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I have been listening to the NASA podcasts a while and I really do find some of what they have going very interesting. Other parts, so so. The thing that gets me has to be the really cheesy music they have running in the background. Hideous!!

But yesterday I listened to an edition which had a segment going on about a Moonbase Alpha game, a 3D moon base with a problem that needs to be fixed. I downloaded the game off from Steam and it seemed like a bit of fun. But there really isn’t much there. Fix up the base in 30 minutes and then you get bored!

Saying that, I would like to hear some other peoples thoughts on the game.

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/programs/national/ltp/games/moonbasealpha/mbalpha-landing-collection1-overview.html

http://www.looki.com/gaming/empire_universe_2_s75.html

Here we have another Java based game via the browser. O how it can look good from those screenshots, but yet again looks can be deceiving.

Gameplay starts with building, just like you build on evony, basic building which is based on the Age of Empires style of gaming. However this is as far it goes for building your city on your planets, boring, as you have to wait on time just like on evony! Once you get your space port up and running you can build ships. How much research do you want to do also depends on how much better a ship you want to build.

Yep, I said research, this is endless, and clearly not worth waiting for, all you do is research, build buildings, build ships, mine astroids, colonise other planets and finally explore space.

The idea sounds great, shame it is more boring than daytime tv and far more boring than any other game in existence.

I really can’t rate this game. That’s how bad it is!

I start playing this dam game again, what made me stop again?

It must of been the fact that after two weeks of gameplay I got raped and destroyed. Not only did it destroy my heart but it destroyed everything I felt I had accomplished in the game! I found it hard to get into the alliance I wanted, then some guy with the nickname Ridout in the 129 server just for no reason raped my city to the ground, took everything in it, destroyed all the fortifications and wiped my army out in one blow.

So I tried to rebuild, got back up a bit, sent him an in game mail, for what reason did you destroy me. “Lakes and wrong answer” was all I got back along with him destroying everything, taking my city and made me feel sick.

Clearly the problem isn’t me, the problem is people must spend their own life playing a game to get so dam good, they can destroy you in that game with a few number of clicks. It makes it so uninviting to new players.

My suggestion to all, firewall block the game so you can never get near it again!

http://www.evony.com

Formally called Civony this browser based game brings you a very basic medieval game in which you create your city and expand your empire. This is really a cross between Age of Empire and a Sim City type game.

You start with following the basic quests given to you which is a tutorial that lasts for seven days building up your city, from cottages to barracks, town hall, farms and works. Each building is time each upgrade is time, hence the meaning running in real-time. I have to say I do get rather bored by this game, there doesn’t seem too much depth to it.

A direct copy of Age of Empire’s is the farming system, collecting food, wood, stone and metal. The same again when building your army.

The landscape is repetitive all over the place. There is no continuity, structure or beauty to this game, the graphics look okay but there is no glamour. There are level changes in the map structure and this doesn’t really happen in reality and shouldn’t happen here. It looks wrong and seems wrong.

A feature of the game is the shopping which is very expensive and isn’t worth spending any of your money on. I don’t want to increase boredom by descressing boredom.

Game score:
1.5 out of 5

Created by MAIET Entertainment and published on the web the first time round Gunz had a style and class of what was a good game.

The player could move their character around a 3D area with speed, style and grace. The way in which you could move and swing a sword became fun fairly quickly. So after a few rounds and a loads of bullets fired you could move on and up through levels which was very much the same. Each upgrade was exactly the same, the dynamics of the game suddenly seemed very poor and depth began to disappear. The sound and graphics were good, but this alone does not make a good game.

In an instant the clan in which I play internet games with began to find the game boring. In fact, there was no depth and it took a long time for such add’ons of quest mode. By then the game had been transferred to a company called ijji who decided to introduce other aspects. The changing of the login so you have to log in through a browser window which in turn present their G-coin system. A place where you had to spend real money to get other items for a game which started to breakdown with system problems.

(The login will want to load up Internet Explorer even if this isn’t your default browser which is a problem in it’s self!)

Hackers where able to create a godmode, admins didn’t seem to exist inside the system. This was in tow with Denial of Service attacks led to system failures. Along with bugs here and there, players unable to log in to the game led to a massive drop in the community.

I would have to say a good game broke in the hands of ijji!

4.9 out of 10
http://gunz.ijji.com

At the start of the game your characters father is the demo and dies right in front of you. It was a futile tutorial with controls that felt a little funny and very untraditional. Once I got the hang of things it started to feel better and the game started to evolve.

The thing that gets me is that the game feels too much like Grand Theft Auto. Navigation, the little compass in the corner, weapons, cars, kills, missions and contracts. Mind you, the cars were very lacking, being the fact there was only about five different cars across the whole of New York.

The game is quite a vast world to run around in and once you have done everything, which should take around 45 hours worth of game play. There is little left to do than shelf it.

So the graphics are good, the gameplay is a little left to be desired but works effectively well. The music is from the original Godfather. The cast have added most of the original voices. The buildings felt recycled across the board, hotels are all similar to each other, compounds and buildings are all very much the same. Even the same person can walk beside the same person!

The funniest thing has to be when you are charging round in a car, the people will be a hundred yards away from you and try to die out of the way. And why would there be so much crap on the roads. Surely only cars should be there!

A very enjoyable game in it’s own way, but at times can be very sickly. Although a gene I do like, I don’t have much emotion for this and hence I probably score it a little low of what I could give.

7.2 out of 10

Although this is simply a clone of Command & Conquer there is nothing wrong with the game. Well it plays exactly the same, the units are based on C&C units, all the items and buildings have a relationship to everything that is Command & Conquer. There is very little addition in the way of gameplay, well in fact, there is no addition in the way of gameplay!

The only true different thing has to be the cinematic’s of which they have a selection of actors playing the roles of whom? I am not sure where they wanted to go with the game, it seems far from the books and all about the quest for Dune.

Speaking of the cinematics, well Atredies was okay, but the Ordos is terrible, the guy that is acting the part… well he looks like a borg and plays the most boring of characters! At least there is Brian Blessed on Atredies to keep me company.

I do like playing know, but C&C was always a good game, so a copy of a good game just makes an average game. There is nothing great or bad, it’s just average and frankly that is boring! The only element I like watching is a worm swallowing a tank or two.

It is very hard to finish the game, I managed to complete the Harkonnen campaign but the other two I didn’t even finish. I just found the final missions far to hard.

So the graphics are good, the music is fine, the terrain is the same and that makes it rather boring also. I do like building up the base and sending massive armies to go kill the A.I. But to anyone that reads this I will tell them to stick to the Dune novels and stick to the real Command & Conquer series. No point in playing an adventure here, not worth wasting your time like I did.

6.1 out of 10

You are brought into Deadly Alliance with a rather well made cinematic and then I was disappointed to find out that my favourite character was killed off so I could no longer play with Liu Kang. However there was a host of other characters to play with.

I don’t know where Midway wanted to go with the game in terms of depth and dimension because Konquest was not conquest. It was just game training and rather irritating and boring at best. I for one can only take small quantities of this at a time and that really drags the game out.

I am not saying that Deadly Alliance is a bad game. The Arcade mode is good with strong stand out graphics and arenas. The gameplay works very well, and if you have done the Konquest you can learn the moves which kick ass and easily get through to watch the ending sequences which are rather dull if not interesting. In fact Midway hadn’t put the same effort into the endings as they had done with the beginning intro. Still comic shots with a voice over are rather boring.

I do however love the way you can switch between different martial arts and weapons. This certainly adds to the characters and makes for a rather fun battle. It has a tiny bit of educational value here to show you all the different types of arts. But after all it is a game of violence with a monster load of blood.

The other extras like the makings of, music video, buying new characters and Kontent all help. But “The Krypt” is vast and annoying! There is far too much content to buy and working to get that much can be rather tedious. There is a massive lack of depth and with Liu Kang missing this only gets 6.9 out of 10.

The first thing I noticed with Fifa 2006 is that the graphics are much improved than its predecessor. Although I believe the game is using the exact same engine as in the 2005 edition, noticing replays being exactly the same in some areas as the 2005 version. There are many more additions and extras which count towards last ability. Game goal highlights have been enhanced, the commentary seems much better and seeing players going on and off during substitutes all look excellent. I do like watching all the little added quirks from red or yellow cards to the little stat boxes popping up. Graphically this game is very pleasing to the eye and has that quality only EA can give you. There is still a slight graphical bug with players who have short or no hair where parts of their head will flicker. I guess EA couldn’t fix that bug because it was also in the evident in Fifa 2005.

So how does Fifa play? Well gameplay is much improved, the passing, off the ball movement when you’re on the ball going forward all play really well. On the harder difficulty levels the game engine becomes very realistic. However off the ball the game engine seems to fail to perform such functions as man marking, filling those spaces, closing down players and most often not holding to the formation shape to which you ask. When off the ball the wings are very much neglected and the game A.I. will exploit its own exploit of its own creation!

One niggle I would have to have with the game is the lack of different types of referee’s. There should be more contrast to the referee’s of today’s game. Black, White, Asian, European refs. The annoying thing with the referee’s is the lack of invention on names for them. They could have generated some decent names to go with the refs. But alas, the selection of ref names is pitiful.

The main game function is of course season mode and this time they have my favourite low level team of Barnet. So I chose them to take them all the way to the Premiership and into Europe. I like the new feature of stadium upgrades and the other upgrades all seem very expensive. Seeing my new stadiums as I guide Barnet all the way too the top all look great. The sound and atmosphere all seem very realistic. I do feel the commentary at times let’s the season mode down a bit by failing to tell the difference between results of home and away. There should be some kind of code to tell the commentators the correct statistics of games played against who and where over the career lifespan. That would make for a much improved analyst from the commentators and would make the game feel that more real.

This time I sort of get to see my team winning the trophy, but it’s still not quite what I want to see. What I would like to see is them picking up the trophy and parading it around the ground and then have my players have a picture for the paper segment with the players and trophy in the same picture! A club history would have been nice to see also. Sort of a walk in room to browse what has been won at that club and what you have won to add to that club.

I am not sure how the math works with the currency in Fifa but it should work better than what it is currently. There should be British Pounds (£) for England, Scotland, Euro’s (€) for the countries in Europe and American Dollars ($) for the rest of the world. Along with realistic prices for player trading and staff upgrades. Another problem with this version compared to the last version is the youth system. In the 2005 edition of the game you would get new youth players added to your squad at the start of every season. They failed to implement that in this version and that is a slight let down because that helps to create a loan system for your club along with the ability to sell your youth players for the extra profit which is a big factor in modern football. Going back to the loan system, I don’t know why only clubs in your own division can buy or loan players from you, but that should have been widened. This would help the players join clubs equal to the player’s stats level.

Speaking of stats, I noticed the morale of players doesn’t work very well in season mode. For some reason the fringe players, the ones that don’t get to play much should have some morale, but the game doesn’t give them any what so ever. And one player I signed to my squad who plays regularly doesn’t have any morale statistic at all. He will always be zero unless he scores then he his stat goes up by 1.

On the international scene Holland is still missing. I am not sure of the mystery behind this but Holland wasn’t in the 2005 edition either. I wanted to create the Euro 2008 tournament but I had to replace Holland with England! I guess I will be playing with England. The problem I found with setting up the group stages was a simple fact. It wasn’t easy putting in the teams that are suppose to be in same group together. It could have been made easier on a new screen right after you had selected the teams you wanted. But I was unable to do this.

There was another irritation I had with player creation. The problem that annoyed me was the limited character length when creating a new player name. For instanced I wanted to add Tom Huddlestone to the Tottenham squad, well I did that but he is just called “Tom Huddlesto” because the surname field only has a length of 9 characters. Then I created John O’Hara but again the character missing is the upper-comma. So that didn’t quite work out the way I intended it too. There are a fair number of spaces to add new players. But for the extreme game player is it enough?

Another touch I like is the addition of the 1996 version of Fifa Soccer. It really does should you the difference in gaming over the past 10 years and how much graphics, gameplay and everything else has improved. For the younger generation they might not care so much. But I am amazed that just within ten years how much the industry has improved.

There are also scenarios that can be played and extras to buy along with a fair collection of songs to listen too. There have been so many improvements in the space of a year but a few minor set-backs at the same time. But overall I have been very impressed with the game and enjoy it a hell of a lot. I will certainly play Fifa 2006 for a long time, right up to the time I get an updated version that is!

8.5 out of 10

I love going back in time and playing old games and I have to say I rather liked Tides of Darkness. The graphics are always good and I would have to say exceptional for the time.

Although I am not sure what came first, Command & Conquer or WarCraft but they both have the same type of feel. Warcraft tends to be a classical fantasy and I am rather fond of the gene. But this version doesn’t seem as tactful as the predecessor, as the AI is considerably more intelligent even know I can beat it fairly easily. There are simply more options, more to do and the cut scenes are great.

I love building my base, making sure the church goes in the right place. I like the towns to have a unique feel and my citizens to look happy! But then again this is war. Being able to build a big fleet of ships makes for a great sea battle and I do love having the ctrl function that allows you to have multiple armies to send into battle. All the upgrades and levelling up of the units in my army does add that addiction factor and I could easily spend hours a night on the game.

So I am grateful there is a Dark Portal expansion pack to add to the last ability which Tides of Darkness lacks. Even still Warcraft II is an excellent game with good background music, excellent graphics and great functionality.