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Need For Speed World review

Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: EA Black Box
Genre: MMO
Release Date: Out now

When Electronic Arts announced its intention to take the Need For Speed franchise into the massively multiplayer arena we were somewhat dubious. On paper it’s an attractive proposition – buy a car, spend loads of cash on it and rag it around a city in races against other players. The only problem is, the year is 1999 and broadband was little more than a pathetic rubber band.

What started life as Need For Speed: Motor City, became Motor City Online and was released to critical acclaim at the end of 2001. Two years later it was dead in the water. EA’s original idea was clearly light years ahead of its time, but it’s fair to say they learnt a lot from the experience.

Some might think it’s a bit pie-in-the-sky for EA to attach one of their biggest licenses to the Free 2 Play (F2P) MMO released today, but as it is, they’ve got all the grounding they need to make a decent go of Need For Speed World.

After Motor City Online EA went on to make The Sims Online (which did marginally better, lasting around five years) before taking the MMO model East with FIFA Online in 2006. Low and behold, nearly five years later, the 2010 iteration of FIFA Online has just gone into beta over here in the west. There’s little doubt that EA has done its homework for Need For Speed World, and for the most part, it shows.

EA isn’t just capitalising on their F2P experience for Need For Speed World though, it’s picking and choosing from the rich tapestry of tracks, driving mechanics and assets that have gone before. In fact, fans of Need For Speed will feel immediately at home since it’s 250-odd kilometres of track are built from the cities of Palmont and Rockport – the same locales of Carbon and Most Wanted.

It also spells the return of the arcade twitch-style driving model with a fresh nitrous injection of persistence, not to mention power-ups more associated with the likes of Mario Kart or (perhaps more fittingly) Bizarre Creations’ Blur.

Gameplay – like all good MMOs – starts at the character select screen, or in the case of Need For Speed World, the Safe House. This is your base of operations – where you’ll buy and sell cars, install performance tuning kits and prettify your wheels with a revamped (if somewhat limited against the likes of APB) decal editor. Once you’ve created a driver profile and selected a car from the Tier 1 models available its time to hit the streets. Once spawned you can do one of two things: join your first race by driving to a race marker in the road, or aggravate the resident cops into chasing you around the city in a classic game of Pursuit. More on this in a minute.

The UI will be very familiar to MMO and online racing fans alike. The top of the screen holds your XP bar (EA call it Rep) and icons that call up the map (highlighting events, other players and points of interest), return you to the Safe House, open the social window for adding and interacting with friends (which can also be imported from Facebook) – and more besides.

Read the whole story on Total PC Gaming

August 16th, 2010 | Posted in Games | No Comments

The LOTRO Store explored (with images)

There’s a lot more to the new Lord Of The Rings Online in-game store than buying a few potions for your character. With its tiered free-to-play payment system and Turbine’s obligations to its former Lifetime subscribers, it was clear from the original announcement that the new Warner Bros era wasn’t going to yield a standard F2P/micro-transaction model for LOTRO.

So with the MMORPG due to go free-to-play this month, we dipped into the beta to see what you can buy with your Turbine points – from a relatively insignificant buff to entire expansions, we compared the old subscription model to the new F2P experience… and turned up a few surprises.

We already know that there will be three tiers of LOTRO account: free players, who have paid nothing for the game, premium players, who are free players that have purchased Turbine points from the LOTRO store, and VIP players, who pay a monthly subscription.

Current Lifetime members will automatically receive VIP status without having to pay a monthly subscription. We hasten to add that Turbine points can be earned in-game by completing certain quests and deeds, so all of the LOTRO store items, including those we’re featuring, can be bought without spending a single penny.

Turbine is yet to announce the cost of its store currency (Turbine points), but it’s likely that it will match that of its other F2P MMO, Dungeons & Dragons Online. So for the sake of this article we’ve based the real cost of each LOTRO store purchase on a standard Turbine points top-up: 1,550 for $19.50.

1) Mines Of Moria expansion

Subscription Model LOTRO: Digital purchase (complete edition including Shadows Of Angmar) for $19.99

F2P Model LOTRO: 2495 TPs ($31.39)

Considering you can currently buy the subscription expansion for $19.99 from the Tubine store, this is quite pricey. But then, if you’ve played the F2P version of LOTRO up to level 50 without spending a penny, you’re getting good value for money.

Our advice: if you know you’re going invest a lot of time in the new LOTRO experience and don’t want to grind for Turbine points, then buy this digital version while you can.

2) Quest Packs

Subscription Model LOTRO: All quests are freely available throughout Middle-Earth

F2P Model LOTRO: 600+ TPs ($7.55+)

Turbine has bundled up some of the quests in each area and will unlock them only for a specified amount of Turbine points. There are still plenty of quests available to free and premium players, but if you still want more meaning to squashing ruin-weavers and bashing Tarkrips after you’ve exhausted the Lone-Lands of quests, it will cost you 600 Turbine points.

In all fairness, there are few LOTRO players that have completed more than half the quests in any given zone, so only perfectionists and ardent fans are likely to dip into their wallets for these.

Read the whole story on Total PC Gaming

August 16th, 2010 | Posted in Games | No Comments

StarCraft 2 review

Publisher: Activision Blizzard
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Genre: RTS
Players: 1-8
Released: Out Now

You can never go back to a state of grace, they say. No matter what you try, time and toil make it impossible to reclaim the joy and sense of wonder you had when things were new. As life-long gamers we’d be inclined to agree; there’s just a sense that as time goes by, we become more difficult to impress – give us something new or take it away.

Well, what they say is wrong; with StarCraft II we’ve been taken back to a time when the RTS genre was a joy; tightly crafted, challenging, yet accessible and entertaining. You’re going to hear a lot of lazy talk about how Blizzard has effectively just re-skinned and updated the formula that made the original StarCraft such a phenomenal success, but that’s mostly wrong, and largely missing the point

Yes, the heart of the old gameplay is here, featuring StarCraft II’s three finely balanced races, the rednecks-in-space Terrans, the hideous, alien Zerg, and the technological/Psi-based warrior race, the Protoss. This is still a traditional RTS in which you’ll gather resources, build a base, develop your technology, and destroy the enemy but Blizzard have taken the formula that they perfected twelve years ago and given it an astounding level of polish and refinement.

The first of which is new way StarCraft II’s epic story is told. While StarCraft was famous for its great brief cut-scenes most of its story was told in-game via talking heads. It’s often difficult for real time strategy games to get their narrative across and really connect missions with story. In StarCraft II, though, your ship – The Hyperion – serves as a point and click adventure hub in four areas; the Bridge, the Cantina, the Armoury and the Laboratory. In between missions, you’ll use these areas to talk to the motley crew you’ve gathered. And there’s a hell of a story to be told here.

It charts the fortunes of lead character Jim Raynor, as he fights to bring down the despotic Dominion, survive the Zerg onslaught, and battle with his inner demons from the loss of his lover, Kerrigan (to the Zerg swarm, where she survives as the Queen of Blades and plots the destruction of humanity). The highly polished interactive areas all have elements you can play with (our favourite is the Cantina, with it’s jukebox playing StarCraft versions of southern rock anthems such as like Sweet Home Alabama and sweet Lost Vikings arcade game), but you’ll eagerly return after each mission for the character conversations in each that drive the narrative. It’s a tale told with a truly superb script and wonderful voice work (with music to die for). It all goes to making you care that much more about Raynor’s battle to save humanity.

There’s also some narrative gameplay choice – as with missions requiring you to either side with, or against crewmembers determining whether they stay with you or leave, taking their technical advantages with them and changing the story. It all just gives StarCraft II greater narrative depth, as well as further replay value.

This is a level of love and polish that works its way into StarCraft II’s gameplay in so many ways, elevating its way above core genre concepts. While things that RTS gamers may have gotten used to in StarCraft II’s contemporary genre stable-mates, (facing and cover aren’t here), StarCraft II has its own nuances, like line-of-sight and rate of fire. And, there’s countless RPG unit effects, like healing, splash damage, and the ability to slow your enemies.

It’s the versatility of the units you field that makes it such fun, with old friends like Marines and Siege Tanks joined by the transforming Viking or massive Thor Walker. There’s an underlying rock, scissors, paper mechanic to be sure, it’s just that you have several varieties in each category. But, once you start to get to grips with it, things become second nature and that’s when choice and play-style begin to deepen the experience.

What’s astounding about the StarCraft II campaign in particular, is just how tight the mission design actually is. We’d be hard-pressed to point to an RTS with as great a flair for it, or one which ramps up quite so well. It seems that Blizzard really took to heart the fact that it would effectively be re-introducing the genre to a whole new unsuspecting generation, but that, rather than dumb down the concept as others have, (yes, we’re looking at you Command & Conquer 4), they chose to create a perfectly gentle curve that would both teach, and challenge.

Read the whole story on Total PC Gaming

August 16th, 2010 | Posted in Games | No Comments

Civilization 5 preview

Civilization 5 is being developed by Firaxis Games and will be published by 2K Games on the 24th September 2010.

What’s that you’re hearing? Why, it’s the ire of the fans, directed straight at your face. That’s normally the case, as we well know – gamers like what gamers like, and what they don’t like is change. So it still surprises us that so little flak is aimed in the direction of Civilization V, even though developers Firaxis Games have tinkered with a fair few standing elements we’ve come to expect from the series.

Gone are the days when a mere four sides were available to travel in/be attacked from, as the squares of yore have been replaced with the hexagons of The Future. It’s when you consider the tactical implications of such a seemingly simple change that you begin to realise just why the fans of this long, long running series aren’t actually that annoyed: it’s a bloody good addition. Two extra sides with which to expand or with which to attack – it’s an extra 20 ways to expand or attack on ten hexes; another 100 directions on 50; a thousand for 500. It seems like so little, but it brings with it so very, very much.

But let’s not get carried away here. After all, there are people out there that haven’t played a Civilization game in their lives, even though it’s been available for 19 years (and you can play a version of the original for free, online, right here (www.freeciv.net)), so we should do some brief explaining. This is a game of turn-based strategy. In it, players lead their chosen people through thousands of years of human history, from prehistory, through medieval times, the renaissance, the industrial revolution, modern times and on into the future – with all the other bits in-between, naturally.

Along the way you encounter other civilizations who you can choose to approach however you like – diplomatically, aggressively, merchant…ly. It’s a deep, deep game that genuinely requires you to think and is – as those who have played it will attest – one of the most addictive experiences ever unleashed on the world. It’s almost as if ‘just one more go’ was invented for the Civ series

What Civilization V does differently from before – aside from the extra sides – is streamlines the whole experience. Each previous iteration had increased complexity of both the game experience and the user interface to the point where it had just become unwelcoming to newcomers. Firaxis attempted to counter this with the release of Civilization Revolution back in 2008 to some degree of success, but that version was clearly cut back in many ways the main series was not.

So it is great to know that the next ‘proper’ Civilization title will attempt to incorporate some of the welcoming atmosphere championed by Revolution, while at the same time keeping the depth of strategy and intelligence the main series is known – and is popular – for. One of the first changes those returning to the series are sure to notice is of the aforementioned interface. Gone are the menus, sub-menus, demi-sub-menus – replaced with simplicity, advisers who will help newcomers around the system and a series of notifications allowed fast transport around the randomly-generated maps to instantly see discovered areas of interest. Or if your hometown is being bombarded, of course.

Read the whole story on Total PC Gaming

August 16th, 2010 | Posted in Games | No Comments

Nokia 5530 XpressMusic firmware update v31.0.005

This software release comes with an improved browser, improved video calls, and a new version of Mail for Exchange. There are also general performance improvements. To get this software through your device, select Applications > Software Update, and choose the software you want to update. Alternatively, this software release is available through the Nokia Software Updater. See Nokia Software Update News for more details.