Category — Games

Rainbow Six: Vegas is finally done and the reviews are starting to come in. We got a 8.5 from the Official Xbox Magazine and now a 9.3 from IGN.com!

Currently the best multiplayer shooter on the 360.

Edit: 9.5 from TeamXbox.com

However, it’s the game’s multiplayer mode that will keep us playing Vegas for years to come. This isn’t just the multiplayer game of the year, it may actually be the best multiplayer game in the whole Xbox 360 library.

One last edit: 9.1 from GameSpot.com who are notoriously hard reviewers. On the down side, Edge Magazine only gave us a 6.

From The Escapist’s article on Canadian Content in the videogame industry:

Ubisoft Montreal received $6,300,000 over three years from Emploi-Québec, $5,300,000 over three years from the Quebec Ministry of Education and $6,000,000 over three years from Investissement Québec as part of their expansion plans. Telefilm Canada’s New Media Fund has been set up to help smaller interactive entertainment professionals fund their projects. For 2006-2007, the Department of Canadian Heritage allocated $14,000,000 to the fund. In three years, Ubisoft – one of the largest producers of videogames in the world – will have taken in more money from the provincial government in Quebec than the rest of Canada will receive in an entire year.

Congratulations to t! and Richard Dansky. It seems that people are noticing that Splinter Cell: Double Agent for the XBox is better written then Xbox 360 version. From Gamespot’s review:

Michael Ironside again provides Fisher his distinctive voice, plus many more great lines of dialogue than in Double Agent’s Xbox 360 counterpart.

On the Xbox 360, Splinter Cell Double Agent’s story has an interesting hook but leaves much to be desired in terms of plot and character development. On the Xbox and PS2, it’s still not the greatest story ever told or anything, but there’s substantially more and better dialogue, stronger characters, and a better ending–yet the same basic plot and main characters. Plot holes from the Xbox 360 version are plugged. For example, while it’s inexplicable why Fisher would get to use his government-issue experimental rifle while working for terrorists in that version, on the Xbox and PS2 we learn that Fisher’s commanding officer plants the gun by tricking the terrorists into believing he’s an arms dealer.

I’ve been told that the plot hole fixing is all Taras.

I beat Final Fantasy X a couple of weeks ago and really enjoyed it, so I’ve been meaning to buy Final Fantasy X-2 since then. X-2 is interesting for a Final Fantasy game as its the first direct sequel to previous FF game. Its not FFXI, that’s a different game, so it gets the strange “Final Fantasy Ten Part 2″ nomenclature.

It’s also strange because it changes the typical Final Fantasy gameplay, its a lot more, um, girly. In X-2 you play as three women, Yuna, Rikka and Paine. Instead of doing the typical RPG thing of making one a fighter, one a thief and one Spell caster, you can change your class during a fight. If you don’t like how you thief is doing change her into a black mage, what follows is a Magical Anime Girl Transformation Sequence as her thief costume disappears and is replace by the black mage dress. Part of the game involves you finding dress sphere which allow you to change into different classes Gunner and Songstress, which allows you to sing and dance to confuse your enemies, like DnD’s Bard class only with a microphone and more J-Pop.

Needless to say a lot of people hate this game. From what I’ve read I the game actually really good, if you can get past the fact that your collecting dresses instead of unnaturally huge swords, like in the other FF games. So last weekend me and Ceri stopped by an EB World and I picked up a copy. At the cash register we met the greatest EB employee ever:

“Ah, man! Don’t buy this game, this game is crap.” he says.
“Umm..”
“If you’d have brought up God of War, or Resident Evil 4 I’d be all like ‘Awesome Game!’, but this is just crap.”
“Actually, I have God of…”
“Did you like X? Did you like the plot? This one goes nowhere.”
“Yeah, I really liked X so I thought…”
“Did think Yuna was really cool? In this one she runs around in hotpants shooting people. It’s sucks.”
“Maybe we’ll pretend it’s in an alternate universe” My wife says, laughing.
“It’s not an alternate universe, it’s a bag of vomit.”
“Wow, I don’t think we’ve ever had someone who works here tell us not to buy a game before.”
“That’s because everyone else who works here’s a douchebag. I hate them. I hate this company. I wouldn’t care if they went bankrupt. We don’t get anything for working here. Did you know we were the biggest selling EB World over Christmas? Do you know what we got. They gave the Manager an Xbox 360. You couldn’t buy one in stores and they gave one to the Manager. He already had one. So did the Assistant-Manager. The employees didn’t even get a free game. We got nothing.”
…
“That’ll be $22.95. It’s not even worth $22.95. It’s crap.”

As we’re leaving the Mall, Ceri went back and asked for his name. He asked her if she was going to phone up the Manager and get him fired. She told him no, we’ll phone and tell him how great you are. He told her they’ll probably give him a free game then.

Ubisoft finally announced the game I’m working on Rainbow Six: Vegas. 1up.com has a preview here, and the woman who wrote the article writes about visiting Ubisoft Montreal on her blog here and here

IGN awards Ubisoft Montreal with Best Xbox Developer and gives us this lovely quote:

This year Ubisoft Montreal blew us away again and again and again without let up.

Ubisoft: We love you long time.

There are games that make me wish I owned a PS2, Guitar Hero is one of them. It’s Dance Dance Revolution expect with a special controller shaped like a guitar with a whammy bar and everything! I don’t know why this excites me as I could just play my real guitar; well, other then this would let me play videogames and guitar at the same time.

GameSpot has it’s review of Far Cry: Instincts up here. They gave it a 9.2 out of 10!

IGN.com has a review of Far Cry: Instincts up here. They give it a 9.0/10.

If you read game reviews only as a buyers guide then my advice is to pick up Far Cry Instincts this instant. The title easily outdoes its peers as one of the best shooters on Xbox and more importantly it brings some original features to the table.

They also seem to really like the muliplayer: “Add to all that the unique Predator mode, and this could be a console multiplayer shooter you’ll be playing for a long time to come, and even more of a reason to purchase this game than the single player.”

GameRankings.com has a page for Far Cry here. There’s only a couple of reviews, but the average is 89%. I’m interested in seeing what GameSpot.com will have to say, they’re generally much harder on games then other review sites.