Like I said before, there are several scenes and moments in the game that will simply put a smile on your face. Sneaking up behind enemy soldiers and knifing them in the back is one. Launching explosive arrows into groups of unsuspecting enemies is another. But there are times in the game where things are simply so unbalanced that it’s just downright frustrating. Part of the problem is the screen shake in the game. When you take hits from gunfire your viewport is skewed a bit. The bigger problem is when an explosion goes off near you and knocks you off your feet. You become disoriented, and can’t shoot or move for a few seconds. The even bigger problem here is most times an enemy will be able to get off another rocket or grenade before you even get back to your feet, thereby knocking you back down before you really get back up. Before you know it your screen is a blurry red mess and suddenly you are dead.
The single player campaign was mildly entertaining, as was the story. There’s a solid voice acting cast with the likes of Ron Perlman as the cynical sidekick Slade. The game features a pretty indepth multiplayer mode complete with dinosaurs that roam the playing field. There’s also a small co-op campaign online which consists of 3 short missions. It would have been nice if the actual campaign was co-op, but what we get is pretty solid.

Turok is a game that many people will overlook, and while it’s not something everyone should play, fans of shooters or the previous titles will enjoy what the game has to offer.

Score: 3 out of 5

4. Halo 3 (360)

The game with the biggest hype of 2007 didn’t disappoint…most. The trilogy came to a solid conclusion, and it took you on some interesting twists and turns along the way. The beauty of Halo though can only be experienced by exploring the lore that surrounds it, which is masterfully expanded in books, comics and other literature. It’s especially well noted in the excellent advertising campaign for Halo 3 in which they depicted real life actors as veterans of the war in which the Master Chief fought in. The multiplayer modes are the richest and deepest we’ve ever seen on a console, and tools like Forge and the Replay Viewer are going to be new staples in console gaming. Did the game live up to the hype? No, of course not. No game could ever do that. But god damn was it a fun as hell ride.

3. Bioshock (360/PC)

As the “spiritual successor” to the System Shock series, Bioshock hit the PC and Console world by storm this year. The Action RPG became mainstream in this beautifully decorated underwater art-deco style world. The game was a beautiful blend of puzzles, action, rpg customizations all intertwined with a unique and twisting story which had one hell of a plot twister in it. Everyone will remember their first encounter with a big daddy, or the first time they saved a little sister. Now would you kindly continue reading my list.

2. Call of Duty 4 (PC/360/PS3)

Infinity Ward hasn’t missed a beat with Call of Duty 4. The game is actually their 3rd iteration of the franchise (3 was made by Teryarch), and everyone of the games has a unique flavor about it. Call of Duty 4 is all about cool weapons, insane firefights, and impossible situations. The veteran difficulty of the game will test your patience, but is still one of the most rewarding experiences in gaming to date. The graphics are superb, and at times look downright realistic. The story is an intertwining twist of characters from different backgrounds, and provides more than enough twists and turns to keep you interested. But the best part of Call of Duty 4 isn’t just the single player, it’s perhaps one of the deepest and most unique multiplayer experiences yet for a first person shooter. In a mix between an MMORPG and a shooter you level up your character by using killing enemies, completing objectives, and accomplishing tasks. Leveling up unlocks perks to customize your character, as well as unlocks the ability to use new weapons. It was a god damn genius move and it created some of the most addicting online play we’ve seen this year.

1. Mass Effect (360)

Every year there seems to be a game that just instantly grips me and I can’t stop playing it.  This year, that game was Mass Effect.  After the the mediocre experience I had with Jade Empire, Bioware came back big time with Mass Effect.  Like Bioshock, Mass Effect took the RPG experience mainstream, and it did it without making any sacrifices.   The game sported incredible visuals and a conversation system that flowed back and forth dynamically like watching a movie.  The story was unique and interesting, and literally spanned across a galaxy in which you could freely explore and do side quests on.  The core gameplay was based around a 3rd person shooter mechanic, but was well grounded in the rules of an RPG.  Weapon upgrades, character specialties, and tons and tons of areas to explore all made this a truly amazing experience.  I’m incredibly happy this game is part of a trilogy and can’t wait to see what the second one brings.

Mass Effect truly is the game of the year.

Note:   It should be noted that because of the insane holiday season of all the good games, certain titles didn’t even get to be considered.  Crysis, Assassin’s Creed, and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune among them.

10. Rockband (PS3/360)

Rock Band is a recent release of the year, but it’s one that should be on everyone’s list. Rock Band is the ultimate party game. Combine Karoke Revolution, Guitar Hero and drums and you’ve got something for everyone to play. The music selection is varied, and the presentation is absolutely top notch. I expect this game to have a lot of legs well into next year, especially with the weekly support of downloadable content.

9. Company of Heroes (PC)

The first time you fire up Company of Heroes you’ll marvel at the detail and animation of the game’s characters an environment. Then you’ll realize you can use your little mouse wheel and zoom all the way down to street level and see even MORE detail. The best thing about this RTS is it’s focus on action and the units. There’s no resource gathering here, it’s all about building up your army and conquering the enemy.

8. Heavenly Sword (PS3)

From a purely game play standpoint Heavenly Sword doesn’t bring much new to the table. But what is there is very solid. What the game really excels at though is story telling and character detail. You will be hard pressed to find a more detailed facial expression system than the one found in Heavenly Sword. Even Mass Effect which looks gorgeous in it’s own right can’t hold a candle to the emotion that was conveyed by the characters facial expressions in Heavenly Sword.

7. Crackdown (360)

Crackdown is one of those games that if it was released later in the year it would be on a lot of people’s GOTY lists. But having been released in February it’s going to get glossed over quite a bit. Crackdown redefined what it means to be a sandbox game by setting players in a futuristic city in control of a character with super powers. Anyone who played the game remembers that first giant leap from building to building, or climbing the Agency Tower and looking out over the entire city. The game was an amazing technical marvel. Not only that but it provided some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a game via online Co-Op play. Many people picked this one up for the Halo 3 Beta, and after playing it many people spent more time on Crackdown than they did in the H3 Beta.

6. Portal (PC/360/PS3)

Portal was packaged in with the Half-Life: Orange Box set, which was probably the best value in gaming. Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episode 1, Half-Life 2 Epside 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal all for under $60! The funny thing about it is, Portal was the game everyone thought was a tack-on, and it turns out Portal was by far the best game of the bunch. The game is a 3-D puzzler of sorts where you need to get form point A to point B by placing two inter connecting Portals. It forces you to think outside the realm of normalcy to solve the puzzles presented. What makes Portal so enticing is the atmosphere and character. Set in a Test-Lab you are guided by GlaDOS to your goal of testing out the Portal gun for Aperature Science. Everything here is top notch, and if there’s one downside to Portal it’s the fact the game only lasts under 2 hours. The game spawned an internet catch phrase (the Cake is a lie), the companion cube craze, and a song so catchy everyone wanted to sing it.

5. Mario Galaxy (Wii)

From the moment you turn Mario Galaxy on you know the game is going to win the hearts over of many gamers. The game features Mario on the path to rescue Princess Peach who was captured by Bowser and wisked away across the galaxy. It’s your job to go from galaxy to galaxy and then jump from little planet to little planet to gather up lost stars. The design, the colors, the controls are all top notch. This is one game every Wii owner shouldn’t be without.

Be on the lookout for the top 4 games of the year later this week.

Keats is a reporter at a sci-fi magazine who receives a frantic phone call from a woman at the Village of Doolin. Both arrive to find a woman dead on the cliffs of the town, and murder is in the air. It’s their job to get to the bottom of the crime as well as discover what exactly happened in the village 17 years ago in the Village’s past.

The game itself is broken up into two parts. The first has your character walking around town, talking to townsfolk and looking for clues. The second has your character transported to the land of the dead to talk to a character from village who has since been deceased to fill in a piece of the puzzle. Each one of these sections make up a chapter of the game, and each chapter is played by each character. Cut scenes are played out in a pseudo comic book style look with a mix of frames and real rendered 3d graphics with popup text. This was sort of a disappointment to me as there are a few cut scenes that are actually rendered really well with complete voice overs, while the graphic novel style cut scenes seemed more low budget. With all the touts of Blu-Ray and the space it provides, not having the voice overs in these other cut scenes seems sort of silly. Especially when a huge epic RPG like Mass Effect or even Oblivion has every line of dialog voiced.

The meat of Folkore comes in the netherworld where your job is to defeat Folks and a Folkore, which is the big boss. To capture a Folk you must use appropriate attacks against the Folk to release its id, then lock on and use the SIXAXIS controls to pull the Folk in. Every Folk in the game has a native power, whether that’s a physical attack, a fire attack, water attack, etc. Once a Folk is captured, you can map it to one of the face buttons on the controller creating palettes of attacks that are easily saved, loaded and swapped via the L2 button. It feels very much like Kameo on the Xbox 360, but instead of turning into the different forms you simply summon them. Recapturing ids from the same Folks upgrades their attack power, combos, and other various aspects.

Every chapter in Folkore takes you to a different level of the underworld, each with it’s own distinct look, setting and Folks. Everyone of these are absolutely gorgeous from the Fairy Forrest, to the Underwater City and even a Warzone of the dead. The Folk in each zone are all very relative to what is going on around it. The Forrest Folk all are based on animals, while the Warcadia Folk are all little soldiers that shoot, bomb, dash and fight. The creature design really is top notch in the game, with a lot of creatures taking on an almost Tim Burton feel. At the end of the world is a giant Folklore. These bosses usually need to be brought down in stages, utilizing all the Folks you’ve acquired from trekking through the world.

The game is fairly slow paced and doesn’t really extend on the RPG elements much above the leveling up and experience. There’s no customization to be done with each level to your character, though there are side quests available in each chapter which yields unique items. This isn’t to say it’s a bad thing, I just want to make sure people understand this game is not an RPG, it’s an Adventure game.

All that being said, Folklore has some annoying problems. The first is the fact that as you are given the choice to play as each character before each chapter starts, you still have to play the same chapter over again with the other character. While you are playing through a different perspective, you are still given the same level layout, (mostly) the same Folks, and even the same Boss to fight. Even the cut scenes are identical in which both characters are in. I understand what the developers tried to do by extending the story from two different viewpoints, but the execution just didn’t pull me in. I think it’s akin to when you play a game, you get deep into a level make it all the way to the end boss and then die and realize you forgot to save only to have to replay through the whole level again. I know 9 times out of 10 I’d immediately turn off my system, but in Folkore this sort of method is forced upon you. Luckily you don’t have to do the characters in alternating chapters, and you can play with one character up to a certain point and the do the other chapters with the other character. This breaks up the monotony of it a little bit.

Another big problem is the level design and load times. The levels themselves are very linear, and provide very little “off the path” areas. The individual areas in each level are incredibly small and going from area to area provides a short 5-10 second load time. The problem with this is there is a lot of backtracking through the levels, and sometimes I found I was staring at the little loading screen more than actually playing the game.

Finally the use of the SIXAXIS in the game feels really forced. While pulling the ids with a little jerk of the controller is no big deal, the bigger Folks and Folklore add in mini-games to this where timing, waving, and a mix of them are all brought into play.

All that being said, there’s something about the game that keeps drawing me back in. Just when I think I’m bored of playing, just when I thought I’ve sucked my last id the game offers some new plot twist or a new Folk becomes available. Folklore combines gorgeous visuals with a unique story and some really greatgame play making it a game that separates itself from a lot of other titles out there. Folklore isn’t for everybody, but if you can get past a few minor annoyances it will make a decent addition to your gaming library.

Score: 3.5 out of 5

When the game was first shown, God of War comparisons were instantly drawn. It’s very easy to see why, with a similar style of play and even a similar weapon with the split sword on chains. The developers even chose to adorn Kratos’s armor and Blades of Athena in the kings armory, and there comes a time in the game where the story almost takes a blatant God of War story twist. All that being said the game was designed to have a core mechanic quite different from GoW. While GoW was all about offense and button mashing, Heavenly Sword is more about finese and counters. That’s not to say you can’t mash your way through the game, but it’s quite obvious how the developers intended the game to be played.

Lets get right down to it, the game is absolutely beautiful. Bright vibrant colors span vast landscapes of waterfalls, huge mountains and forests with falling petals from trees in that classic Asian inspired way. During the in-engine cut scenes you will see the most realistic character faces to date, and I dare say it, they avoid the whole uncanny valley phenomenon. Each wrinkle and blemish is incredibly detailed, and when a character’s face squishes up in anger it all looks incredibly convincing. The characters themselves are so full of life not only in look, but in voice and animation. Nariko’s adopted sister Kai, the Twing-Twang girl, is particularly impressive with natural movements and some amazing voice acting. King Bohan, played by Andy Serkis of Gollum fame, is another standout character providing a full range of emotion and dialog as well as some great comedic relief. Sure it’s all very cliche’ and been done before, but it’s rarely been done this well in a video game.

Like I said earlier, the game is more about reaction than action. Once in possession of the Heavenly Sword Nariko is capable of three stances; ranged, standard, and heavy. Enemy attacks come in these same three stances, and are colored to clue you in on what kind of attack is in incoming. By countering in the appropriate stance you are able to gain a significant advantage on your opponent. Chain attacks and counters together to build up a combo meter, and in doing so you can not only unlock special attacks and more combos, but you’ll unlock artworks, videos and other various behind the scenes content. The entire game isn’t just a hack and slash, as various other mini-game style levels break up the action including firing cannons, launching rockets and of course…Twing-Twang.

Ok, so what the hell is twing-twang? It’s shooting a cross bow. Yup, no lesbian action here, sorry Yahtzee Croshaw. At first I wasn’t a huge fan of these sequences, finding the controls floaty. But the more I realized you were supposed to use the slow-motion steerable cam, ala reedeemer in Unreal Tournament, the more enjoyable I found them. There’s something inherently satisfying by following an arrow across the battlefield, sailing over soldiers heads only to steer it into the crotch of one of their friends. In fact, anything you throw in the game can be slowed down and steered with the motion functions of the SIXAXIS controller. Honestly though, I found throwing the random objects in the game like tables, pots, and bodies pretty much ineffective. The other problem with the slow-mo motion steering sequences is these are the ONLY puzzles in the game. Basically strategically placed shields are thrown and steered into gongs to open doors and drop bridges. And just to mix things up, sometimes you have to bounce the shields off a wall, or a strategically placed statue to complete the puzzle. It all feels very forced, and really is the only weak element of the game.

That’s not to say the game isn’t without other problems. As gorgeous as the game is, it does have it’s slowdowns and hiccups. In some of the larger battle sequences I experience audio pops and dropouts. That being said, these are minor and take no enjoyment away from the short title. And it is a short title. My total playtime with deaths and restarts was just under 6 hours, completed in about 3 play sessions. That’s a tough pill to swallow for someone that just dropped $60 on a game, not to mention $600 on a system.

Heavenly Sword really sets the bar high when it comes to character detail and emotion. It’s rare to see such high production values and attention to detail, watch the making of videos on the Heavenly Sword site to get an idea of what went into creating these animations, details and emotions. The bottom line is Heavenly Sword is an amazing title with very few flaws. I honestly think if the game was much longer it would have been drug out and simply gotten to boring and repetitive. If you are looking for a game that sets yourPlayStation 3 apart from other systems, right now Heavenly Sword is it.

Score: 4 out of 5

Bioshock Demo (PC/360)  – While the demo is only available on 360 right now, this shouldnt’ stop you from downloading it immediately.  Initial impressions of the demo have been solid, with considerable praise to the graphics.   If you are looking for a FPS with lots of atmosphere and the freedom to accomplish things mulitple ways, this game is for you.

 Stranglehold Demo (PC/360/PS3)  – The Stranglehold demo hit last week on the 360, with a PC demo coming this week sometime.  Anyone who was a fun of Max Payne needs to play this ASAP.  Fully interactive enviornments, incredible damage modeling, and just an all around fun game.  The greatest thing about this demo is successive playthroughs will unlock new abilities and higher difficulty levels.  Sweet!

All Pro Football 2k8 (PS3/360) -  I know, I know.  Madden 2008 hits this week.  But you SHOULD be playing APF2k8 instead.  Stick it to the man by playing a solid football game that’s more than just a roster update.  The graphics are decent, but the animations are top notch.  Overall the gameplay is solid, and should satisfy any football fan.

That’s right, Evil Avatar Radio hosted by Philip “Kefkataran” Kollar is no more. No more late Friday nights in the chatroom listening to Phil and Amanda talk about Draygons and Horse Carcass. Phil is moving sidways and taking on more responsibilities at 1UP.

Fear not Evil Avatarians! Our newest Red and host of In-Game Chat, Scott “Psykoboy2” Benton has picked up the reins of said horse carcass and rode it, and the Evil Avatar Radio name, to Monday nights.

So what ever shall we do on Fridays? Us gamers SURELY can’t go OUT. We definitely can’t be social in public. So instead I bring to you, EvAv Arcade Fridays!

What is it? Every Friday night starting at 10PM Eastern we’ll be playing some specific games over Xbox Live and Playstation Network with the Evil Avatar Community.

So this week we’ll have 4 games lined up to play:
Bomberman Live (XBLA)
Carcassone(XBLA)
Spyglass Board Games (XBLA)
Calling All Cars (PSN)

I’ll be keeping the chatroom up, so if you need to try to get in a game, be sure to head over there and ask around. I encourage people to use it, or even just hang out on Friday organzing ANY kind of gaming activity.

Unfortuantely you aren’t able to run any games via this method, it basically is like a remote desktop connection to your PS3. But the fact that you can stream videos and such, or listen to music is pretty awesome. And with the upcoming PS3 DVR, the ability to stream shows anywhere, anytime is huge. You are even able to adjust quality settings based on network performance, even on the default quality the videos look fairly crisp and sound great.

Finally I downloaded Syphon Filter for the PSOne via the Playstation Store and checked it out on the PS3. The title definitley shows it’s age, but it was still a blast. The really great thing is the ability to copy the game to the PSP then and play it on the go. Take note Nintendo, Sony has the pricing done right. $5.99 for a PSOne era game, something Nintendo charges $12 or more for), with the ability to copy and play it on your portable device. That’s value right there.

You can also see the new trailer over at GameTrailers.