Bioshock Infinite PC : A Mind Boggling FPS

I just finished Bioshock Infinite on my laptop over a couple days and I must say that at the end, I wasn't sure what the heck was happening. Read on to find out just how confusing this game is.

Assassin's Creed 3 PC : Enjoyably Funny...

Assassin's Creed 3 PC : Enjoyably Funny...

Just finished playing Assassin's Creed  III on the PC over the last couple of days. Guess what, this was fun, occasionally a tad boring but mostly fun! and I'll tell you why...

Before showing you more screenshots I would like to share that getting this game up and going was a bit of a technical kerfuffle. Apparently it won't work with the current Nvidia Geforce drivers for notebooks. If you are running this on a Geforce 540M or similiar make sure you are using the latest as of today 12/12/2012,  beta drivers from nVidia version 310.64 beta. Otherwise you just get stuck at the "Inspired by historical events...." black screen right at the beginning and the game freezes / hangs/ crashes.  I only had one crash throughout my week of gameplay using these drivers.

Talk to the Hand

The game starts of with a character called Haytham which I thought was the main character much like Ezio in the older games. He does the  "talk to the hand" motion instead of saying no, pompous british fool :D hahaha...



Then it does get a bit cinematic with the gameplay meshing in great with the the intro title.  So u sail from the UK to Boston in what is to become the US of A. Those American revolution loving patriots are going to so love this..

Is it just me or is this shaping up to be a "pirates of the Caribbean" kind of game? Well the answer is yes and no, but more on that later..

A lot of the old gameplay mechanics are still present. You can still climb high up there for pleasant view.

Bonus new content... You get to have a romantic carriage ride with Pocahontas :D

AC3 Horse in the Air

Ok so there are still some clipping bugs with version 1.01.No biggie but still hilarious.

AC3 Up my horse's a.s.s.

You can even hide your head up a horse's butt!

Pocahontas gets lead into a dark and mysterious cave.




And gets a whole lot of loving! Well after this is where you find out she becomes a single mom and we have a son meets father after many years story with son vs dad (assassin vs templar) on-screen tension going...

Assassin's Creed III Naval Battle

The most fun I had was from the very well done naval battles! Though the amount of detail brought my framerate way down :D This game has by far the best Naval/Sea battle mechanics today. After the hugely disappointing Port Royale 3, this puts my faith back into hoping for a respectable pirate game franchise. Definitely a spin-off for Ubisoft waiting right there.

Well this is a really fun game that is joining my hall of fame for 2012. As Ratonhnhaké:ton says, play it and tell me what you think! :D

Next on the menu is Far Cry 3.

Sleeping Dogs and 24Herbs 廿四味

Sleeping Dogs ranks as one of my top games for 2012. This is an awesome single player game with a strong storyline. A good break from all the military FPSs that have been coming out this year. Of note is another free roaming game I recently played called Prototype 2, which had a good but not really gripping story, too much like a male version of Alice in Resident Evil.
 

Pardon the gallery of ghostly pictures as I took these with Fraps playing through the Sleeping Dogs "Nightmare In North Point" Halloween DLC. Just scroll through and enjoy. More on the soundtrack below...

Wei Chen the main character gets a magical wooden sword that does special damage to the undead.

You get to kill some jumpy chinese vampires.

You get to hang out with a hot babe whilst trying to rid HongKong of the undead evil.

Job done.

DLC finishes with the babe doing the classic turn around and evil laugh from MJ's Thriller video.

Which takes me to the main topic of this post - 24Herbs! A lot of their songs were commissioned for the Sleeping Dogs Soundtrack, specifically when you drive around in the car with HKLUB radio channel on. This outfit of 6 guys seem to have made their album with the game in mind as a lot of the tracks are triad/gangster based. Many other tracks on the other radio channels were pretty good as well.

Took me quite a while to google this, but this is what I found which I thought I should share with any lucky readers that stop by... (attempts at extraction directly from the .pck sound file where futile for me)

Complete list of tracks can be found here....Sleeping Dogs Soundtrack Wikia

To get the actual songs read on below...

First stop :
UPDATE : Read update at end of post for link to complete soundtrack.
Second Stop :
If you are a new fan of 24Herbs like me you can grab their latest album from last year, contains most of the tracks, quite high quality but in VBR. Link to bitshare from some chinese forum here

This is the tracklist:
01 Turn It Up
02 Bring It On
03 Do You Know Me
04 Wonderland (feat. 衛蘭)
05 Fashionista
06 Do Or Die
07 Rock As One
08 Control (feat. 黃貫中)
09 Hong Kong Kowloon
10 罪惡之城 [Sin City]
11 Why Can't U
12 不是兄弟 (feat. KZ) [Not Brothers]
13 Perfect
14 Chillax (feat. 蛋堡)
15 Hu Ge
16 24K (Duet with Kolor)
17 罪與罰 (Duet with 鄭秀文)
 
The track H-KLUB - The Life I had to get from another french search engine. Same drill as the russian forum, google translate and register there to download the file... you can also get another comprehensive list of the sleeping dogs soundtrack tunes including love is heavy by nathan wang which everyone seems to be looking for...
Link to t411 search here

Alternatively you can youtube the tracks and extract from the downloaded youtube files :D

thanks for visiting and enjoy the sounds, I know I am! remember to drop a comment or a link for more from this fabulous  soundtrack.....


UPDATE 30 March 2013 : Apparently the complete list of songs from the soundtrack can be found here (you will need to have a torrent client in order to download)

Binary Domain PC review

Binary Domain Rust Crew

Welcome to the world of Binary Domain. The title doesn't really have much to do with the game except that machine code does use binary code as its base.

From WIKI :
Binary Domain (バイナリー ドメイン Bainarī Domein?) is a tactical shooter video game developed and published by Sega. The game is set in Tokyo in the year 2080 and features innovative enemy AI technology.The creator of Binary Domain is Toshihiro Nagoshi, who created the Yakuza video game series..

Binary Domain a futuristic third person shooter with a few light elements of RPG mixed in. Game play is similar in style to Mass Effect 3 and it has a world that makes me think of the movie "I, Robot".

The campaign mode is just really fun to play with stereotyped comments by characters often just adding to the humor. Main plus here is the story telling.

Cast wise they probably should have had a British chick with much better looks as well which might have helped with increasing fan base and ratings.

There are also quite a few action set pieces that add variety to the story telling.

Voice recognition though not up to par but thumbs up for good effort as not many games have this implemented.

Don't forget to watch the cut-scene at the end of credits where Dan finds and saves Faye from government forces!

Definitely must play for games out this year. Haven't had this much fun and humor in a game for a while. 9.5/10 from me!

Port Royale 3: Pirates and Merchants PC Game Review

Port Royale 3 Opening Screen

Just finished playing Port Royale 3 yesterday. I have been playing it a lot for the past few days. Time seems to really pass as one is pondering the next step to take on the high seas of the Caribbean.

Initially, the opening screen was impressive, with the close-up of a big Frigate sailing across the screen.

Campaign mode was really short. I managed to complete it in a day of gaming in adventure mode. The game provides you with ships and money for attacking towns. You can also choose trading mode whereby you trade and profit and use your reputation and ownership of businesses and workers to takeover a town by getting the spanish viceroy to agree fora takeover. In my opinion this was a refreshing gameplay idea but I still prefer attacking a port anyday.

Port Royale 3 In Game

The game loads very quickly and in-game we have the naval chart where all the important activity is happening on the screen. This shows resources each town needs urgently and battles taking place.

**TIP** Make sure to choose 2500 instead of the recommended 1000 for town size when selecting a Free play game, this makes it easier to recruit sailors and sell larger amounts of commodities for more profit. You will also get more tasks to do to increase reputation with a country.

Port Royale 3 In Port

You can take sides during the game with one of the four super powers, in this case I was friendly with England. Unfortunately world conquest is not possible as you cannot annex(take over) a port if a country has only 2 towns left.

**TIP** To get more tasks to up reputation quickly as you need this for a letter of marque to attack a country without repercussions, just buy up all the wood and bricks in harbour, then build 2 buildings. If you get the lack of construction materials icon above the buildings, after a while the administrator or governor of town will offer you a task to get raw materials which can be done easily for a reputation boost of 5%

Port Royale 3 In Port Screen

Nice picturesque port towns, the harbour even has dolphin animations! :D This is a pic of my fleet being repaired. This is where you can get quests which do become repetitive and boring after sometime.

The only action orientated task are naval battles. The port battles seem to have been made for idiots.

HOW TO ATTACK OR TAKEOVER A TOWN / PORT : For noobs looking for how to attack a town or port you should seriously read the pdf manual that came with the game... Just joking... if you look at the bottom right part of the picture above, just tick the bottom right wood colored box beside the "castle wall icon with the crossed swords". Tick it before you sail into the town and your ships will attack the town :D

Conclusion : 

Easy to learn and play, nice graphics and simple trading but unfortunately not much improvement over Port Royale 2.

Major disappointing game mechanics include lack of captian vs. captain duels during naval battles, ports cannot be defended, port battles are lame, too much focus on trading, unable to enter all towns once you choose to focus on pirating. Older pirate games much better! Massive lack of action.

Developers should seriously try walking the plank!

On another note, another recent pirate game Risen 2 : Dark Waters wasn't any better. An RPG rip-off story of pirates of the carribbean movie with poor graphics...

This is one disappointed pirate fan here languishing in the high seas...