Grand Theft Auto : Vice City

Publisher: Rockstar Games
Developer: Rockstar North
Genre: Modern Action Adventure
Release Date: May 12, 2003 (more)
ESRB: MATURE
ESRB Descriptors: Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Violence
Number of Players: 1 Player

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for the PC needs no introduction. Not only is this game in many ways better than its amazing predecessor Grand Theft Auto III, but it's also technically superior to the original version of Vice City that was released on the PlayStation 2 a number of months ago. Like GTAIII for the PC, Vice City is identical to the original PS2 version in terms of content, so if you've already played that version to death, you won't find the PC version to be much different. However, the PC version of Vice City does offer enhanced visuals and controls, improved loading times, and a few extra frills. More importantly, it offers the same refreshingly open-ended gaming experience, which has occasionally been reviled for its controversial subject matter, but has far more often elicited much-deserved praise. Simply put, if by some chance you've put off playing Vice City up till now, don't wait any longer.

To be clear, Vice City is an extension of Grand Theft Auto III, rather than a completely overhauled sequel. That's definitely a good thing, because GTAIII's freestyle gameplay was extremely entertaining and offered tremendous replay value, yet still had more potential. Vice City fulfills a lot of that potential, as it features improved production values (including over eight hours of licensed music and plenty of Hollywood voice actors), new types of drivable vehicles (motorcycles, helicopters, and golf carts), new weapons, better vehicle damage modeling, indoor environments, and more.

Yet the most obvious difference between GTAIII and Vice City is that in the new game, you're in a brand-new setting, a sprawling city styled after Miami, Florida, circa 1986. Laced with neon and featuring miles of beachfront property, Vice City simply looks a lot more pleasant than GTAIII's oppressive New York City-inspired Liberty City. Nevertheless, like Liberty City, Vice City is actually a den of corruption and evil. And it's your playground. You're free to roam Vice City on foot or in any manner of vehicle you can get your hands on, and you can undertake a wide variety of action-packed missions, explore the town, wreak havoc, or whatever. The game's convincing physics and terrific atmosphere make any of the huge variety of activities available in Vice City enjoyable in themselves, and even greater than the sum of their parts when you put them all together. You'd be hard-pressed to find a single-player action game with more variety than this one, and Vice City will more than likely surprise and impress you even if you've already played GTAIII to death.

Rather than put you in the role of a nameless, voiceless antihero like GTAIII, Vice City lets you assume the role of Tommy Vercetti, a tough guy who has just gotten out of the slammer. He gets himself back into trouble fast when a drug deal goes bad and he barely makes it out alive, so the basic plot of the game is to get the drug money back and take out the double-crossers. In so doing, you'll get to kill all your enemies, buy up the town's priciest hot spots, and eventually become Vice City's resident crime lord. Vercetti, who is expertly voiced by Ray Liotta, is a likable and memorable protagonist, and many of the other characters he'll meet, like a crooked lawyer and a South American crime boss with an explosive temper, are also well done.

Vice City pays closer attention to its characters, making the proceedings seem more cinematic and more story-driven than GTAIII, which was criticized in the mainstream media for letting people live out their sociopathic fantasies. Regardless, if you were surprised by GTAIII's unflinching portrayal of mature content, be advised that Vice City doesn't pull any punches either. And, like GTAIII, Vice City somehow brings to bear a truly inspired dark sense of humor amid all its violence and chaos. Smartly written dialogue, scathing social critique and caricatures, and a remarkably well-done depiction of '80s excess make Grand Theft Auto: Vice City far more than just a game about causing mayhem.

The story missions in Vice City are generally more complex and often more entertaining than those of GTAIII. They're multiple-stage affairs, often requiring you to take out various targets, make deliveries to key areas, drop someone off in exchange for something, and so on. They're fun, and they also do a great job of introducing you to Vice City's gameplay and new features. You usually have multiple missions to choose from at any given moment, and, true to the game's open-ended nature, many of the missions play out quite differently if you attempt them multiple times. Like in GTAIII, you can also steal squad cars, ambulances, fire trucks, and now even pizza-delivery mopeds and take on various peripheral missions in them, all of which make for fun diversions. The game's save system, which requires you to constantly return to a specific save point, is identical to that of GTAIII, so it might slightly frustrate those accustomed to being able to save anywhere and at any time. But since the missions aren't that long, being able to save your progress only in between missions simply helps maintain the game's pacing, forcing you to accomplish each of your objectives in one, dramatic take.

Minimum System Requirements
System: 800 MHz Intel Pentium III or 800 MHz AMD Athlon 1.2GHz Intel Celeron or 1.2 GHz AMD Duron processor or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 915 MB

Recommended System Requirements
System: Intel Pentium IV or AMD Athlon XP processor or equivalent
RAM: 256 MB
Video Memory: 64 MB

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Rise of Nations

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Developer: Big Huge Games
Genre: Historic Real-Time Strategy
Release Date: May 20, 2003 (more)
ESRB: TEEN
ESRB Descriptors: Blood and Gore, Violence

Connectivity: Online, Local Area Network
Online Modes: Competitive, Cooperative, Team Oriented
Number of Players: 1-8

Designer Brian Reynolds had already made a name for himself with his work with Sid Meier on turn-based strategy classics such as Civilization II and Alpha Centauri. But Reynolds went off and founded a new studio called Big Huge Games and began work on the historically themed Rise of Nations, a game that has finally arrived on store shelves. This superb strategy game combines the best elements of real-time strategy with the conventions of the turn-based blockbusters that Reynolds had worked on previously. By combining some of the concepts of Civilization with the general gameplay of Age of Empires, Reynolds and Big Huge Games have created a truly outstanding game.

Rise of Nations might resemble Microsoft's Age of Empires games at a glance--like other, similar games, it has a host of different civilizations (18, to be exact), each with unique bonuses and four to five unique units. But beyond that, the game has a lot of depth, more so than other real-time strategy games, thanks to novel concepts such as national borders, city assimilation, and more. While these new features might seem foreign to real-time strategy players, fans of Brian Reynolds' turn-based strategy games should know them well.
Unlike in other turn-based games, in Rise of Nations, cities are a focal part of your strategy. Each of your cities has a radius around it that constitutes your national border. You can build other buildings only within your borders, and you can build only a limited number of different improvements for each city (such as a maximum of five farms each). Since expanding your empire depends entirely on your cities, the game makes you think harder about how and where you should expand. This focus on cities also means that each one will become a distinct community, with its own farms, temples, universities, and so on--actual cities will populate your empire, unlike in other real-time strategy games, where most of your structures are at your main base, while your additional town halls exist in isolation near some resources.

This intriguing concept of national borders works as you might have expected it to in an epic turn-based game, such as Civilization. In practice, national borders add depth to the game without being overwhelming. For instance, since your national borders grow with the number of cities you control, you may wish to aggressively expand your empire by building lots of cities, but you'll be limited by the extent of your research in civics. In addition, any troops you send across the borders of an enemy nation sustain attrition damage (to simulate the difficulty in supplying them over vast distances). It's an intuitive feature, and it also prevents your enemies from rushing you early on in the game. However, both you and your opponents can recruit supply wagons that protect armies from attrition damage.

In the meantime, you'll be able to recruit a wide array of different soldiers from different nations across different time periods. Like other real-time strategy games, Rise of Nations uses a rock-paper-scissors unit balance system--for instance, cavalry are devastating against some archer units, while pikemen can make short work of cavalry. Rise of Nations' combat is fast-paced, though it also features interesting tactical considerations, such as flanking and rear attacks, as well as special abilities that your general units can use to provide extra defense for your troops, cause your troops to move on a forced march, or even hide your army briefly to set up an ambush. Cities are also crucial to warfare in Rise of Nations, since successfully attacking a city doesn't destroy it, but instead captures it for your own use. As such, battles over cities are crucial and potentially very rewarding, and they also make the stakes a lot higher in multiplayer battles, which, despite the game's epic historical scale, can often be completed in less than an hour.

Thanks to its turn-based roots, Rise of Nations has other interesting features that aren't common to real-time strategy games, but these features allow the already varied game to offer you even more options. For instance, you can build wonders of the world (just like you could in Civilization), and these powerful monuments can provide bonuses to your troops as they stride into battle in real time. In addition, Rise of Nations doesn't have any troop transports, so you don't have to micromanage your troops as they march individually onto a boat. As long as you have a docks structure in place and the right technology level, all your land-based units will automatically become transports when they cross water. And as you'd expect from a game designed by Civilization II's cocreator, Rise of Nations offers multiple victory conditions to suit a variety of different play styles. You can win by conquest, by controlling 70 percent or more of the entire map, by building or capturing a critical mass of wonders, or by capturing and holding an enemy's capitol.

Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium 500 Mhz or equivalent or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Video Memory: 16 MB
Hard Drive Space: 800 MB

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Kim Possible

Publisher: Disney Online
Developer: Disney Online
Category: Adventure

SRB: EPC

Kim Possible: Legend of the Monkey's Eye is just what you'd expect from a Kim Possible action game, a lot of twitching fingers on the commands, the need for precise timing, and, of course, monkies!! Many, many monkies. Oh, and puns of course. Usually bad ones, which means you'll groan while you are laughing. You know, like the storyline starts with “legends speak of an ancient Monkey King who ruled over Noh Goh”. Yep, I heard it. You groaned.
Ok, so bad puns aside for a moment, what is the game really like? Well, my kids were a bit luke warm about it, to be honest. It isn't that the game is not well done, and actually quite fun in a “twitchy fingers” sort of way. What I mean by that is that you have to have really good timing on hitting the keys on your keyboard in order to make a particular jump, or kick a monkey at just the right time. Things typical of an action game, but that somehow seem much easier to do on a console type game than on a PC based one. (And yes, for those who have followed my reviews over the months, that is as much a surprise to me to say as it is for you to hear. Somewhere along the way I've learned to play console games.) The game plays out much like your typical video-game turned PC game would, in other words. Which isn't nescessarily a bad thing, it is just a thing.

So why were my kids luke warm about it? I think it has to do with the fact that there really isn't much of a challenge to the game, and they have been spoiled by the excitement and variety in a 3D world. Kim can move left, right, and up/down, but it is all along a straight line path. And she doesn't interact with her world other than punching/kicking her enemies. So it is a pretty straight forward, arcade style game as far as that's concerned. Again, nothing wrong with it, but the thing that our kids are used to games that are more 3D and the characters have a variety of powers. Kim can get power-ups as she goes through the level, like a temporary invulerablity that really helps when fighting some of the bigger boss mobs. And there are a lot of things to collect as you go through the level as well. There are tacos from “Bueno Nacho” hidden through each level, cans to collect (which also help to guide you through the level) and special “super cans” too. This provides replayability for each level.

In fact, when you play through a level, you get a message saying that you have unlocked the “Timed Trial”. The timed trials are just what they sound like. You are given a time to beat, and one chance to beat it. (In the regular game you have three lives, or chances, to get though the level and mini save points in the level that if Kim is defeated she'll go back to so you don't have to redo the whole level.) My kids have found this more fun than playing through the level the first time, actually, because they can just take off and speed through the mission. They've replayed some of the levels a few times over now looking for the hidden tacos and trying to beat their sibling at how many cans are collected.

When I asked my kids, ages 5, 8 and 11, about the game, they all said about the same thing. “It is ok. Its fun to be Kim Possible.” From a parent's perspective, I can tell you that it isn't the first game they pick when they go to the computer, but it isn't one they play so rarely that it only takes up hard drive space. My guess is that if they didn't have game consoles like a PS2 available to them, they would like this particular game more than they do. But for just playing through the levels to unlock a more competative mode, the timed trials, the kids would rather have me unlock the level for them and let them just play, not worrying about the storyline itself. If you are looking for an action game for your young PC gamer, this one will keep them playing for a few hours a week. If you're looking for something that is going to grab them and keep them busy for longer periods of time, then there are other games on Disney's Games Cafe that will do that.

System Requirements

Windows ME/2000/XP
Pentium III ® 800MHz CPU
128 MB RAM
16 MB 3D graphics card or better
80 MB free hard disk space

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Grand Theft Auto III is a faithful

Publisher: Rockstar Games
Developer: DMA Design
Genre: Modern Action Adventure
Release Date: May 20, 2002 (more)
ESRB: MATURE
Number of Players: 1 Player

Since its release last October for the PlayStation 2, Grand Theft Auto III has become one of the most popular games ever made. Far superior to its predecessors, GTAIII let you go on a free-form crime spree in a surprisingly lifelike city. It was so successful that, even amidst stiff competition from games such as Halo and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, it earned GameSpot's Video Game of the Year award, both from GameSpot's editors and its readers alike--and the accolades didn't stop there. Now, publisher Rockstar Games has finally released a version for the PC. And while it has somewhat steep hardware requirements and doesn't offer any significant new content, it doesn't manage to screw anything up either. Six months after its initial release and in a relatively unchanged form, Grand Theft Auto III still remains a great, great game.

The basic appeal of GTAIII is the ageless fascination with using firecrackers to blow up model cars, staging horrific toy-train wrecks, and lighting plastic army men on fire. It sets you down in the middle of a detailed clockwork world, presents you with a physics model and a wide variety of interesting objects to interact with, and then gives you the freedom to smash them into each other and enjoy the resulting mayhem. Within this metasandbox mode, you're also presented with a series of missions, which tell the ongoing story of your life of crime among the game's cast of unsavory characters.

While these 73 missions provide a proper plot and a beginning, middle, and end to the game, you can attempt them at your leisure. In between the missions, you're free to do whatever you want, either on foot or in any number of vehicles, most of which you can relinquish from their owners at the touch of a button. Other than the always satisfying manufacture of general chaos, there are plenty of more-structured tasks to undertake. For instance, if you steal a cab, you can begin accepting fares in what amounts to a nearly complete re-creation of Crazy Taxi. Police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances also each have timed subgames associated with them. In addition, there are 20 mass-destruction challenges (called "rampages"), 100 hidden packages to find, and 20 cinematic superjumps hidden throughout the city. Completing these side tasks grants you various bonuses, ranging from access to extra weapons to cash bonuses.

The real star of the game, however, is the environment itself--a corrupt municipality called Liberty City. Scotland-based developer DMA Design (recently renamed Rockstar North) has done an amazing job of creating a living city dense with detail. The streets are busy with both pedestrian and vehicle traffic. Time passes, the sun rises and sets, and different weather patterns move in and out. And unlike in most games, you can actually drive to the skyscrapers on the horizon several miles away. What's more amazing is that the huge city is presented as a virtually seamless world. There is a short one-to-two-second loading time (down from the PlayStation 2's five to seven seconds) between the city's three districts, but otherwise the only breaks for loading occur momentarily before mission cutscenes.

The PC version permits you to play the game in resolutions as high as 1600x1200, a huge leap over the relatively low-res PlayStation 2 version. In addition, the textures have been reworked and are now much sharper. Details, like some store signs, that were blurry on the PS2 are now clear enough to read easily. The polygon counts, on the other hand, are unchanged. The higher resolution makes the simple geometry stand out, especially on the character models. However, the impressive view distance and general amount of activity on the screen counter the somewhat chunky models. Pop-up is a more serious problem. The "bubble" in which active objects in the world exist ends long before the horizon does. On a long stretch of straight road, vehicles and people simply materialize in the distance. On the low-res, fuzzier PS2 version, this effect was much less noticeable. It would have been nice if the object draw distance had been made adjustable, but it's more of a minor visual distraction than something that actively interferes with gameplay.

It's worth noting that the enhanced graphics come at a price. We tested the game on the "recommended" system--a 700Mhz CPU with 128MB of RAM and a 32MB graphics card--and were required to turn every detail to its lowest setting to make the game playable. And even then, it stuttered enough that the PS2 version seemed like the better alternative. It's hard to imagine that Grand Theft Auto III would run at all on the so-called minimum specs. Fortunately, when we tested the game on a higher-end system, with a newer graphics card and a faster processor, we experienced significantly better results.

Minimum System Requirements
System: PIII 450 or equivalent
RAM: 96 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 700 MB

Recommended System Requirements
System: PIII 700 or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 700 MB

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7sins

Publisher: Digital Jesters
Developer: Monte Cristo
Website: www.7sins-game.com
Genre: Simulator
Release Date: 24 Mar 2006
Age Rating: 18+ (BBFC)

Think you can roll with the high life? Reckon you're a true player? 7 Sins is your chance to prove it. Money, fame, power and sex are at your fingertips...but everything has its price. If you want a piece of the action, you're going to have to lie, steal, seduce and cheat your way to the very top of the social elite. Make friends, make enemies, learn their secrets and desires and then use it against them to get ahead. With outrageous mini-games and hilarious social interactions, you'll soon discover that sinning really is the best way of winning!Features:
Exciting 3D interactive environments in which the player gets to mix with the rich, beautiful and famous.

Complete interaction with other characters – seduce them, humour them, bore them or be as nasty as you want!
Non-linear gameplay – players have control over which missions or mini-games to undertake.
Sprawling locations with players encouraged to 'be bad to be good' to progress to new areas.
Themed challenges based around each of the seven sins – Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed and Sloth.

Humour – A heavy dose of 'lads mentality' with visual and audio gags focusing on drinking, voyeurism, pranks and sexual conquests.
More than 20 different mini games, including erotic dreaming, beer chugging, and SEX!

Minimum System Requirements
Windows 98/Me/2000/XP
128 MB RAM (256 MB RAM recommended)
900 MB free hard disk space
1.0 GHz Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon equivalent (1.5 GHz recommended)
DirectX 9.0c compatible video card with at least 32 MB video memory DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
DirectX 9.0c

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25 to life

Publisher: Eidos Interactive
Developer: Avalanche Software
Genre: Modern Shooter
Release Date: Jan 17, 2006
ESRB: MATURE
ESRB Descriptors: Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Sexual Themes

Connectivity: Online
Offline Modes: Competitive
Number of Players: 1 Player
Number of Online Players: 16 Online

Throughout the early and mid '90s, there was a boom in movies that took place in "the hood." This urban-themed movie trend really kicked off due to the success of John Singleton's Boyz n the Hood. After that, the "me too" phenomenon kicked in, and there was suddenly a glut of gangsta movies--the quality of each steadily declining the further in you got. The same phenomenon is happening with games. While games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas stand out as Boyz n the Hood or Juice equivalents, we're also getting our video game equivalents of junk like Tales From the Hood or (shudder) Phat Beach. 25 to Life is the latest in line, and this third-person shooter is, in a word, dumb.

25 to Life is an overly simple third-person shooter that has a story-driven single-player mode and a team-based multiplayer mode. The single-player starts you out in the role of Freeze, a gangster who's trying to get out of the game and escape with his wife and son. You're asked to do "one last job," which, of course, goes spectacularly wrong and messes everything up. You'll also play as a cop surrounded by dirty cops and as a gang leader who gets banished to Mexico only to end up taking over the organized-crime scene there by force. The story is all over the place, and since the playable characters are to a certain extent connected, you're never really sure if you're playing as a good guy or a bad guy. But the narrative is so lame that you probably won't care.
The single-player action boils down to hiding around corners, popping out, and mowing down as many enemies as you can. You'll come across a bunch of different weapons--including pistols, dual pistols, submachine pistols, assault rifles, and even a LAW rocket launcher or two. In case you're silly enough to get up close, you'll also be packing a melee weapon, such as a knife or a hammer or something. There's almost always enough ammo around to prevent you from having to turn to your melee weapons, and there's usually enough health around--at least on the default difficulty setting--to prevent the game from ever being too difficult, assuming you're careful and don't stand out in the open. An onscreen radar displays enemy positions, which is good for letting you know when you're safe and when you've got trouble coming around the corner.

The environments vary, giving you outdoor and indoor levels to play in. You'll run through some Los Angeles-like streets, rob a bank and a casino, run through the streets of Tijuana, and break out of a prison during a riot. There's a good amount of variety, though none of the environments are particularly noteworthy. Most simply contain singular paths that take you from start to finish as you blast your way through the game's short story mode.
As you play through single-player, you'll be unlocking new custom items for use in the multiplayer. The team-based multiplayer is cops versus criminals for up to 16 players in four modes. War is your basic team deathmatch. Raid puts the criminals on the defensive as they protect their stash from the cops. Robbery puts a series of loot items on the map, which criminals must steal and return to their base while the cops try to prevent them from doing so. Tag pits criminals against criminals in a graffiti war. The taggable walls act as control points, and it's up to your team to hold down as much of the map as possible to earn points. If you like, you can disable or limit respawns to adjust the finality of death.
While the multiplayer setup's focus on team games makes it resemble Sony's popular SOCOM series at a glance, you won't find any of that game's tactical elements here. Death comes quickly if you expose yourself to enemy fire for too long. Overall, it's a simple mode that doesn't beat out its competition on any of the three platforms.

25 to Life is available on the PC, the Xbox, and the PlayStation 2, and the experience is roughly the same across all three platforms. The PC offers slightly better control, with its standard mouse-and-keyboard setup, but the Xbox and the PS2 versions control just fine. However, a bug in the PC version caused all of the music to constantly skip, forcing us to disable it. The Xbox and the PS2 versions come with a soundtrack CD, though it is conveniently missing all of the game's best music, while the PC version comes with a Freeze playing card for use with the collectible card game Street Warriors.

Graphically, the game isn't much to look at. The bland environments and generic character animation stick out, and the rag doll-like physics of falling bodies look cheap, especially when dead bodies clip right through solid objects. The sound effects are similarly standard--you've heard gunfire in a video game before, right? The voice acting is passable, though the script's low quality negates any of the game's better voice actors. The soundtrack is a quality mix of hip-hop, both old and new. It's good, which makes the PC version's music bug all the more disappointing. Containing classics from Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy ("Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" plays during the prison riot scene, which is a perfect fit, even if your in-game motive doesn't match the song's), it's the high point of the entire package.
While 25 to Life works as intended, the third-person shooting doesn't differentiate itself in any way, making it feel like a sad Max Payne clone--lacking that game's style and acrobatic shot-dodge maneuvers. The multiplayer is functional, yet thoroughly unexciting. Even if you're a fan of the subject matter, you could certainly do better than 25 to Life.

Minimum System Requirements
System: 1.4Ghz CPU or equivalent
RAM: 256 MB
Video Memory: 64 MB
Hard Drive Space: 2500 MB
Other: DVD-ROM drive

Recommended System Requirements
System: 2.4Ghz CPU or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 128 MB
Hard Drive Space: 2500 MB
Other: DVD-ROM drive

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