Minecraft

This is by far one of my favorite games to date. it might not be exactly up to par with the latest in graphics, but in my opinion it surpasses most current gen games in terms of creativity.

The game offers a classic mode, in which you can build things with different types of materials online with other people, and a survival mode, in which you.. well.. survive.

the original game was minecraft classic (although it was then called minecraft) and it is a very simple game. You start in a sort of cube, with limits on how high/low you can go and how far in each direction you can go.

In survival mode, however, there are no limits in the directions you go. The terrain generates itself when you move in a certain direction. (The high/low limits still exist, though) you start off with nothing, and build your way to success. You craft your own weapons, tools, even buildings. But watch out, because at night monsters come out and attack you (hence the name "survival mode")

heres a video of a castle a friend of mine and I have built recently;



Theres a wide variety of different materials you can use. You can even have a bed! crafting items is a big part of the game, and the minecraft wiki site has a lot of useful information incase you ever need to find something out about the game.

http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Minecraft_Wiki

The game is by far one of my favorites and definetly a recommendation from me. It currently sells for $15, but when the full game releases it will be $20 (it's in beta at the moment)

Nation Red

Being a big fan of zombie games, I was a little disappointed by this. Mostly because I had bought the game with intent on playing coop mode with a friend of mine, but then discovered that only about 4 of the 20 levels were playable in coop mode. Plus it's only an endless onslought of zombies, no real goal besides surviving as long as you can. What's the point? I'm going to die eventually anyway right?

Anyway this game is played with a skyview pov, or almost third person if you zoom in to the max (but I can't see much when it's like that, so it's skyview for me). Use of the WASD keys is for moving around, and mouse to aim and shoot. a couple other various buttons for locking/unlocking weapons, jump-rolling, spending skill points, etc..

The singleplayer aspect of the game was very amusing, however. Playing through the levels was fun, seeing as they actually ended (it also has a progress bar at the top of each level indicating how far you are for that particular level). Plus after each level you get a chance to replay it, giving you an extra star for beating it. This can be done up to 15 times (I think). After that you can still replay them, but it won't change the number of stars you've gotten for beating the certain level.

The first levels are quite easy, but after a bit some harder "Boss" zombies get added. For example, the Minigun Zombie, The Butcher, Chainsaw Zombie, etc..

You start off with a pistol and a melee weapon. But killing zombies often drop different, better guns. I loved the fact that there were so many different weapons in the game (about 70 or so including melee weapons). Killing zombies also sometimes drops powerups, giving you aid in your fight against the horde.

There is also an rpg aspect included in the game. (the only sad part being your level restarts every round, so you don't keep your bonuses past the current round you're playing) The way it works is that based on every kill you gain a certain amount of experience. After a while you level up and can spend your points in certain skills. Some skills are affected by the powerups you can pickup, and others are just always on (without picking up a powerup)

ending with a bit of gameplay from yours truly;

OpenTTD

Basically a multiplayer mod for the game Transport Tycoon Deluxe.
I got into it about a year ago and have been hooked ever since.
It might be a bit complicated at first, but if you stick with it you'll see how much it pays off in the end.

The game is basically this: You're starting a company. You don't really have much of a goal, except making money and being cool. The easiest way to start out (in my opinion) is with coal. Just set up a train station from the nearest power station to the nearest coal mine and wait until you have a lot of money to expand on your operation.

A quick way to gain money in the game (besides loans) is airports. They produce a ridiculous amount of income. and I do mean ridiculous. A couple friends of mine were playing with me, and we were all in the same company. But one of them left, rejoined and formed his own company. By that time, we were way ahead of him and focusing on our trains. He built a few airports here and there, and before we knew it, he had at least $10,000,000 more than us. After we had been playing for a few hours.

Anyway, there are a lot of ways to make money in the game. Before starting, you select a game year (I usually select 2500 and up, because that's when you get the maglev, which is the best kind of train you can have but if you are really serious about it, you can start in the 1900s and use steam/coal powered trains) and you select the type of terrain you want to play and other options like this.

Then you can start either using boats, trucks, trains or airplanes to carry your cargo from place to place making money along the way. The easiest being airplanes, but the funnest (in my opinion) being trains.

Boats are a little messed up in the game and don't always work properly, so making a boat only based company doesn't often turn out good. But using them for aiding a train or airplane based company is a good idea.

Trucks are slow, they can't carry much cargo. But the roads are easy to navigate, since they go both ways and you can have a lot of them at a time.

There are different ways of making money, for example you can bring wood from a forest to a sawmill, and get paid for doing so. Keep in mind you get paid based on how far the cargo has traveled, so bringing wood from 1 side of the map to the other takes a lot longer, but it pays off in the end.

You can also work with oil (bringing it to a refinery), passengers (bringing them from town to town), producing goods (and delivering them) etc etc

In conclusion, a great game to play with a few friends. Great place to also meet new friends, but also fun to play alone (just not "as" fun)
finishing up with a couple screenshots (not all mine)










*side note; there is also an iPod Touch application for the game. I've got it, and it runs great. The only problem being that the buttons are so small I often press the wrong one or lay a track down in the wrong position. (a nice alternative would be using a small stylus, but I have yet to find one small enough to press the buttons on the interface correctly)

Beat Hazard

Prepare yourself for this seizure inducing time waster.
Like listening to music except better, more interactive.

If you've ever played audiosurf, this would be a game to compare it to. It's a game in which you take command of a small ship, with a few lives and enemies to defeat. There is also an asteroids aspect to the game, in addition to the enemies.

The object of the game is to survive, destroying all the obstables on your screen (enemies/asteroids)
There is also a couple sets of bosses (one is a giant ship with a few lazers and cannons and the other is twin ships half the size of the giant one with half the guns each) that appear throughout the game.

There are also 2 types of powerups you can pick up that increase the power of your lazer. The first amplifies the volume of the song, and the second gives your cannon more power. Upon reaching maximum powerup capacity for both types, you get to "Beat Hazard" mode, which increases your lazer power to enormous proportions.

The twist is that the game track is an audio file you select from your HDD (or one of the pre-loaded tracks, but that's not as fun) The power of your shots will change depending on the beat the song is playing. A loud/fast beat will give you powerfull lazers, whilst a weak/slow beat will leave you virtually defenseless.

videos of me playing a couple songs:





Complete with online scoreboards, ranks and a few different game modes, Beat Hazard is definetly a force to wreckon with. I remember not being able to do anything other then play the game for atleast a week after purchasing it.

Ranking up also gives you more unlockables (starting with more powerups on screen, the last unlockable is starting the song with "Beat Hazard" mode activated)

A Beat Hazard DLC called Beat Hazard Ultra is in the process of being made. With it will come online multiplayer support, different boss/enemy types, more powerups for a price that has yet to be announced. But for now, Beat Hazard supports local coop (on the same computer) provided you have an extra gamepad handy.

Mercenaries 2

Great game, really enjoyable. Be it a hardcore game session or just a
few minutes of destroying everything in your path, mercenaries is
always a great way to spend my time gaming.

I got the game a couple weeks ago thanks to my friend lending it to
me. The controls took a little getting used to when I began playing,
but after a bit I got the hang of it. I really enjoyed the way you could
order tanks on the fly and destroy everything with it.

Only issue I've had with the game so far is that sometimes when I go
in certain areas (especially Caracas area) the graphics would mess up
and... well it's a little hard to explain what happens, so I'll show you
with a video:



Other than that, the game works fine. I (of course) sided with the
pirates as soon as I could complete missions for them. The only one I
had trouble with was the one where you would steal rum from UP and
drive it to a pirate area for delivery. I completed the first level but
couldn't complete the second or third. Guess I'll just have to keep
trying!

Another thing that I enjoy about this game is the humor aspect of it.
You can put on a chicken suit and complete the game wearing it. As
you can guess, it's very hard to take a mercenary seriously while
seeing him wear a chicken suit :P

I also like the fact that you could gamble with your partners, because
I always won and got rich right from the beginning thanks to them.
Lots of spending money at the start really helps making the game fun
to play.

All in all, this was a great game, but it had a multiplayer aspect that I
wasn't able to appreciate seeing as I had no one to play with. Maybe
sometime I'll get around to testing it. Also has a nice gta feel to it,
except that people don't even care if you take their cars! (I think they
respect the mercenary too much)

Titan Quest general

I've played through Titan Quest recently, had started it a few years ago but never got around to finishing it. Recently a friend of mine (same friend from RE5) had expressed interest in beating it, so we started new characters and beat the game. Now we're on the expansion though, which is surprisingly long for 1 act in the game. It's almost as long as the entire game :P but I'm not complaining, it's very entertaining and fun.

My character is a ranger (Archery and Nature masteries) although I've only used the healing spell and Heart of the Oak for nature mastery, the rest of my points have been going in archery. My friend, on the other hand, decided to me a mage (thank god, didn't have to argue about who gets what drops) and he went with the earth and storm masteries.

The start of the game was a bit slow, but it really catches on later. We've only beat the game once, but there are different difficulties to play the game on once you've beaten it a few times. We will probably keep playing after we're done with it this time, so we can experience having our characters maxed out.

After getting by the starting area, it gets a lot more interesting, because you meet up with some people that you might actually recognize in real life (for example; Leonidas and a few others later on)

Another great aspect of the game is mod support. There's a game mode called "Custom Quest" on the main menu which allows you to select user made Quests to try. I've downloaded a mod myself called "Titan Quest Lilith TWoD Battles of Jalavia". Here's a video of me demonstrating a few of it's aspects.



As you can see, it changes a lot of the game's structure (as in mastery selection and shop items. You can even stack 25 potions on top of each other as opposed to the game's regular amount of 5)

The only problem I have with the mod is that you can't hear people expressing their dialogue, but I didn't really expect to see that in a mod anyway.

Resident Evil 5 Thoughts

My friend told me about this game, and how it had a great coop aspect to it, so we decided to give it a whirl using skype to communicate throughout the whole experience.

First off, the boss with the big fire furnace. I had accidentally died in the furnace after almost killing the boss, but we brushed it off with a few laughs and continued on playing. We eventually got passed that, and were killing people from the turrets on the truck on the way to the town. I didn't like the fact that we had different turrets, for the obvious reason being that one of them was a minigun and the other was just a simple automatic rifle, but we played through the game twice to try different difficulties, and switched characters for the second playthrough, so I got to experience both anyway. We were always devising plans and strategies to get by most of the hard parts.

But then came the big troll boss. The one boss where you only had quicktime events. We could not figure out how to stop that one move he did, where he threw a boulder at us, except by blowing up the barrel when the boulder got near it. (but that only worked once, so we couldn't do it for the other times he threw it) we had to keep trying until we got lucky enough that he would only throw that boulder once or twice and we could get by taking the damage and still surviving.

There was also the problem of the before last boss. After dying many times, we finally devised a plan that worked for us. I would kill all the little black spurts of goo that would shoot at us, while my friend would continue killing it with the hammer of dawn (I don't know the actual name of the weapon).

We had to look at guides to help us with Wesker though, because it seemed as though the fight would never end and we always ended up dying for some silly reason (as in falling off the edge)
Turns out all we had to do was wait for him to go into ultimate defense mode (which looked like a tornado of goo spinning around him) and right after if you rush to him you can activate a quicktime event where Chris (or Sheva) would grab him and Sheva (or Chris) would stab him in his heart thing, killing him instantly.

So all in all, the game was quite fun, a great coop experience that I would appreciate seeing in future games (not so many games today are focused on coop anymore). The game also had a nice learning curve to it in the sense of quicktime events. (My friend was used to them, but I was completely new to them and had to practice using them for a bit before actually being able to complete specific quicktime tasks)