So I snagged “Grand Theft Auto IV” for the Xbox 360 last week and finally got to put some real time in with it last night and I’m really enjoying it. Thus far, I’m not finding anything crazy different from the prior games, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The previous games were hours upon hours of fun and this one will be too.

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So last Monday when I was working from home, I also took the time to call around to see if any of the local Game Stops had any of the Rock Band Special Editions in for the Xbox 360 (Special Edition is just the game, the drum kit, guitar and mic). None did initially, but I’m glad I called around, as a couple just said no, while others informed me that they expected some via UPS later that day.

Late that afternoon, I snagged one from the closest Game Stop and since I had sold my PS2 hardware and all the games back, I had a massive store credit. Brought it home and did a little drum and guitar playing solo. Lots of fun!

But the real fun came yesterday when Bret, Tina and JC came and we had a full band. It really rocks with a group of people, and there’s a good variety of tasks in the career mode. We really were rocking out on a lot of tracks and had the most success and fun when Bret was on drums, Tina on bass, JC on vocals and me on guitar.

The only downer came toward the end of our extended session. Reports have been widespread about faulty hardware (EA Acknowledges Rock Band Guitar Defect, Promises Replacements, Rock Band Users Discovering Hardware Issues).

I was hoping since I didn’t get a box from the initial release batches, I’d be fine. But by the end of Sunday’s extended jam session, only upstrums were working on the Fender Rock Band Guitar. My guitar strum bar is slightly limp, hanging down from its usual centered home position. Luckily, EA is doing a two day turnaround on the faulty equipment, so a new guitar should be here Wednesday or Thursday this week – plenty of time before the next D’ Bagz jam session commences this weekend.

Local play was great, but is greatly enhanced by having a few friends in the room with you. I have yet to play online. I tried late Saturday night to, but gave up on trying to hook up with people to play with. I kept getting kicked out of the initial join “lobby.” I’m thinking I didn’t have enough experience. Maybe I’ll make it through on a couple of instruments solo and with the D’ Bagz before any further foray.

Despite the hardware issues, I highly recommend this game, especially if you have a few buddies that will be into it with you. The price tag is steep, but oh so much fun. I feel that I’ve already got my money’s worth, but there’s still a lot of fun, achievements, content and songs yet to unlock and/or tackle.

The Worms series has been alive and exploding worms since the old 8-bit Nintendo.

The newest in the series from Team 17, Worms Armageddon, adds features and improves slightly on its most recent predecessor, Worms 2.

The game is a team vs. team game. While there is a one-player mode, it comes to its full potential in multi-player mode, either with several people hunched around one screen, mouse and keyboard, or via a Local Area Network (LAN) or an Internet server.

Teams consist of warrior worms that can be customized with names to your liking and even sound files. Our team members found sound schemes for everything from "The Simpsons" to "Pulp Fiction."

So rather than a missed shot resulting in a scolding from a worm with a high-pitched voice, you can hear Homer Simpson yelling "D’oh!"

Teams take turns trying to eliminate all of the worms not on their team. If you were a worm, how would you take out the enemies? Team 17 decided to give the worms 60 different choices, all with their own quirks, tricks and situational uses. The favorites on my team are the Holy Hand Grenade (paying a little homage to Monty Python), the banana bomb, which explodes and then distributes several clusters of volatile bananas. There’s also the Super Sheep, capable of bleating its little heart out before donning a cape and taking to the sky in an explosive kamikaze mission.

Sound weird? It is - but it was instantly addictive and fun to play with a group of people. The game builds on the old game Scorched Earth, in which opposing tanks fired at one another relentlessly with a plethora of weapons.

Most everything can be customized in the game, giving great and varied play. Players can build the landscapes and choose which and how many weapons to start with. There are so many options I’ve yet to totally tweak all the settings.

The game play is very similar to Worms 2. A few weapons have been added, while others areabsent. The biggest additions are improved graphics on each landscape and a couple of more powerful weapons.

Sadly, the multiple random cartoon intros that Worms 2 started up with are gone and they are sorely missed.

But side by side, Worms 2 and Worms Armageddon are pretty much the same game. Neither will disappoint you when you’re looking for a fun multiplayer game with a bit of a sense of humor and a lot of options.

Team 17
Rating: ages 11 and up
Requirements:
Pentium-100,
Windows 95/98,
32 MB RAM,
2x CD-ROM,
50 MB free hard drive space, 1 MB SVGA card,
16-bit sound card

Originally printed in the News & Observer and NandoNext.

Dark Angel was a great little show on Fox, created by T2’s James Cameron and starred the beautiful Jessica Alba as Max, a genetically enhanced soldier in a post-apocalyptic near future. The first season of the television show was great sci-fi / action. The second season stretched a little and my interest waned, as did others, as a third season never popped up.

The Dark Angel game, available on the PS2 and X-Box appeared on the market months after the series went defunct. It was most likely in development before plans to cancel the series took place and Sierra decided to still release it.

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A lot of my focus and enjoyment from the PS2 thus far has been through sports and driving games (and always will be), but I’ve always had a thing for the iron eagles of the sky and really loved the 80’s flick, Top Gun. While Top Gun: Combat Zones does not have a thing to do with the Top Gun movie, besides the F-14s and dogfighting, it does share the delight of flying the not-so friendly skies.

The game is split into three eras, a Vietnam-era, Desert Storm and a near-present Middle-East skirmish. Each of the eras have a series of training missions that must be completed before tackling the real combat missions. The training missions seemed to fall into one of two categories: ones that could easily completed in one or two tries, and ones that got tedious, taking uncountable attempts to successful accomplish. These training missions do really prepare you for the enemies you’ll face.

Top Gun: Combat Zones is not a straight fighter sim though, it really leans toward being an arcade fighter, but that’s just fine in my book. The controls are pretty simple to master and turning seems pretty realistic to the actual fighters’ movement through the skies. For example, just as real naval aviators do, to really turn the F-14 efficiently, the plane has to be put nearly on its side to execute quick turns. The buttons are laid out nicely for the default control setup and after the first couple training missions, maneuvering the aircraft becomes second nature.

One of the cool facets of the game, which is also one of the reasons the game isn’t considered a true simulation is the fact that points are throughout. While success of your mission ultimately rests on whether you destroy your targets, score is being kept throughout the game for much more than just the number of bogeys you blow out of the sky. Your score is greatly enhanced by dare devil maneuvers, such as low-altitude flying, soaring under obstacles such as bridges, cranes, etc. and having close brushes with obstacles. While we’re not talking, edge-of-your-seat excitement, the bonus scoring is a nice touch and essential to get the highest rankings for missions.

Missions consist of two main types — dog fighting and bombing missions. The dog fighting can be extremely tough and frustrating. Locating enemies in the sky is difficult, as the radar is two dimensional, while the sky is obviously a three dimensional plane. It’s really tough to visually identify the planes, and can become really frustrating. The fighters I’ve encountered thus far tend to keep a fairly high altitude. Often, bogeys can be located a little easier by ascending a few thousand feet.

The bombing runs also are not without their share of frustration, as these are usually the missions that have to be done over and over again. Your aircraft can take a fair amount of damage (honestly a lot more than a jet could handle in real-life conditions), but all the missions are timed. During the first two eras of missions, failures most often come from time expiration, rather than the plane being shot down. The bombing runs consist of multiple targets, meaning you will have to criss-cross your fighter over a section of land countless times to succeed and move on to the next training or wartime skirmish. One hint is to take your first pass or two to destroy anti-aircraft batteries and tanks. This allows you to concentrate on locating and lining up bombing targets on subsequent passes. Quicker missions, withless damage to your aircraft also translates to bigger bonus points upon mission completion.

The graphics are pretty nice overall, and the sense of flying is decently realistic. The land-based graphics, such as the mountains, canyons, bridges and buildings look nice, as do the explosions that take out those structures.

I love the replays, the close-ups and different angles look like they came right out of the Top Gun movie. My only complaint is that a lot of the camera angles are way too shaky. It seems the developers were going for realism with their fighter-mounted camera views, but I’d gladly sacrifice a bit of realism for a steady shot of my F-14 cutting through the air at supersonic speeds. Why shoot for total realism here, when I get extra points for putting my aircraft at risk by soaring under a rock formation?

This game isn’t mind blowing or a must-have for your Playstation 2 library, but it is decent fun and a game that you can sit down and play, without investing major time. The game is definitely a welcome addition to my collection, providing a change of pace from some of my other games that require major time investment to progress.

I have yet to play Ace Combat 4, but it is supposed to be even better than Top Gun: Combat Zones, so you might want to rent that one prior to this. If the store happens to be out of AC4 copies, Top Gun is still worthy of checking out.

The Simpsons Road Rage sounded like a great concept for the die-hard Simpsons freak. The concept is sound, but in practice, it’s amusing and fun initially, but very swiftly becomes monotonous and lacks any real challenge or fun.

The premise of the game is billionaire Montgomery Burns has taken over Springfield’s mass transit system with a fleet of nuclear busses, that have exorbitant fares. The citizens strike back, using their personal vehicles to taxi others around the city to earn enough money to buy the mass transit system back.

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I rented All Star Baseball 2002 by Acclaim as everything I’ve read thus far puts it ahead of the other two baseball sims available on the market, but let’s hope the reviews I’ve read were wrong, because there’s not much here that I liked about the game.

I will note that I’m writing this review after playing it for an hour and a half against my roommate. To be fair (and also to get my money’s worth from renting the game), I’ll dive into the game again tomorrow morning, but initially I was pretty appalled at the product that Acclaim has released here.

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Both the Xbox and the GameCube have been released now. But games like Grand Theft Auto III show that the Playstation 2 is not going to lose the console battle lying down. The PS2 is starting to have game after game of must-haves. Grand Theft Auto III is definitely one of them, with its unique and entertaining play,and its sights and sounds. All are top-notch.

The original Grand Theft Auto was an addicting and original game when it was launched on the original PSX. The carjacking, criminal-thriving game played like no other video game title. The mission-based game play also had the ability to drive around the city, wreaking havoc in a free-for-all around Liberty City, USA. The only thing lacking was the game’s graphics. The game featured a top-down view, high from above Liberty City.

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I pre-ordered SSX Tricky, the sequel to the awesome PS2 launch title, SSX knowing very little about it, other than that it was a new SSX game and that it was on DVD, meaning more storage space for enhancements, characters, etc.

If you liked SSX, you’ll like SSX Tricky. The game isn’t a huge departure from the original released last year. Basically, SSX Tricky is a tricked-out version that pushes realism further away and embraces some mind-blowing new tricks and a few new features that enhance game play.

With the media move from CD-ROM to DVD, EA Sports Big were given more room for music, sound, commentary and most importantly the tracks. While none of these were slouches in the original title they all have been tweaked and enhanced in Tricky. A few of SSX’s characters have returned, but many new faces are now present, all with different characteristics and riding styles. Another character-related enhancement is the fact that you now have relationships with the other players. A shove during a race can translate into making a once-neutral rider in to an aggressive enemy who will take shots at you as you descend the slopes.

A lot of the original courses are back for Tricky, but in all honestly, most are almost unrecognizable. Tricky also adjusts the course based on the mode. Obstacles not present in the race mode pop up in the freestyle, offering more chances for big points.

The biggest enhancement in Tricky are the new uber tricks. The boost meter along the right-hand side of the screen fills as tricks are performed, the bigger the trick, the more boost you earn. When the meter fills up, the uber tricks become available. You are alerted to these events by samples of Run DMC’s “Trick to Rock a Rhyme.” I was thrilled initially, when I heard the samples, but in all honesty, the frequency of the samples now grates on my nerves. The uber tricks are quite amazing, but purposely outlandish. One in Mac’s arsenal of uber tricks consists of him doing a mid-air handstand on his snowboard, before spinning it. A word to the wise though, make sure you have some major air before attempting one, as they take a lot more time than any of the standard tricks.

Other than the samples of Run DMC getting tired, my only other complaint is also uber trick related. Uber tricks are initiated by holding a shoulder button (or sometimes several shoulder buttons) and then hitting the square button. The square button, is also used to tweak out holds to earn more points. But because of this overlap in controls, I find myself often accidentally initiating uber tricks when there is not room, nor time to successfully complete them.

While the control overlap is definitely a major annoyance, the rest of the game is pretty much flawless. The frame rate is smooth throughout the game while at the same time, the courses are extravagantly large and impressive both graphically and architecturally.

The character renderings are a bit more cartoon-like this go-around, but it fits Tricky perfectly, as the new trick capabilities are exact real-world themselves.

Snowboarding games never did much for me, but both SSX and now SSX Tricky are not the normal snowboarding title. They’re loads of fun and seem to be enjoyable by the avid and the casual alike gamer alike. EA Sports Big did a wonderful job of creating an enhanced SSX game that isn’t just a simple rehash of the original. SSX Tricky is not a complete overhaul, but tons of fun regardless.

Either SSX or SSX Tricky are crucial titles for any gamers’ PS2 library. Personally I have both and think both are worth every penny spent on them.

My rule of thumb with console games is to rent them before they become permanent parts of my collection. I’ve been burned too many times on crap games, so I’ve been really anal about playing before buying.

When I bought my PS2 back in February, I couldn’t just buy the system. I obviously wanted to have something to play in it, besides DVDs. So I broke my fundamental rule of console gaming. I bought two games that day. I got burned slightly on one, but I just couldn’t go wrong with Madden 2001. Everything, I’d seen, heard and read was all positive.

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