Graphics: The colors are pretty vibrant on my Nintendo DSi and it seems that Nickelodeon made an effort to make it into very distinct color schemes due to the fact that there are some color and shape mini-games in the story mode. No special cell-shading here, but let’s be honest now, it’s perfect for the target audience.

Sound: Not much to say here. Not like I play early childhood video games games as a habit, but I assume they used the same voice actors as the cartoon and had them do sound bytes. This was pretty cute, as an educational type game but I wouldn’t want to hear it over and over again as an adult. But the game is for pre-schoolers, and for them, it’s fantastic.

Dynamics: My favorite section of reviews: I thought the overall gameplay to be very linear — not a bad thing for younger minds. The mini-games go from one to the next and don’t really stop for anything. Also interesting is that neither the directional pad or A,B,X,Y keys work. And I’m pretty sure that this was by design; you figure that as a young child, you’ll probably be using the stylus more than anything, so all of the controls are built into the touchpad. From that perspective, I think that it was a brilliant move, although I’m curious as to what age group does actually start to tinker with the keys.

My one single black mark — only like a semi-gray one, really — is probably when Kai-Lan asks you to say something. At first I was trying to say the words but on a offhand thought, I decided to blow in the microphone instead. What’s strange is that it also worked and took it. Now, this isn’t necessarily something that 2K Play can control, but I don’t know how sensitive a DSi can detect actual word patterns. It’d be curious to do some testing in this fashion, but that’s for another day.

Overall: 2K Play is the division of 2K that creates games for this age group. So if you have a little one, love this game, and am looking for similar titles, go there first to find more information. Kai-Lan is a cute series that delves into the Chinese culture and I think that it’s great that we’re starting to see this beginning to pop up even in mainstream gaming.

Now, admittedly, the entire historical aspect of the game is fascinating. The sequel to the hit Assassin’s Creed has amazing graphics, and it’s not as dreary as the first one with the right amount of things to do and sub-storylines that allow it to function altogether very well. Even the latest Battle at Forli DLC was worth more than the money you pay since it gives another chapter of the story arc and explains some more things that are going on.

So you’re kind of built up….. then it’s like… poof. Uhh. What?

The end boss is a cake walk. You don’t have to do anything pretty much to beat the historical version of the game which is strange since end of games are usually a lot more difficult. Not a huge deal although for those looking for a challenge, be sorely disappointed. The credits that roll that show you as the character Desmond, is a playable end which leaves the storyline open for another one. Great, ACIII coming soon to your PS3.

But here’s the kicker. The part where it connects Ezio’s life with Desmond’s? After beating the last guy to a pulp? You’re kind of left going, what the hell?!!? Total cheese factor. I mean, there are few games or television shows that can get away with this type of story arc and if you watch Stargate SG-1, you’ll understand what I’m saying if you get to the end, but it just wasn’t executed very well in my opinion. Almost like those movies where the end seems cut short because they ran out of money and had to end it quick. You’re just left hanging with… what’s going on? Why was it like that? And is that part of it going to be developed even further?

Overall, the game play was very smooth and I would have to say that the overall experience saved the game from a kind of bitter-sweet end. It was great to see the end of the game, but on the flip side, you just can’t help thinking back going…. what the hell were they thinking when they wrote that part in. Even the tie into Ubisoft’s new UPlay was pretty interesting since you could unlock more things and expand on a very good game. The entire concept was well thought out… except that one part and I have to say that this year’s going to be tough when it comes to action adventure games. There so far has been a high bar that’s set by last year’s GOTY and and ACII doesn’t quite get there although it was fantastic overall.

And boy, I have to say that the entire experience is amazing. Nintendo really outdid themselves here.

For the most part, the entire game play is smooth just like its predecessors. But there are a few things that make this game worth every penny. The only one that you absolutely have to go into mentioning is the one about multiplayer through the game mode.

Most games try to scroll you through the game and drag along all of the players. New Super Mario Bros. Wii however, uses the player that runs to the farthest edge of the screen as the one that drags the game. This means that you technically could kill your teammate if you move too far and they haven’t caught up. You can also screw them up by jumping on top of them and so on, which makes it absolutely frantic when you’re playing on an ice level with ledges.

But in the same instance, it makes the entire game fantastic. You can bust through a level with multiple people trying to achieve the same goal. Before, this was only reserved for FPS shooter types or capture the flag. Not even close for scroller games. But now, it’s a seamless play where gamers are immersed in the same screen (no splitting) and are looking for the same things like coins and such. Team effort at its finest, which is actually a whole new level of game play.

I have to say that I haven’t had a chance to touch the Super Guide mode yet, but this definitely has a lot of replay value. Even my wife, whom usually just watches me play the review titles had to pick up a controller and couldn’t put it down.

The game itself does come with a pretty thick manual, and if you’ve never played any of the Marios before, I would probably suggest you familiarize yourself with at least the concept. I personally prefer to play it with a controller instead of the nunchuks being of the old school Mario play. Would be interesting to see it actually work with the classic controller too, but obviously that wouldn’t work with some of the movements you need for this game. Either way? I’m looking forward to waking my wife up bright and early this weekend to finish beating this sucker. And I’m sure that anyone that has that old Mario nostalgia would entirely understand.

First off, this patch proves one thing. What the community calls “glitching” with the villager up the side of cliffs and such, was indeed not a “glitch”. Why anyone came up with that term to begin with is beyond me since this patch proves the fact that surfaces were made for different types of jumping abilities and such.

Class changes:
Second, with the new warrior speed improvements, and more health, it’s too bad that if the guy falls into water, he doesn’t drown. I mean, come on. The new class balancing basically made the worst class into the best, and downgraded some classes that didn’t need to be downgraded (specifically, I’d say the Ranger and Worker). Priest is still a great class to play regardless of the range and power drops and Mage wasn’t touched.

Maps:
New map wise, the New Pork map is completely crazy vast. I think this map actually could take on 64 players itself if the P2P servers could handle it. It would be great to have some way to sell or develop new maps by the community.

Bugs:
Voice chat is still bugged. This is where depending on how you join the game, or switch teams, you might be on one team but can hear the entire other team’s conversation. New bug where mining for metal, had the metal disappearing. Couldn’t recreate but I didn’t look too hard at it.

Scoring:
With the new scoring, it’s been basically tweaked down so that you basically suck at scoring. Which probably was an effect of keeping the title, but it does make it sort of… bleh.

Host system:
While the host now cannot kick or ban players, it also becomes an incredible annoyance. Mainly because with the several clans that I usually hang with (Broccoli Crew, Mr. Ts, Rockstars), these individuals usually are pretty fair with kicking the people that try to mess up the game. Namely, tkpanda148888. This guy just goes around and tries to sabotage games entirely which while apparently gives him great pleasure, it creates a terrible gaming environment. There are others, but known throughout the community, this guy is one serious jerk.

Thus, there should be a voting system. Perhaps if you can vote throughout the system and have to register at least a percentage of votes to kick or ban someone. With the new patch, I also found that there are hosts out there that I used to be able to connect to and now cannot. Sounds like some changes on the server side.

Synopsis:
Overall, the feel of the new patch is pretty good. I’m not really enthusiastic with the class changes, but overall it shows that the developers are always watching the scene and taking notes from the community. That makes it all the more worthwhile to support them in any sort of paid endeavors that they release. Outside of that? Get your Cakey ON!

I would say that if you’re taking a break from all the RPGs and action/fighting games, this is one of those great in-between ones that seems to have a decent story arc and the graphics are very much cartoonish which lends itself to the younger generation. Personally, I found most of the gameplay to be satisfying although the switching between players and weapons was somewhat annoying every time you were trying to adjust things in the middle of combat. Outside of that, it was pretty smooth and had a 3D feel.

The demo itself for the PS3 is rather long compared to much of what you can download and was surprising to me for as much as I played. Just exploring the entire level and area took probably somewhere around forty five minutes to an hour, but that was going slow. You could probably race through it pretty quickly if you knew where you were going instead of picking up everything and fighting everyone you could.

The only thing I dislike about this game is the voice acting. It’s not that it’s bad voice acting, but somehow the fact that it’s in English but subtitled just throws me off. Either do the entire story in Japanese and subtitle it, or do it all in English with the option of subtitling. Having it in English with a fake Asian accent and subtitling sort of deters from the game itself, but it could just be me considering I watch a lot of imports and foreign films.

Due to the different ports of this game, I’m rather curious as to how the handheld versions will fare since it’s going to every next-gen system along with the PC which means that the graphics will probably be the thing to suffer the most and controls will be awkward.

Overall, I found that this game was very enjoyable and probably will look forward in getting a copy when it comes out. After my list of RPGs and such for the holidays that is…

The amazing thing is that this game is entirely cute with brilliant music, and a great narrator, but it just screams of my generation when it comes to the blood, gore, and humor. Let’s be honest, the credits rolling with Sir Mixalot? Come on… Baby Got Back is not only a classic from my time but it’s also fitting to the game itself.

I will say that the delay for single player was okay at best. The narration is good, and it’s a good way to learn how to play the game itself. But it’s rather short for all the time that they took to delay it. I would probably wish there was a little more to the story line chapter front. There also are different ways to play such as the Gladiator mode which will pit you against waves of combatants. From the trophies side, it seems like it takes about twelve levels to clear but I didn’t take too long with it.

The greatest part of this game is the multiplayer. There are some quirks that I hope Titan clears out later on, but the entire thing is very smooth for game play and load times. Ping time effects death toll count very much so be careful as with any multiplayer game where ping is king. If you’re going to host a game, FP will detect what your bandwidth can manage which is nice, since your upload speed determines it all and some people just don’t have the pipe to support all 32 players. Wish I did, but I don’t.

There are a few bugs, and user interface things that are kind of crucial. For example, after hours of play I realized that one of the princesses in multiplayer was stuck because a player had stuck themselves against her and you couldn’t grab the princess. Interesting bug, and it came after hours of play so I thought it was rather unusual. The AIs are okay during match play, but for the most part are rather fun to play against. Not entirely dimwitted but also not crazy hard. I do wish that there was a game selection mode though. When you join up with a game, it just scans for new games instead of giving a list. There also is no way of quitting out of a game join once you’ve started the process so you have to wait for the time-out before starting it again. That’s rather annoying with no cancel feature.

Overall, this game was worth every penny as long as there are new maps coming out. Super cute, and hours of fun. Definitely worthwhile to shell out for this one if you’re into multiplayer capture-the-flag type action in a 2D scrolling setting.

In case you want to play… look me up.

 I recently found a blog post which describes a nielsen rating for March 2009 of Top PC Game Titles. Second Life came in at #2 with WOW at the very top. There is a big discussion going on in that post which I’ll leave for interested users to read. What the chart really says is that users of Second Life play it a lot more hours then users of the other games. There was also a correction post describing that SL was the 8th game in popularity in the nielsen ratings. In my opinion, Second Life, has a small amount of users but those users are dedicated and find many reasons to play for hours a day. I find the nielsen chart to be very interesting from my own personal experiences. I find myself wanting to find new places to explore, create new stuff and make new friends. SL is more a social place for many people I talk to. There is a wide amount of different communities for everything. I also find a lot more international people doing business inside SL.

 I still think SL has some promises but there are some major competition coming up this and next year. I think Second Life will still be the best virtual world for user created content. Some of the upcoming virtual worlds may get more advertisers from big companies, though. That could get more users to their worlds and leave SL behind.

Naturally, my first thought was “Philip,” the former CEO, and then M, the new CEO, but as I thought about it, I thought the one who certainly deserves the fame is Torley Linden, who has a lot of jobs with Linden Labs but whose official title is Resident Enlightenment Manager on the Community Initiatives Team. It’s a mouthful, but it certainly does encapsulate his job, which I think is “try to help every resident have the most fun legally possible in Second Life.” You want tutorials with entertaining commentary? Torley’s your guy.

A trip to his Here Island is a trip indeed, kind of a watermelon-colored theme park that crosses getting lost in Bugdom (without the mosquitos and poison slugs) with a slip down the rabbit hole. Giant flowers, birds and blades of grass surround you, and if you don’t pay attention, a giant cat head will come rolling at you out of nowhere.

Take in a tutorial or two, grab some of Torley’s textures, all free, or check out his Flickr page. Gape at the giant pink robot. As Torley would say, “Amplify your awesome!”

(Top photo)
Standing on a cat head (made by his RL wife and fellow SL enthusiast, Ravenelle Zugzwang. Torley’s public declaration — “I love life, wife and watermelons” — is also one of his more endearing traits).
(Bottom photo)
The giant Torley head, his signature greeting (“Friendly greetings!”) and me on Here Island

And the fact that Sony is now providing HD rentals and selling the videos is a smart move. This streaming business is starting to take off and he who has the most content at the right price will undoubtedly be the winner. But here’s the thing that Sony needs to be careful of. When the games that you download are not cheaper than the actual game on medium, then there’s no reason why people would want to buy the downloadable game. This is apparent with both PSP and PS3 games in the store, when you compare to usual market prices in the the brick-and-mortar establishments.

Similarly, if the downloaded movie isn’t cheap, then it’s not worth it. Some of the rentals were HD and saw that it was about $5.95USD a rental. While that is okay, and I don’t know what Blockbuster now rents them at, knowing that I have a Netflix account and the lowest one of those costs $4.99USD a month. But with that, you can still rent Blu-ray or HDDVD.

By being greedy a little bit for a dollar or a few dollars more, that could create a distance between your loyal consumers and your store. I believe that the people behind the pricing for the store have to be very adamant about keeping on top of the pricing of the markets for both media sales and how much price point they should go over for HD rentals. Exclusive shows do not constitute more payment (as seen with Xam’d).

We’ll see with this new offering by Sony. It’s definitely welcome, but on the flip side if they’re not careful of how they sell their content, then there are a lot less people with PS3s as those with Apple hardware.

Photo Credit: (Dekuwa)

Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) has been updating their game almost every 2 months with new changes and areas. Book 11: Defenders of Eriador! was added on October 24, 2007. This book brought a new smaller 12 person raid called the Rift with a balrog to fight against. I haven’t done any raiding in this game yet but I have heard this raid is very challenging. I also have reached level 50 with my minstrel and rank 7 with my spider in monster play. I’m the first rank 7 spider on the server I play on so It’s a big accomplishment but I get no new skills so that’s a disappointment.

This update also allowed players to buy houses for themselves and for their kinships. Players can decorate their houses with brand new items and some crafted items. There are 4 different housing areas for each race: dwarf, elf, hobbit and man. I picked the hobbit housing for my characters and kinship house just because that is my main race and my kinmate liked the houses.

The misty mountains was expanded with a new area which includes the goblin-town. Trollshaws area was expanded too. A lot more quests for the higher levels were added with some great items with good stats. You might also meet gollum in one of these quests. It is a fun quest when you finally find it and doesn’t break the lore at all. Gollum’s cave in the Goblin town area is a a great place for fans of the Hobbit book to visit. It’s not easy to get to unless you are a high level character.

Lore masters and minstrels got some new skills which really was a great addition. Lore masters can rez (resurrect) a fellow player and have more pets. Some of these pets are passive and only for looks. Lore masters can lay tar down on the floor which makes mobs slow down to a crawl and vulnerable to fire. Minstrels can now do some good damage if they sacrifice their healing a bit. Minstrels get some better healing too but the best part is now they have better dps for solo play.

Some changes to other classes didn’t play well with players. Hunters biggest damage skill now places a big x mark on a creep in PVP so it’s a warning for the creep to get out of the way. When hunters track players in PVP the creeps get notified of being tracked now. Burglars didn’t appreciate the 10 second timer on their sneak skill which didn’t have any before. But Burglars are still the best at PVP and can still survive easily.

Monster players can now use warband maneuvers which allows a stronger attack within a group. This only used to work on the freep side but only to npc characters. Now both sides can use it on any player character or npc’s. In my opinion this was not the right thing to do. The attacks were too strong and it pauses the fight which is not good in a PVP setting. I’ve suggested to keep the group attacks but not allow them on player characters. The creep side got some needed skills for higher ranked players which allowed for better fights. There were plenty of silly bugs that got though testing but I felt these were not as bad as the last update.

This update provided a lot of content for high level characters. The housing was the best due to the chests which allowed players to save more items. The rift seems a big success from what I have heard and read. It’s challenging, entertaining and gives great rewards. The new skills for minstrels and lore masters were great and it made players have more choices on how to play their class. The new skills made PVP more difficult in some ways with the tar being the most hated update skill.

I give this update a 8.5 out of 10.