Archive for May, 2009

Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Sega has made one of the first online console role playing games in the industry with Phantasy Star Online for its Dreamcast console in the year 2001. Since then, Phantasy Star Online, also popularly known as PSO, has appeared on other console platforms, and it has always gone through few revisions by adding some of the new contents and also some of the new characters to play as. An updated version of the game is the Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst.

Blue Burst allows gamers to choose to explore the futuristic, sci-fi world of Ragol as one of the twelve different professions from three different types of characters. The characters are hunters, rangers, and forces. There are also three races namely humans, androids, and newmans. Newmans excel in non-physical combat.

In the game all the characters are different from each other. They have crazy profession names. Gamers can play as an android HUcaseal, a human RAmarl, or a newman FOnewm.

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Jade Empire: Special Edition

Monday, May 25th, 2009

If we remember, BioWare, Canadian studio, was first recognized with PC role-playing games, which let gamers create parties of stout warriors and wizards to combat with many types of evil goblins and dragons. Since then, the developer has expanded its horizons beyond the PC.

BioWare made the martial-arts-themed Jade Empire for the Xbox console, their second venture in role playing games. It was an entirely different direction than the studio’s traditional games that had heated battles and were generally decided by role-playing hack-and-slash systems.

Jade Empire was an action role playing game, which let gamers roam the countryside as a fledgling martial artist and by using several combination attacks and of course several fighting styles to pummel bandits, warlords, and also otherworldly demons.

This game of BioWare is now headed for the PC as Jade Empire: Special Edition.

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3rd World Review

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

XYZ is the developer of 3rd World. The characters in this role playing game are a little more dynamic in the sense that a ship or a space station becomes an extension of the gamers character. The character advancement in the game is based around skills. Different races have different modifiers for specific skills, but there are no specific classes for characters.

There are different methods for the advancement of certain skills. Sometimes gamers has no idea what action increased the character’s skill. They just did something, and the screen blinks, and gamers receive skill points.

Space stations are the main centers for player-to-player direct interactions. Inside it gamers will be able to chat with other players, make business arrangements, rent a room, and also relax in a local bar. They can trade with the station or with other players.

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Ultima Online Review

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

The game has been designed to look and also to work much like the company’s immensely popular Ultima 6. This rpg-game, Ultima Online, features a continuous changing world where much more goes on behind the scenes rather than most players will ever notice.

In the game nearly everything in the world has a purpose. The “virtual ecology,” as Starr Long, the Ultima Online’s associate producer calls it, affects nearly every aspect of the game world, small or big. If the population of rabbit suddenly drops (due to some gung-ho adventurer was trying out his new mace) then wolves might have to find different food sources – say, deer.

When the population of deer drops because of the local dragon not being able to find the food he’s accustomed to, may head into a local village and attack. As all of this takes place automatically, it also generates numerous adventure possibilities.

The great concepts of game reveals that gamers don’t really have to do anything that they want to. There is nothing to stop a player.

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Wizardry Gold Review

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

The best feature of Wizardry Gold is that it have an excellent plot. The plot has been developed by author D. W. Bradley for the original Wizardry VII. It has an intricate world where magical Tolkienesque characters and Buck Rogers-style technology exist parallel.

The unique blend of science and fantasy in the game is a refreshing change from traditional role playing game fare. It has helped to make the game one of the most memorable role playing games ever. With multiple paths to completion the game also has exceptional replay value.

The plot was mercifully left intact and everything else has been changed for the Gold edition. The sound of Wizardry Gold has been enhanced with new digitized effects and speech.

One more thing, each time your party is attacked, the game pauses automatically for up to 10 seconds while the creature graphics are loaded. After several hours of play, these pauses become extremely annoying (gamers can alleviate this problem by choosing the “full install”–at the cost of 510 megs of free drive space.)

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Sacred Underworld review

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

In the gaming world Sacred was one of the better action RPG games that came down the pike in recent years. The game was released in March 2004 and it delivered solid, Diablo-inspired gameplay along with some innovations thrown into the mix. About eighteen months after the launch the developer came with Sacred Underworld, the expansion to Sacred.

As it was expected, Sacred Underworld delivers some high-level gameplay for Sacred gaming fans and also few tweaks, although everything that the developers liked and didn’t like about the original game remains pretty much the same.

Picking up immediately where Sacred left off, Underworld has introduced a new threat, and also some new environments to explore. In fact Prince Valor was killed in the Pyrrhic victory of Sacred. In the initially stage of Sacred Underworld, his widow, Vilya, has been kidnapped by a monstrous demon. Before gamers know it, they are off once again to plow through a ridiculous number of monsters, pick up mountains of gold, and oh yes, collect a bewildering amount of equipments, all in the name of slaying the latest evildoer.

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Sacred Review

Friday, May 1st, 2009

Sacred is a good looking and a good action role-playing game, which offers couple of interesting gameplay innovations. It provides an open-ended gaming world for exploring decent cooperative and also a good competitive multiplayer option. It also offers a good mix of goal-oriented questing and fast-paced battles. The fight system of the game is finicky and unrewarding that is a significant problem for what’s fundamentally a hack-and-slash role playing games.

It may be very artificial to describe this game without at least a cursory comparison to the Diablo games because it was clearly heavily inspired by that series. In Diablo games, each of the 6 character types in Sacred has a predetermined gender and also they have a distinct selection of skills that gamers can choose to develop.

Most of the enemies only take a few mouse clicks to dispatch, but gamers will be able to encounter hundreds of foes, including types that will spawn more of their kin if gamers do not take them out.
The monsters of the game are all classic fantasy stereotypes like undead, dragons, and ogres. Gamers can use the Alt key to highlight and even immediately locate the seemingly endless bounties of loot they hoard.

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