Review: Dirt Showdown

Dirt started as a rally racing game, hence the name. It had a really good model… no turbo, relatively realistic driving physics, and decent graphics. They kept expanding into the other genres, such as Gymkhana, stadium, and others. Dirt 2 was a pretty good success, and Dirt 3 came out relatively quietly – most received their copy as an afterthought when buying a new ATI video card. I thought they’ve been good the whole way, they really didn’t add too much craziness, which is refreshing. Simulation racing is hard to come by, and Shift 2 didn’t do it any favors.…

Review: Call of Juarez: The Cartel

It’s really as bad as you’ve heard. From the very first screen you are alerted to its crappiness. The text itself is circa Mortal Kombat – giant and pixellated. It looks so dated. It really feels like a modern Sega CD – it hardly even looks 3D. I barely got through the first level. I bought it for $5 – shipped from the UK for the amazing price of $2.49 – gotta love Amazon. I figured there must be at least SOME saving grace, story, anything. From what i saw the story tries really hard to be in depth (remember,…

The Viking Kittens Return!

Ok, so maybe they were only just sleeping but here they are: This is an oldie.  I remember this being one of the first “viral” media pieces out there.  Before shockwave/flash there wasn’t much for embedable media.  There was a picture here or there, but high density media was avoided to prevent isolating users with slower computers. Flash changed that and allowed everyone to see the same thing at the same time (upon visiting the site).  In any case I had sucked this down a while back and recently found it again while cleaning up the FTP.  I hope you enjoy…

Review: Jurassic Park (2011)

Wow, it’s pretty impressive how lame they were able to make this game. If they made it a traditional first person puzzle / battle game that would have been ideal… but they didn’t. Everything is WASD on PC and I’m sure ABYX on XBOX. They turned a promising concept into a lame press the button at the right time, twitchy, too slow? die” lump of blech. I’m very disappointed in this title. I see a ton of blocky translucent vegitation, medium detail character models – blocky with giant eyes. The dinosaurs look good, until they move… which apparently the running…

Grand Theft Auto 4 mods – ICEnhancer+

So ICEnhancer 2.0 was recently released, and to celebrate here is everything you need to get started modding Grand Theft Auto to look better then god ever intended. Behold the power of Grayskull: Patches: You’ll need 1.0.4.0 or 1.0.7.0 to apply these properly. 1.0.4.0 is advised as it’s most compatible. Install the original version, then you only need this one to get to 1.0.4.0. Graphics, Textures, and Lighting: ICEnhancer 2.0 Brightness and contrast most gamers prefer ICEnhancer 2.0N Natural Lighting (coming soon) Add Ons: Traffic Load V3 (ASI) – Sick of seeing the same old cars all over the place?…

Review: FlatOut3 Chaos and Destruction… of a Francise

Video: Video has Bloom turned off, motion blur turned off First impression: ugh. I am shaking my head in disappointment.  I would have put the first and second FlatOut as two of my favorite games.  I’m a huge racing fan, and a bigger car crashing fan.  This game really was the best of both worlds. However number 3 is Jack’s utter lack of surprise. They’ve taken well made race tracks, nicely finished cars and damage models, impressive AI and boiled it down to an impossible arcade fiery mess.   Not to say it’s difficult, it’s just bad; a blurry, cluttered mess. Monster trucks,…

Review: Mafia II

Screenshots: Video: I had originally played this on Onlive, I gave it the 30 minute trial. I don’t exactly remember it starting how it did. I seemed to be going through many more story points then before, but I bet I skipped them in the interest of time the first time around. I was really pleasantly surprised. I got this game after all the holiday game download sale hooplah. I had seen it on Steam, Onlive, Amazon – all had it on major sale, but saw them come and go. However, upon checking up on it on Amazon, the price…

Review: Driver San Francisco

Ok, I loved the original driver. It was an entirely new genre at the time. Sure you had a driving around car game, but once GTA III hit anything where you drove and crashed was “just another GTA”. They’ve always been one to spin a story but this latest one is entirely out of the box. It was not what I expected at all. Sure, plainclothes policeman in a muscle car, but there’s a big twist to this one. After a crash attempting to apprehend an escaped convict you’re jumping from body to body. Think Quantum leap meets Messiah (if…

LA Noire PC – Review

Video: It’s a port, a straight port but with an extra tidbit or two of settings and smoothing for the graphics. You have ansiotropic settings, and FXAA (x1, 2, or 3). The textures do appear scaled, as in they look as good at 2560×1600 as I remember them being on PS3 but many of the facial textures appear a bit more blurry. The view distance is still very low – you see the fog and blur on anything further then a block away so you don’t quite get the full immersive city feel as GTA. I like the time period…