Reviews: Graphics Enhance Gameplay in These Next-Gen Games
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New games for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 let you embark on a hero's journey. Just don't pick a game that's too much like your own boring life.
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Gabe: The Crash of the Titans demo just landed on Xbox LIVE. I just finished it and I was really impressed. It's a beautiful platformer with some really slick animation and character design. It also does a great job of capturing the feel of the old Crash games. It ends a little abruptly but it definitely sold me on the game.-Gabe out
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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters Life!) - Video gamers, finally  emerging from the pixilated haze brought on by last year's  bumper crop of best-selling titles, are now turning their  attention to upcoming releases.
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LOS ANGELES, Feb 8 (Reuters Life!) - It's not all fun and  violence in video games, according to makers of a new genre of  games which claim to boost players' mental health and  self-esteem.
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The next generation of computer  games sporting more realistic visuals than ever is not yet in  full swing but a range of new graphics chips is letting gamers  beef up their PCs today in anticipation.
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Tycho: Keek directed me to a radical (and potentially even "badical") article on BioShock over at Gamers Wif Jobs. I've been wondering about the recent PR shift the game has gone through, because I don't just keep hearing that it is a "shooter first," but I keep hearing specifically that it is a "kick-ass shooter," even though it's a game where you learn about Objectivism underwater while helping jealous composers get revenge. I've never doubted that the game will be great, by whatever road it reaches that greatness. The recent WWE slant just had me curious about whether I'll be able to perform a suplex in-game. You may not think that is important, but it is totally important.(CW)TB
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In an age when the latest video games sport ultra-crisp graphics and cinema-like sound, there is still plenty of love for the good old-fashioned games just like Mom and Dad used to play.
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LOS ANGELES, Feb 8 (Reuters Life!) - It's not all fun and violence in video games, according to makers of a new genre of games which claim to boost players' mental health and self-esteem.
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Some game makers are trying to get players to expand their horizons by reflecting on news events in games
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Gamers may be some of the first to appreciate high-definition content.
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With a new vest, players can feel the impact of video games.
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Some of the best gaming fun is still to be had on the small screen.
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Is competition to keep up with the next-gen Joneses slowly running the video-game industry into the ground?  In Game|Life.
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Tycho:  Sony hasn't been entirely clear regarding what their 1.92 update for the Playstation 3 actually does, suggesting that it "focuses on some PS3 compatibility and playability issues for select titles," but our own experience with the update has been conclusive.  In the Internet's dark places, aggrieved Lair fans are suggesting that this update improves the game's motion controls, and that each media outlet must rescind their previous scores.  I'm fairly certain this is magical thinking - neither Sony or Factor 5 will say with any specificity, and now that both our PS3s are updated it would be impossible to test.  Typically we don't take the traditional holidays off, nor do we take off non-traditional holidays, such at the Feast of St. Motherfucker - a holy day that I've only just now invented.  Gabe's father was around, though, and golf seemed like a good time investment.  Reading greens and choosing clubs for other people is about as far as I get, so for me the social aspects of the game are paramount.  Standing under the awning at the driving range, it's hard not to see where EA's Tiger series could improve.      This year's lobby system is much improved over last year's, but I'm not sure why the lobby itself couldn't be a driving range.  This is how virtually any actual round of golf starts, with every person hitting the bucket they bought and lamenting their performance.  A few of their minigames would work just fine in this context - don't create a custom game to play them, build all of the basic play into a casual, central experience.  From here, modes, courses, and wagers are established.  When new people pull in, carts can be heard.  Links for the 360 wasn't as complete as Tiger, but it had four player modes first - and it had a means to play Speed Golf that Tiger should loot from its fallen enemy.  Essentially, you play the round as normal.  Everyone else plays the round as normal simultaneously, and shots are keyed to a certain color so that the arc of each person's shot is visible to all other players.  They need to steal this - throw the name of each player on there, use the face, whatever.  This needs to be how it works.  You can play an entire course in a quarter of the time.  The RPG metaphor really worked the first few times I bought the product, but it's really lost its currency with me.  There's a point - and it may be with the '08 version of the product - where the number of courses are such that I don't actually want to pay sixty dollars again just to lose all of my character progression every year.  Gabriel's suggestion is to approach it more like a fighting game, which is to say like Mario Golf - with discrete golfer archetypes that have a suite of skills.  I'm wondering if Guild Wars doesn't have the answer - full priced expansions every year, with a perpetually tracked online experience where your prior purchase actually increases the value of the next.  Let all play - online and off - be a part of the core experience, let all play hone your ability.  Don't wall off online play into some purgatory as it is now, untracked, outside of the normal scheme of advancement.    With these thoughts in my head, excited by the sun-dappled future we had envisioned. we sat down to play a round online the next night.  After determining that one of us couldn't play at all or it would crash the game for everyone - a weird kind of crash where you can't play, but you're able to talk to one another about the crash - we were able to play eight holes, at which point it crashed before a victor could be determined.  They've only just made online Photo Game Face available for Tiger, for the first time since launch, but they had to deactivate online features for two other titles to do it.  So, no.  I don't have high hopes.
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Tycho:  Orcs and Elves for the DS has a fairly strong mobile heritage, which is to say that some of its presentation is a little two-frame and raw.  If you crave gold and adventure - a common affliction among our people - I think you'll slip past it, and into the retro dungeon crawler at its heart.  It's been reviewed much better on the mobiles than it has been on the portable, but I imagine that people who review games that you play on a phone have a more forgiving palette.
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These games aren't the best, nor are they the prettiest. &nbsp;Instead, these are the games I played with my friends - the games let us kick the ever-loving-crap out of each other in increasingly fascinating ways. &nbsp;These are the most original head-to-head sleeper hits on the Sony Playstation. Just some fun stuff you might've missed the first time around.
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Playing high-action video games for a few hours each day can improve your vision, according to U.S. researchers.