We can’t write it any better than this.

Here is the exact, unedited, email that Blast received from Southpeak today:

HELLO EVERYBODY!

I am STOKED to present to you the debut trailer for Two Worlds II — w00t! We are O M G excited about bringing Two Worlds II to your hands at E3 and wanted to share this first peek at the game with you all! If you haven’t yet made an appointment with me for the show — by all means, let me know and we will hook you up! We’re going to have 30 minutes of multiplayer hands-on action to show you by appointment only — there will be walk-up stations as well in case you can’t schedule with us, but the only way to get the full experience is by submitting yourself to my will and booking time with me! MUAHAHAHAH AHAA HA ….

Alright, anyway.

Two Worlds II is set to release this September on Xbox 360, Games for Windows, and for the first time ever Playstation 3. And you should probably tell your friends to preorder the game at Gamestop so they can get an exclusive sword and locked area with two extra hours of gameplay (zomgz). Why? Well, let our VP of Marketing Richard Iggo tell you why:

"For a while, we considered offering horse armor or something painted gold. However, we became worried that people would be overwhelmed with excitement. So with the welfare of the gaming world weighing heavily on our minds, we chose a badass weapon and in-game area instead," said Richard Iggo, VP of Marketing at SouthPeak, who often attends ren fairs wearing a codpiece with studs on the inside. "These things actually affect your game experience with stats, abilities and quest experiences that you’ll find useful and dare I say it — sexy. After all, what’s better than 60 slashing damage, 110 lightning damage, 85 poison damage and an increase to all resistance skills? Not much I say!"

What a professional.

… Well that’s all for now! Back to that trailer we were discussing. You can find it on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdvP0RR0YdY

That’s our bud Aubrey, a publicist for Southpeak.

Sorry guys, she’s married.

PC gamers have had low-priced and free online, second-tier shooters for years now, so it’s not surprising to see such B-grade attempts hitting consoles. SouthPeak and developer TimeGate Studios’ Section 8 definitely fits the bill, except that it’s neither low-priced nor free. The game is basically a multiplayer-centric first person shooter that tries to throw a twist on the mainstays like Unreal Tournament and Halo 3 (or for older PC gamers, Starsiege Tribes).

The story has something to do with armored super soldiers who fight each other across a variety of huge, bland landscapes for very nearly indeterminate reasons. The soldiers look like a cross between Halo’s Master Chief and Warhammer 40k space marines… with less personality. In fact, the whole game manages to provide one of the most generic sci-fi universes you’re likely to see all year.

The single player campaign puts players in the shoes of one of the said generic, parachute jumping space marines, as he struggles against the evil forces of red. These levels task you with plowing through enemy soldiers with your fellow team, hacking computers, stealing data, shutting down planetary defense systems and other tried and true objectives of sci-fi action. The single player campaign actually uses the same maps as the multiplayer mode, though they unlock sections at a slower pace. In multiplayer, the whole area is open from the start.‚  This gives you an easy way to get used to the gameplay and the maps while burning through the otherwise short and throwaway story.

While the single player action is generally lackluster, the AI of both enemy and ally troops is truly awful. Don’t expect much help on the battlefield, but then again, there’s not much in the way of intelligent opposition either. If you do happen to die, you just respawn in the air again, which is one area of originality. At a certain altitude, you can apply air brakes that give you limited control over where you land. This makes it easier to get right back into the action or close to your current objective.

The multiplayer aspect of the game fares much better. The game has only one game mode, called Conquest, but the scope of the maps and support for 32 players makes for surprisingly hectic and charged battles. In Conquest, two teams earn points by not just killing your enemy, but capturing control points, and completing “dynamic combat missions”. There are six different, timed DCMs, and any given game can feel like a variety of play styles thanks to this design element.

Section 8 has six different weapons and seven gadgets to play with. The guns are entirely standard fodder–a sniper rifle, shotgun, machine guns, rocket launcher, etc–and you can, as usual, only carry two at a time. You can also change load-outs at certain stations, but this is far from ideal in the heat of combat. The gadgets allow you to repair vehicles, heal teammates, become invisible to radar, use remote control mines, and knife people.

Earning money by completing objectives enables you to purchase vehicles and turrets in Section 8. The turrets are a nice idea, and give the game a vague RTS nod since the stationary guns help defend a specific area. The vehicles, on the other, are amazingly bad. There is a tank and a mech up for grabs with enough cash, and both are executed so poorly that you’re better off avoiding them. On foot, your normal pace is sluggish, but your armor allows for super-powered sprints and rocket pack high jumps. At full speed, you can plow through an enemy killing them instantly, and the ability to jump several stories in the air makes navigating the huge maps a little easier.

Blast Factor: In every sense, Section 8 is a mediocre shooter, and had it been released at a budget price, this might have been just fine. PC gamers are used to plenty of cheap alternatives to big name releases, so why not consoles? Unfortunately, this isn’t a budget-priced game–though it’s almost a certainty that it soon will be. The single-player game is utterly forgettable, yet the multiplayer portion holds enough interesting concepts to make it worth a look once it hits the bargain bins.

Section 8 is available on the Xbox 360 and the PC, and retails for $59.99 and $49.99 respectively

Velvet Assassin is the new stealth game from SouthPeak Games, based loosely on the life of Violette Szabo, a French secret agent in World War 2. The strongest elements of the game involve stalking around in the shadows, stabbing Nazis in the back or face and switching the attractive protagonist in and out of various form-fitting outfits “" generally a pretty winning combination “" but offers little else to make the quality of the content match the strength of the concept. The writing is hammy, the story is not particularly compelling or well told, and the gameplay is drawn out and repetitive, all of which conspire to undermine the game’s purpose of getting the player to empathize with the historical figure at the center of the gameplay.

To be fair, historical gaming is a pretty unexplored genre. I know Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed attach names and dates to their gameplay that are accurate at least according to Wikipedia, but at the end of the day, the history isn’t what’s at stake. You don’t play Assassin’s Creed to learn about the nuances of geopolitics in the Holy Land during the Crusades, you play it to knife suckers in the back. Given this, the fact that SouthPeak is using Szabo’s life as a selling point for the game (it’s on the back of the box and everything) is a bold marketing move that will, ideally, open up a dialogue about the merits of interactive media in more highbrow contexts in the future. If Velvet Assassin had been executed perfectly, which, sad to say, it wasn’t, it could have been a high-minded, almost literary game, and I would like to commend SouthPeak and Replay Studios for taking a step in that direction.

Velvet Assassin has problems, but it does have some solid elements. The meat of the gameplay involves sneaking undetected between areas of light and shadow, and the cinematography is striking and organic. Twilight, moonlight and harsh floodlights cast plenty of natural looking shadows for you to stalk around in and hunt patrolling Nazis. The game does a good job of emphasizing the stealth gameplay over any shooter elements, making the form of gameplay fit well to the spirit of the story. You have a silenced Colt pistol for most of the game but it’s very little match for the German guns, and if you get spotted, you really have to work to get yourself back into seclusion unharmed, so you can’t just charge into a room guns-blazing with any realistic hope for success. Stealth take-downs are infinitely more satisfying anyway.

The gameplay takes place within the fevered dreams of a bed-ridden Violette, recalling her missions while laid-up in a French hospital. This allows for an in-game power called “Morphine Mode” in which Violette doses herself with morphine, the Nazis freeze in time, and you can reposition yourself “" or kill a guard “" as you see fit. This isn’t a necessary component of the game, and really just an out for when you get spotted so you don’t necessarily get gunned down the first time. Also when in morphine mode, Violette’s costume changes to a scant night gown, which is as good a reason for a not-completely-believable video game gimmick as I’ve ever heard, and while it’s a fairly interesting facet of gameplay, it feels tacked on and is a little strange.

The controls are pretty simple, which makes for a very quick learning curve, but also makes most of the movement and standard assassination maneuvers pretty repetitive. You can drop into a crouch, which secludes Violette in the shadows and quiets her footsteps, allowing her to get right up behind the unsuspecting Nazi guards and take them out silently; provided none of his buddies are watching. There is some variation, like shooting explosive barrels or activating a patrolling guard’s grenade so that he will walk the active grenade over to another group of soldiers, but for the most part there’s a typical sneak-and-stab drill that it doesn’t take long to get good at, and then bored with. Don’t get me wrong, it can be incredibly entertaining and satisfying to deftly pull off a silent Nazi assassination “" my encounters with the first few groups of guards in the training level left my heart racing “" but the Nazi AI, while deadly enough once you’ve been spotted, is unrealistically stupid.

After sitting and watching a guy walk the same 20-foot stretch of hallway indefinitely without seeing the leather-clad British lady in the shadows at his feet, your enemies resemble less the ruthless soldiers of Call of Duty and more the moving platforms of Portal, where all that mattered was the right timing in a specific sequence to get from point A to point B. The game is pretty linear, so after you’ve got the movements of the next series of guards memorized you can just blow through them in less than half the time it took you on the first try, and if you’re on your second or third run through of a series of guards, the suspense of the game disappears completely and you’re just going through the motions for the hell of it.

While a compelling narrative might have seriously bolstered the repetitive gameplay, the game’s presentation of the story was very disappointing. There were definitely good elements to the story “" the character of Violette, Nazi antagonists, heartfelt letters home from Nazi soldiers you just assassinated “" but the presentation is so awkward and at odds with the rest of the structure of the game that it really detracts from the game more than it adds to it. All of the information about the story is conveyed via Violette’s not-particularly-well-voice-acted narration and occasional feverish hallucinations, but there isn’t really anything like cinematics, or character development, or any real connection between the player and the characters “" a real shame considering this is supposed to be based on real events and people. The story is certainly present if you care to piece it all together, but really, when you’re crouched in the dark waiting to stab your next Nazi, your motives or mission objectives won’t have any more or less meaning if you watched the story scenes or just skipped over them.

In the end, Velvet Assassin puts forth some solid, though occasionally mediocre, gameplay, that will appeal to stealth fans looking for some straight-up sneaking around. The story behind the game and the association with Violette Szabo, though selling points in the game’s advertising, are not its strength, so if that’s what you were looking for, try something else. At full price, with the low replay value, I wouldn’t recommend Velvet Assassin for purchase, but it wouldn’t be bad in your Gamefly queue.

Velvet Assassin is available for Xbox 360 and Windows and retails for $59.99

In video games, there are a few assumptions that you can almost always count on:

1. Being able to control a beautiful woman for the entire game is always a good thing.
2. Killing massive amounts of enemies is always a good thing.

However, combining the two does not always mean success, as proven by Gaijin Entertainment’s X-Blades.

X-Blades (available for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC) is a third-person hack and slash adventure where you control the (barely clothed) Ayumi in her quest to search for treasure, killing everything you see in the process.‚  This game is essentially Tomb Raider on steroids; it stars a more scantily clad heroine fighting larger amounts of enemies with unlimited ammo. However, as fun as this sounds (and it is pretty fun, at times), X-Blades is spoiled due to an almost invisible plot, repetitive levels and an annoying main character.

The game begins with a short monologue by Ayumi explaining that she is searching for an ancient artifact which she believes will grant her limitless powers, fame and fortune.‚  You can tell she is very cocky and confident.‚  Though initially I found it cute, Ayumi’s dialogues with the bosses and other characters became quite annoying.‚  I quickly learned to skip past cut scenes as quickly as possible.

From the tutorial, you start the first level, which is appropriately named “ËœEntrance into the Ruins”.‚  This stages serves as sort of a tutorial, allowing players to get a good grasp of the controls.‚  The controls are pretty easy to get a handle of.

Here’s a quick rundown of those controls: You press X to slash with your blades.‚  You can also press X multiple times to do long combination of hacks and slashes.‚  To use the guns, just press the trigger.‚  For a steady stream of shots, hold down the trigger.‚  Toggling the A button serves as the jump function, allowing you to leap in the air and slash at airborne enemies.‚  X-Blades is equipped with an auto-aim feature that isn’t great.‚  Basically, you turn Ayumi towards an enemy and it aims for you.‚  However, due to the massive amounts of enemies, the auto-aim system is somewhat pointless to pay attention to until you’re facing a boss.‚  The tutorial also explains how you can slot your special moves into certain buttons in the controller.‚  As you add more and more special moves (by purchasing them with the souls you collect from the enemies you kill), you can slot them in the Y, B, RB and LB buttons, giving you easy access when you need that extra oomph in battle.‚  You can also change where your specials are slotted by going to the game menu.

Though the tutorial did a good job explaining the battle system, it did not go over the interface at all.‚  I wasn’t sure which bar on the screen represented my health, my rage (a mana-like meter for special moves) and my progress in the level. I eventually figured it out, but it would have been nice to know from the get-go.

The actual game gives you very little background and history of Ayumi, which will leave many players wondering why she seems so motivated to find the treasure at seemingly any cost.‚  People who purchase the game will be able to read the manual booklet for the brief history behind the protagonist.‚  For renters?‚  Well, they may be SOL as many game renting services lose the booklets within the first week of availability, if they even provide them at all (for example, Gamefly does not).

Without a background and without a good sense of the plot, you continue to explore through different stages whilst fighting waves of different enemies and bosses.‚  You eventually cross paths with a young male character named Jay who serves as a source of dialogue and aids Ayumi on her quest to”¦ wait”¦ what was the main quest again?

Along with the poor plot development, X-Blades takes you through many levels that pretty much look and feel the same.‚  Though the enemies change in shape in size, they all attack you in similar formations and styles.‚  The wall textures seemed fairly uncreative, as well.

The positives of this game, though hard to identify at some points, were present during the campaign.‚  First of all, being equipped with “Gunblades” (which are exactly what they sound like “" Guns with Blades) is always a good thing.‚  When I first heard about these weapons, I thought to myself, “I don’t know what those are, but I like them already.”‚  The hacks and slashes of the blades, though boring from an animation standpoint, are able to supply unlimited combination potential.

Speaking of animations, some of X-Blade’s most entertaining graphics come from Ayumi’s special moves, which tend to be quite effective against large hordes of enemies.‚  Some of the foes in the game can work together for a special move of their own.‚  They do substantial damage to Ayumi, but are also fun to watch.

The fact that this game had two different endings was a worthy addition to the game and added some replay value as well.‚  The endings are brought about depending on whether you align yourself with light or dark magic, which means that your play style will be different the second time around. Also adding replay value were the collectible artifacts, which are hidden throughout stages, but when the game is this repetitive and lacking in plot, you may not want to go through all of it a second time just for some treasure or a different ending.

Overall, X-Blades just isn’t that good.‚  The flaws in this game are much too visible and annoying not to damage the entire experience.‚  There is very little reason to actually purchase this game for the $59.99 sticker price.‚  If you’re going to be supremely bored for an evening, sure, drop a few bucks to rent it.‚  Beyond that, it’s not a great value.

Let me put it this way, X-Blades, like Ayumi herself, might be worth taking home for a night.‚  However, if you spend too much time with her, you’re going to regret it”¦ no matter how hot she looks.

NEW YORK — Sure, Xbox 360 owners have been deprived of experiencing Metal Gear Solid 4 and all of its stealth goodness, but no worries, as Replay Studios and SouthPeak Games are here to help you get over your Solid Snake cravings. To do so, they have enlisted a female lead decked out in leather named Violette Summer, the Velvet Assassin.

Though the game will also release on the PC, I tested it out at Comic Con for the 360. Let’s start with some backstory: Velvet Assassin tells the tale of Violette Summer, who is based on an actual secret agent named Violette Szabo. She has gone behind German lines during World War II after losing her husband in the war, and she intends to exact as much revenge as she can now that she believes she has no real reason to go on with life.

It’s a sad story, especially when you consider that the game you play isn’t happening in real-time; instead, you are essentially playing through Violette’s dreams as she lays in a hospital bed, one which may or may not be her deathbed, in an interactive flashback style. The story is told through the use of a photo album, in which the photos come to life to illustrate the story better than a static portrait would. The scenario and what you need to do are explained for you here, as they are already events that Violette has experienced.

As for gameplay, I played through the first level of the demo and was impressed with a few things, though I wish I could have played more to see what level of challenge the title gets to. You will need to stick to the shadows and out of sight, because Violette is not about to haul off on Germans that she meets face to face; that’s a good way to cut Violette’s dreams short and lose.

Instead, you need to sneak up on as many enemies as possible, and then stab them or cut their throats in silence before hiding the bodies away from other guards who may see. It’s a slow-paced action title, as a stealth game should be. I’m kind of concerned about how your only modes of hiding is to crouch lower, but if the game doesn’t allow you to lie flat on the ground, then there won’t be situations where it is necessary to do so either.

If you run, enemies will hear you. If you are seen, they will give chase, and you can run, but you are most likely screwed unless you find a good hiding place. One way you can take out enemies head on though, is through the use of morphine. Yes, you will inject yourself with morphine in order to boost your skills momentarily. Violette will shed the leather garb and don the nightgown she is seen wearing in the hospital bed, where she lays next to, you guessed it, a syringe full of morphine. This basically allows her to power out of a bad situation in her dream.

I was stuck behind a box after being spotted, with one guard still lurking near the exit I needed, searching for me. I used a syringe of morphine, charged him head on, and then cut him down just like it was from behind. It was thrilling to have that temporary state of what seemed like invulnerability; morphine is limited as well, though you earn experience points (gained through kills and picking up collectable items in each level) that will help you earn new skills and increase the amount of morphine you can hold at one time.

Of course, if you’re properly utilizing the stealth aspects of the game, you won’t need to use morphine that often anyways, and with Violette’s health set as low as it is, it’s going to be tough to treat this as a shooter anyways.

As for things that SouthPeak let me know as I played the title: you will be able to find letters from Nazi’s to their families, meant to humanize the enemies that you so willfully slaughter before they sense your presence. The sound at the convention made it difficult to hear while playing, but the game plays a sound to let you know that you have been spotted, as well as removing the blue tint from around your character once you are in an enemy’s line of sight. This lets you know if you have been spotted from a distance, and that it’s time to find a better place to hide or lay low until the heat dies down.

It’s very difficult to gauge a stealth title based on a single level, but things were promising based on my experience with the title. I would like to see just how difficult things get in the game, but we may have a better idea of that as the release date approaches. The game is set to release in April of this year for the Xbox 360 and PC. Check back here for future news on Velvet Assassin, and eventually a review of the game.

SouthPeak Games (Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars; Big Bang Mini) is attending Comic-Con this upcoming weekend in New York City, and they are bringing many of their new games on tap. One of these titles is X-Blades, the multiplatform hack-and-slash with a unique look and some inspired gameplay elements to it.

Ayumi, the female lead, has been designed in an anime/cel-shaded style, and has been plopped down into a world full of temples that have a striking fantasy design to them. The combination looks alluring in stills, and is something that I would like to see in motion. Thankfully, members of Blast Magazine will be attending Comic-Con this weekend, and we’ll get a shot to check out X-Blades in person.

The gameplay is set to be deep but simple at the same time, with different magical alignments (Light and Dark, and the ending changes based on which you follow) as well as a variety of skills that you can purchase. This is a plus, as many action games with leveling systems upgrade your skills automatically; in X-Blades, you will get to focus on the areas that you want to excel in, making you an excellent fighter in the style of your choice.

The controls are designed in a way that allows button mashers to succeed without memorizing countless combos, but there is enough variety in the attacks and spells that you can put together those kinds of impressive stretches of offense if you are so inclined.

We’ll have more on X-Blades after Comic-Con, and will also have a full review of the game after its release. Check back here for more on this and other games featured at Comic-Con this week and next.

X-Blades is a multiplatform title releasing for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC platforms.

It didn’t take long for the first great 2D shooter of the year to arrive, as the Arkedo developed and SouthPeak published Big Bang Mini fills that role admirably. This shoot ‘em up is unique in its style and challenging enough to have you coming back for more; not that you needed anymore encouragement to do so, given the game is loaded with various modes, over 80 levels spanning nine worlds and all for the low price of $20. If you’re interested in that kind of value for your money-and trust me, you are–then read on.

Let’s begin with the basics. You control your ship with the stylus, and you also shoot by dragging the stylus lightly in a direction. Want to fire rapidly? Just drag the stylus multiple times in rapid succession. You will destroy anything moving on the top screen if you do this, but be warned: for every missed shot, you’re going to get to see a fireworks display. While that may sound like a good idea, it isn’t, because these fireworks will fall to the bottom screen near you ship. Crash into one of these, and you’re done, the same as if you were shot point blank by an enemy.

This adds some strategy into your shot selection, as well as the way you control your ship. You also cannot just fly around shooting and avoiding the shrapnel, because every enemy you defeat drops a star that you need to collect on the touch screen. These stars are the key to filling your gauge on the left side of the screen; once it’s full, you have completed the level and can move on to the next stage. Tougher enemies drop larger stars that fill up more of the gauge, so when fighting them you need to leave yourself in a position to collect the prize.

Every level you receive some upgrade or another, some of them permanent (homing shots that are weaker than your regular attack) and some of them not (different kinds of shields you can draw, ricocheting fireballs). This keeps the pacing fresh and makes each location that much different in ways other than the background and the enemies you fight, and Arkedo did a wonderful job coming up with fun ways to defend yourself or go on the offensive.

Arkedo has developed nine unique looking worlds, each one a neon-infused, colorful take on a familiar location. Hong Kong’s skies light up with monkey’s, Chinese dragons and loads of fireworks that come from your own ship, the Sahara is full of living tribal paintings that want to shoot you out of the sky, and New York’s skies are loaded with mask wearing criminals that throw knives at you in between alien invasions, and words that look like they are straight out of a comic book streak across the sky when you destroy enemies. The game is charming visually, and in many cases, the environments are gorgeous to behold, with backgrounds that look like stylized paintings.

The game is at its best when it’s in motion though, with the most chaotic moments filling up the real estate on both screens with fireworks, lasers, enemies and stars. Fans of shoot ‘em ups are going to be thrilled with what they have here; the levels start out easy enough, in order to teach you the basics of moving and shooting, but by the time you get halfway through the game, that mercy can disappear, and you will need to react rather than think.

The sound in the game is also a strong point, with different sounding explosions letting you know you’ve either missed or hit your target-a godsend considering you may need to stare at the bottom screen nonstop on occasion to keep from losing-and music that fits the environments as well as the look and feel of the game. Each level has its own unique sound, and like many shoot ‘em ups, they are the kind of tunes that get stuck in your head as you make your way through the levels.

The time between the end-of-year holiday rush and the new slew of first quarter releases is normally a dark one, where gamers wait for their wallets to fatten once again in order to greedily attack the next wave of fun. That’s not the case this year though, as SouthPeak games released “Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars” in December, priming it for status as a sleeper hit.

A meteor has hit Earth, and the dust released from it has brought much of the plant life to a new level of living where they can now walk, talk and think. As the title implies, you are concerned mostly with mushrooms; those that are safe for humans to eat are the good guys, while the ones who are poisonous are your enemies.

You play as Pax, and your story begins with you training in a village of Bolete ‘shrooms. You accidentally absorb a piece of the meteor that hit, and go on a quest to find a piece of meteor that you will not absorb. Since collecting meteor pieces is an objective, it’s clear from the outset that you will not find a piece like that for a long time.

The gameplay in Spore Wars is simple, as it’s a 3D platformer with basic running and jumping. There are occasional puzzles that you need to solve, whether it’s clearing a room of enemies, dealing with the environment or fixing broken machinery, and much of your time will also be spent in battle. If you are not into flicking your Wii Remote, then you might not enjoy the combat that much, though the controls do work effectively.

The camera control could have been better, but it’s not a problem in battles-especially not boss battles, where the action is often zoomed out for a better view-and is instead the kind of thing that will make you fall off of a platform. Thankfully, the areas you traverse are not bottomless pits where lives are wasted, and if you do happen to die, you just respawn at the closest checkpoint. You may also get lost on occasion, as the game does not give you explicit directions on what your objectives are. Some players may not mind this, but for those who like a bit more structure in their missions, they may get annoyed.

You do get to build all of your weaponry based off of parts that you find strewn across the levels. Not all of these pieces are in broad daylight either, as many require exploration of every nook and cranny in a room. The rooms are huge too; remember, you’re a mushroom in a man’s world. The game lets you know when you have collected all of the parts for a weapon, and then you can use it. There are different weapon types, each with its own specialty and group of enemies that are weak to it. Some weapons also need ammunition, whether it’s something to keep your flamethrower going or batteries for your saw blades.

The weapons you find at first are weak, but you will build stronger ones as the game progresses, and you will need them. Boss fights in Mushroom Men are incredible, and may be the highlight of the gameplay. Though much of the running and jumping platforming elements won’t offer anything new that you haven’t played in old-school 3D games, the boss fights will make you pleased with your purchase. They require thought and some strategy, which is nice in an age where many boss fights take an uninspired “bigger = better” approach.

There’s a glue that holds Mushroom Men together outside of the gameplay, and it’s a strong one. The art style and presentation are on a level that beats out many games from this generation. Sure, as a Wii game, the graphics are not on par with something from the more powerful boxes, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

The concept art you unlock is amazing to look at, and captures the essence of what Mushroom Men is about. The levels are crafted with love and infused with the idea of Mushroom Men, the game universe. The little touches are everywhere, such as when Pax takes damage and his mushroom cap begins to fall off, revealing his sentient ‘shroom brain below. You have to play it to see what I’m going on about, but you will understand once you experience it yourself.

Les Claypool composed much of the game’s soundtrack, and if you are familiar with his work with Primus (or any number of side-projects) you know you’re in for something that’s both incredibly catchy and appropriately weird. In addition to that, the music and sound design group Gl33k developed a metronome based audio system that turns your environment into one giant instrument. This sound is much like Claypool’s work, and keeps the Mushroom Men mood going throughout the game whenever his tunes are missing.

Essentially, what you have is a standard 3D platformer with solid gameplay, great boss battles, incredible art direction, and sound that will pull you deeper into the experience. Those last three items are enough to lift this from an average platformer into the realm of something better; though not quite the best platformer on the system this year, it’s up there, and should be experienced by all Wii owners.

This review originally appeared on Reviewcenter.com in 1999.

Your uncle has apparently committed suicide, leaving you a mine on Luna Crysta, which is “booming” like a California town in the late 1800s. You travel to Luna Crysta to do something with your new mine. After you start meeting people, from the suspicious manner in which everyone acts, you start wondering about Uncle Jake’s “suicide.”

You meet a beautiful woman, (wow, that’s a plot twist we didn’t suspect, did we?) a sinister man, an oily official, a belligerent cop and an oh-so-accommodating bartenter. Your girlfriend whines on the phone, and your sister talks like she wants you dead. And that’s all in the first couple of hours! You do manage to meet two friendly faces, an older female miner, and a young Cephid child, both of who have heard all about you from your uncle, and seem willing to help you.

You have very little money to start, and you might be thinking of selling out. A trip to the casino shows you that beautiful woman is a blackjack dealer, who is welling to cheat for you, (at least until her boss shows up). This gives you a little money to start building up a “kit.”

All the while, people are out to get you. The oily official says he’s sorry out one side of his face, and suggests you pay for the damage uncle Jake’s death caused. The belligerent cop can’t wait for you to misstep, so he can “get” you. The sinister man reveals your darling sister hired him to get your claim — and the words “one way or another” run through your mind while he’s talking. The oh-so-accommodating bartender offers you a price that you “just can’t refuse” on any ore or crystals you find. And the beautiful woman? She’s been hired by the boss to get close to you and watch you.

Boy, do you ever need a friend, huh? Do you feel like you’re in the middle of an afternoon soap? Well, just wait until the game really gets started.

Dark Side of the Moon is mostly a puzzle solver, although there is plenty of opportunity to get killed along the way, so trust me kiddies, save, and save often! This is not a game you want to space out and forget, even if you think you’re safe because no monsters have pounced on you yet.

There are several mysteries to solve, (like starting with what REALLY happened to your uncle,) and various puzzles to solve. Very early on, the sinister man gets blown away, and of course, they think that you did it, so you become a fugitive, which makes for many opportunities for you to get blown to smithereens. That is cool too, if you get killed, you see your atoms floating in the cosmos, you state that while you are dead, you can’t stay that way, you have places to go, and people to see; and the big programmer in the sky-gives you another chance! How many games ya played that returns you close to where you were zapped-and doesn’t even penalize you?

Now for the bad points. There are 6 CD’s and you will spend a LOT of time swapping them. I would have liked it if they could have grouped some stuff you had to do more on the same CD. When you are talking to someone, as good as the graphics are, the action gets somewhat jerky, and I think the jerkiness shows up even more because the graphics are so good. If you don’t like “tongue-in-cheek” acting, you might be tempted to say that the acting is poor. I prefer, the sinister man is very sinister, the oily official ‘drips’, etc.

The movement and conversation are somewhat controlled. About half of the conversation on your side goes down without your control, when you are offered a choice of comments to make, I noticed that it didn’t seem to matter what you asked first, you will have to check every comment to exit this screen. As far as the movement, when you click the mouse to move, and you stop; look around, cause you only stop when there is an intersection, or when there is something next to you to look at. The reason I mentioned this as a bad point-this opinion will vary from player to player. Some people won’t care, some people that are used to having more free rein in the games they have played might feel this is confining.

The big bad point however — the game tends to lock up. When I first started to play, I got stuck in the same spot a half a dozen times; and I mean locks-up-need-to-hard-boot-your-computer lock-up. I finally had to uninstall, re-install, and start over so I could get past that one screen. I did some research on the web, looking to see if there might be a patch, and I did find out that it wasn’t my system. Enough other people mentioned it that it has to be a universal problem. I also noticed that I couldn’t play for too long, maybe a half an hour to 45 minutes at a time, and then Norton started to interrupt with messages saying that my memory load or CPU load was too high. I had to quit the game. My CPU usage was 97 percent and my memory load was 95 percent. I might mention at this point that I have an 8 MB video card, and a 450 P2 with 128 MB of RAM.

OK, so now you’re going to ask why bother since there were so many bad points, and I’m going to tell you why. Some of the bad points won’t be considered bad by everyone. As far as the lock-up glitches, I’m hopeful that SouthPeak, after working on the game for 2 years, will have a fix for these bugs soon. You don’t put as much work into a project as was obviously put into this one, without being willing to clean up those stupid bugs that crop up after production, though some beta testing might have helped.

I just would not let a few lock-ups keep me from getting this game.

The graphics are gorgeous, the sound is great and the story is quite good. If you like RPGs, or science fiction, or you just want to check out something different, give this game a try. I think you’ll be very pleased.

Quick hits:

Publisher: Southpeak Interactive
Developer: Southpeak Interactive
Platform: Adventure
Players: 1
Launch Date: Nov 30, 1998

Playability: 3.5 out of 5 stars
User friendly: 5 out of 5 stars
Sound: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Graphics: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Overall: 4 out of 5 stars
Ratings were determined in 1999

Ye Olde System Requirements

• Pentium 166 MHz
• 32 MB RAM
• 8x or faster CD-ROM
• 60MB hard drive space
• 2MB SVGA graphics for 640×480 resolution
• PCI or AGP video card with 2MB RAM strongly recommended

The ultimate goal of Boss Rally is to play through several seasons of racing, earning points and unlocking faster cars and harder tracks to become the ultimate rally champion. You can play against the computer or via modem, LAN or serial cable to play with a friend. You can control your game with either a gamepad, joystick, mouse, or keyboard.

There are several ways to play. The championship game is the primary game mode, pitting you against 19 other computer controlled cars, looking to win the for the season. There are 6 seasons per year, and this game does include weather to ruin your year. There is also Time Attack, which is a single player game, for bettering your time by racing against a previous race or recording a new race; or Quick Race, which pits you against a single computer controlled opponent, and allows you to practice and/or get used to the different options you have available.

There are 3 driving perspectives, cockpit view, chase and first person. You can also select an automatic or manual transmission, change your tires and shocks to better control, steer and ‘grip’ the road, depending on conditions. You need to pay attention to that, cause at some point you will be racing in the snow! You also have a lap counter, a lap speedometer, a regular speedometer and more on your screen while you are racing, and if these things bother you-you can shut them off.

The game suffers from serious control issues, however. The cars and courses are fake too. You’re also limited to two cars and courses when you first start out. This is supposed to be an arcade racer, but you have to spend hours unlocking all of the arcade game features.

If you really like racing games and have the right touch to get past the control issues, you might want to give it a try.

Quick hits:

Publisher: Southpeak Interactive
Developer: Boss Game Studios
Platform: Nintendo 64
Genre: Racing
Players: 1
Launch Date: April 30, 1999

Playability: 3.5 out of 5 stars
User friendly: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Sound: 3 out of 5 stars
Graphics: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Overall: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Ratings were determined in 1999

Ye Olde System Requirements

• P2-233MHz
• 32 MB RAM
• DirectX 6.0
• 60MB hard drive space
• 16-bit sound card
• 4 MB video memory