NFS ProStreet : a review

EA's Need for Speed series has long been an ever-evolving franchise, one that changes up its focus, mechanics and style every couple of years. Though the game sells incredibly well, the developer/publisher doesn't like to sit still. This obviously means that the series has had its ups and downs, and unfortunately Need for Speed ProStreet isn't one of the ups.ProStreet is a game that doesn't really seem to know what it's trying to be. It's been years since we've seen a Need for Speed title that focused solely on track racing, with the franchise branching out into open world settings with a story, cop chases and all sorts of other things to make it stand out. ProStreet, however, goes back to the track-based racing, putting the player into race after race on closed circuits, and then sending them back to a menu after each race is over.This setup is perfectly fine and, in this case, does work well to some extent, but there's not really a whole lot of extra "stuff" outside of the races that makes it seem like Black Box had a good idea of exactly what it was trying to accomplish. Yes, the fundamentals are there and the setup does work well, but the bulk of the presentation doesn't feel all that robust, especially when compared to what we've seen in recent years.

As well, the control scheme and arcade vs. sim aspects feel a bit confused. ProStreet adds a ton of great customization options to the franchise, which we'll get to in a bit, but the driving physics are anything but realistic. They're an odd in-between of the two and wind up in some place that really just does not work very well at all. The series has generally had strong racing controls, but those were somehow lost in the latest game.Most of the cars in the game feel like caricatures of their real-life counterparts, but not in a good way. Most every vehicle drives like a boat and feels very reluctant to want to turn at all. Even vehicles in hardcore driving sims like Gran Turismo turn with much greater ease than most any of the vehicles found here, and yet the game isn't even trying to be ultra-realistic.A few of us around the office drive some of the cars that you'll find in the game, like a 2007 Civic Si (which is identical to the '06 in the game) and a 2006 Pontiac GTO, and none of them handle anything like the real deal. ProStreet's version of the GTO barely turns at anything above 30mph, and doesn't really instill any sense of its 400hp engine. The real Civic Si is a nimble little car, but ProStreet's Si feels very top-heavy and slides around corners like they're covered with ice.

Are those tires warm?And though we don't drive every car in the game, it's clear that most of them, if not all, do not drive like what we would expect from the real thing. It's sad, too, because this one, huge fault brings down a game that would otherwise be fairly solid.Though there's not a lot of pizzazz and whatnot to it as we mentioned before, the Race Day progression does offer up a nice assortment of race events for you to partake in. Each Race Day features a handful of events -- be they grip races, drag races, sector challenges or what have you -- and pretty much all of them are good fun.Drag races start out with a mini-game where you heat up your tires before heading to the line, and then it's all about timing your shifts, using your nitrous at the right time and keeping your car in a straight line, which can be tricky when you get to the really fast cars. The tire heating mini-game can get a little old, especially since each drag race event has three runs, so you'll play the game three times in the span of a couple minutes, but it's fun to try and shave a couple hundredths of a second off your time by getting a perfect start.

Bioshock : a review

BioShock is Irrational's finest offering to date, as well as the swan song for the Irrational brand in a way, since they recently relinquished their longstanding and well-established studio name for the more corporate, faceless tag of 2K Boston and 2K Australia. BioShock is a first-person shooter set in the fantastically unsettling city of Rapture, a metropolis built under the sea by the megalomaniacal Andrew Ryan. Throughout your lengthy stay, you'll find options for combat as intricate and enjoyable as the story and characters are to interpretation, something that only a handful of games can ever claim to offer.But to call this game simply a first-person shooter, a game that successfully fuses gameplay and narrative, is really doing it a disservice. This game is a beacon. It's one of those monumental experiences you'll never forget, and the benchmark against which games for years to come will, and indeed must, be measured. This isn't merely an evolution of System Shock 2, but a wake-up call to the industry at large. Play this, and you'll see why you should demand something more from publishers and developers, more than all those derivative sequels forced down our throats year after year with only minor tweaks in their formulas. It's a shining example of how it's possible to bring together all elements of game design and succeed to the wildest degree.


Customizing the arsenal.Things kick off with your plane smacking into the ocean and your character having to take refuge in Rapture to survive. Irrational plays on the conventions of the first-person perspective by thrusting you through experiences that toy with and vastly strengthen that fragile, intangible bond between in-game protagonist and yourself. At times, it forces upon you moments of reflection, which is so important and rare in games, where you contemplate the nature of blindly accepted game conventions, which we can't get into for fear of spoiling things. It lays a relatively straight narrative path for you, but it never feels linear, a result of the gameplay as much as the narrative.The target in BioShock, Andrew Ryan, is anything but a prototypical villain. He's a man of bottomless ambition who built a city under the sea, obsessed with the idea of what makes a man, what differentiates a man from a slave. He's the Randian hero, a man who holds his own creative vision above all else, and he's Rodion Raskolnikov's exceptional person, someone who can be excused for committing crimes to achieve a goal--and he knows it. His vision, Rapture, is clearly a colossal failure. The driving force behind the game is your quest to discover why this man's alluring vision of an artistic utopia failed so completely and why you've stumbled upon it. Even though Ryan spits out what seems to resemble totalitarian propaganda, you can't help but sympathize with him. He has alluring ideas, speaks them with conviction, and comes off as a sympathetic visionary despite his severe eccentricities.As you continue through Rapture, you'll discover it speaks to the nature of what a single-player game is--why do we choose to play a game that isn't online, where you can't interact with others? Like reading a novel, it's to form your own impressions, to see the same events, hear the same words, and come away with a unique viewpoint. The thematic blending and twining of BioShock's personalities is so powerful, it acts like any good book or movie, assaulting you with its ideas, popping into your thoughts when you least expect it, and broadening your understanding of what a game can achieve. Instead of painting Good and Evil across the foreheads of Rapture's denizens with a neon brush, Irrational gave everyone murky motives, much like the shadowed, soaking environments you're constantly plodding through, or the blurred vision you get after walking under one of Rapture's ubiquitous waterfalls.

Hey guy, might want to check your pants!It's the little ideas that pop up from time to time that make this world so believable: the piano plinks that resonate as you browse menu options; the guitars you can actually play randomly scattered around Rapture; the way every room is realistically constructed reflects both the heights to which Rapture managed to climb as well as the decadence and sense of voracious, selfish entitlement that brought it smashing down. You'll hear some of the voice-overs muse, "Why do they wear the masks? Maybe there's a part of them that remembers how they used to be, how they used to look, and they're ashamed." Little bits like that get tossed at you, and you don't necessarily have to absorb them--they're not essential to plot or anything, but they're instrumental in making BioShock as immersive as it is.The game is broken up into large sections, each separated by load times. Don't worry; these aren't load times like in Half-Life 2 where the game pauses unexpectedly. Instead, the load times are logically placed and never jarringly interrupt the experience or mar the immersion. Each section comes with its own cast of NPCs who aren't mere stage bosses--oftentimes you don't even engage them in combat. Instead, you are battling their ideals and their insecurities, grappling with their motivations as much as the splicer minions who so frequently assail you.