings, but these areas do not display visual changes. This gives you the feeling of repetitive actions, with the same chasing for the enemies.

Your targets in this game are bug-like enemies that incubate and hatch from a lot of fertile eggs, and you are left with a constant hunting for these wombs in order to stop their progenitors from emerging. Next to this feature, there is also death watching from every corner, your body being quite often exposed to danger coming from enemies that sneak behind your back or shoot you from above, or through some thin walls.

The difficulty of the levels is present all over the place and because you are lucky enough to hold great controls and powerful weapons in your hands makes you destroy enemies with certain style. Stepping into rooms is another challenging action, since a lot of armed troops are watching, in this case you can take them by throwing grenades and potshots. Sometimes, maybe a bit too often, your progresses are stalled by roadblocks with attackers and no possibility for you to hide.

From the technical point of view “The Conduit” excellent controlled is a nice looking game available for the Wii, but when it comes to its artistry it can become sometimes a real offense to your eyes, due to the same color scheme and no remarkable changes from one level to another. The multiplayer is entertaining for few hours, but the maps are too easy to foresee, thus reducing the excitement of further playing.

When the gamers were first offered “Still Life” they experienced a real thrill in trying to solve mysteries and killers’ identities, for in the end the players were left with the hope that a sequel of the game would follow. And for four years this thing hadn’t happened, till now. Still Life 2 has come as a third in a trilogy that began with 2003’s Post Mortem. The games feature a common character that is a member of the McPherson family, it began with detective Gus McPherson and ended with his granddaughter Victoria McPherson, an FBI agent.
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Still Life 2 returns after a long lasting ‘stillness’ with a complex plot that inherits the burden of solving the mysterious ending of the previous game. The connection to the old story is made through a series of flash-backs while the actual story is moving forward revealing a new serial murderer, the Maine’s ‘East Coast Killer’. The player has the control upon two characters: Victoria, ‘Vic’, and the ‘misery of her life’ – Paloma Hernandez, a nosy reporter, who is kidnapped by the killer. And the story starts to unfold alternating situations of investigations and survivals; the investigation part devolves upon Vic’s character, as long as you decide to have the control on her. For this role, the player is equipped with many options to help in the investigations – key tools, forensic lab that helps you gathering and sampling the evidence that later needs closer attention, through performing chemical, computer and database analyses.

It may occur situations where you miss gathering some important evidence, so at that point you’ll be stuck and in this case more than a little pixel-hunting is involved. Apart from being alone in your investigation, an FBI partner is assigned to you to improve your moves. Then you will need to switch to Paloma and all of a sudden you find yourself in a game where need for survival and horror are all over the place. The rhythm of this situation is hold by a ticking time, since Paloma has to find ways to escape from a house trapped basement within a set time, otherwise she will die.

The storytelling is at its best; the same has been with the Still Life at its beginning and still is with this second series. Whether you want it or not, the plot really suck you in offering many twists and unpredicted surprises. The dialog goes as realistic as possible with convincing lines and the voices of the actors do a good job in bringing it to life. The design of environment and characters is artistically realized, though some parts of the game reveal a graphic that falls short in regard to cut scenes, mainly the graphic issue that introduces the bugs. Toward the end, weird graphic problems display, such as passing through walls, characters falling through floors, or simply disappear.

Though four years have passed since its first release, Still Life 2, didn’t seem to have the required time to solve the game’s graphics issue. But for the fans of this game, it still has some aces in the sleeves, so you will be more than thrilled to try it!