Modern PC Gaming

Titan Quest

Speaking of ridiculous… Something that seemed a little ridiculous was the teleporting system in ancient Greece. The Greeks apparently discovered teleportation somewhere to allow the hero access to every city section once discovered. They even clear a patch of city in order to have built a ornate ‘teleporter’ area for exactly one man. Your bumbling, genocide-inducing self. Let me repeat this for effect; the Greeks. and later the Egyptians, have made a system of instant teleportation and yet… somehow… are under siege by horny goat-men and skeletons that are about as deadly as gnats with cold-symptoms.

Modern PC Gaming

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Bioshock 2

It’s no surprise that being able to ram a person’s face with an industrial drill or electrocuting them from the palm of your hand or freezing them and smashing them like Mortal Kombat is a lot of fun. All the different powers you get can change how you go around obliterating people and that’s really neat. Although for me the main tactic was freezing and smashing everything, you can create a ton of chaos doing that while summoning a swarm of bugs to go eat another enemy or confusing another group. Surprisingly, for me, the first time I played it I say it’s worth a fun factor score of 9 out of 10. On the replay I just stormed through the game and at that level of carnage the game probably gets a fun factor score of 7 or 8 out of 10.

Modern PC Gaming

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Mass Effect 2

I wish they would go away from this dumbed down choose-your-own-adventure system and go back towards the roots of more intricate RPGs. It’s kind of annoying how they only phrase part of what your response would be in the options. I miss the days of being able to look at 8-9 different responses that were worded out exactly as my character would deliver them. I would look at lines in Fallout 2 or Planescape: Torment and think “hey, that’s really clever, let’s see what happens?!” Now I can just click on the obvious choices and just keep making my guy nicer/more of an asshole. Like, it takes no skill or thought.

Modern PC Gaming

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Aliens versus Predator 2000

Should you decide to play as the human space marine, you will quickly find out why I claim for this to be one of the scariest PC games of all time. Everything pretty much kills you really fast. You have the worst vision in the game (the game is pretty dark enough as it is) and you have to rely between switching your night vision off and using your motion sensor which has the same sound effects sort of like the second Alien movie, Aliens. Your weapons range from the assault rifle to a smart gun, various rocket/missile launchers (overkill usually, and can kill you from the splash damage) to the flame thrower. You will get nervous playing as the space marine as you hear the claws and feet of multiple aliens coming at you from every direction.

Modern PC Gaming

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DiRT 2

Like DiRT 1, DiRT 2 has many big names and personalities from the world of rally racing. Ken Block, Mohammed bin Sulayem, and Travis Pastrana are some, to name a few. The racers interact with you as you race (crash) them with a little pop-up and some smart ass comment to keep you in good spirits. Once in a while, in between races, if you really owned it up or sucked big time, the game will offer you a special challenge against one of these personalities. The challenge will depend on the kind of event you just did and what kind of racing that racer favors the most.

Modern PC Gaming

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Heavy Weapon (Atomic Tank) review

I first played this game when we were at my friend Frank’s house and we downloaded the demo via the PS3 Store just to check out some new games. We played the living crap out of the demo, and even that was fun. When I found that they were selling this on Steam I didn’t hesitate to buy it on the spot since I remember how challenging the demo was. I’ve been playing this game for about 2 months and I still find it entertaining.

Modern PC Gaming

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Geometry Wars Retro Evolved

There are different kinds of enemies each with their own attack style pattern. The most basic enemy, a star just comes at you in a linear path, so they’re usually easy to dispatch. There is a diamond shape one that does about the same only that they spawn in groups. There is a green square cowardly one that will stay away from whatever direction you’re shooting in, will try to go around you to tag (kill) you. There is a pink one that when you kill will spawn two smaller enemies that will go kamikaze for you in a circular pattern. You have a snake one (I call them sperm) that you can only kill by shooting the head off. There is a black hole enemy that eats other enemies and also draws you in via gravity, but the best attack is also has is spitting out really fast seeker enemies when it ate until it burst.

Modern PC Gaming

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Max Payne

ou take the role of Max Payne, a New York detective who has the American Dream, an attractive wife that loves him, a small baby, living in your suburb home. As soon as the game starts these Valkyr (a new drug, sort of like Nuke in Robocop 2) junkies brake into your house and murder both your child and soul mate. After killing them, you sob over their corpses like a helpless child. Soon after that, you transfer into vice work, working deep undercover infiltrating the mafia to get to the source of the drug Valkyr. You have been working doing that for a few years but when you are finally getting some good leads, they kill your partner, the only real person who knows exactly what you were up to and you are framed with his murder.

Modern PC Gaming

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Batman Arkham Asylum

Many of the secrets you find will help you level up faster and they help you find out more about how really evil some of the villains are. There are three types of secrets you can find: interview tapes, Riddler question marks, and Arkham lore symbols. The interview tapes are usually tapes that were recorded by psychologists interviewing specific villains in the course of their therapy. The Riddle question marks are usually a matter of you exploring every little bit of the map and picking them up, as well as knocking down walls or climbing up to or gliding down to hard to reach places. The Arkham lore symbols are the hardest to find and they help explain the history behind Arkham Asylum.

Modern PC Gaming

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Nation Red

If you enjoy shooting endless hordes of flesh eaters with the constant stress of being under siege then this is your game. The developers update this game at least once a month, usually making it into a different game because of rule/item changes so this keeps the game fresh. The game has a sheer level of destruction that will bring a smile to any pyro’s face. They keep adding new guns every month and that is a sweet pleasure. I give Red Faction a Fun Factor score of 8 out of 10 with variations to that based on how the latest build changed the game.

Modern PC Gaming

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OutRun 2006 Coast 2 Coast

Outrun is one of the classic arcade games that put Sega on the map in the arcade world and helped them later become a major player in the console market. If you’ve never played Outrun, Outrun is a very fast racing game where you are driving really fast in a bunch of Ferrari cars to get to the finish line, with a time limit. There are different game modes, some where you race against rivals, the traditional one where you are trying to get there as soon as possible with your girlfriend riding shotgun, and another one where you are trying to get the girl excited (no, seriously) by completing challenges. You do different stages depending on the game mode you set it to and unlock new courses, girlfriends, cars (which you buy with money), and music

Modern PC Gaming

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GRID

It’s thrilling to take control of a 500-1000 horsepower race car and push it to the utter limit. Since the game has a damage engine, one can’t simply drive the car straight through walls and one has to be strategic regarding making the car last the entire race. I think that makes the game a more fun vs something like Grand Turismo. The only part that kind of gets boring which you must do (not really but I’m a perfectionist) is the 24-hour LeMans race which literally is an endurance race which will take 24 real minutes to complete. I’ve literally done that over 100 times and I’m kind of sick of it. I would have liked them to have offered some variations to it like 12 hours at Sebring or some other real epic races rather than just that one over and over in between the transition of racing seasons.

Modern PC Gaming

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Trackmania

Trackmania is pretty much the most played racing game series in the history of PC gaming. Most people in the US don’t know it because it’s from French developer Nadeo. Also since it’s mainly a pure PC racing game (although a Nintendo DS version was released) most of the console crowd (where most people who play racing games are) never heard of it. Sure, people might play Need For Speed whichever is the newest at the time but after a month they will probably never play it again. With Trackmania, since the game has been around since 2003, and now in its 4th game “United” one can just not play it for a while and revisit it months/years later with tons of new content and the game never disappoints.

Modern PC Gaming

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Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 2

There are different game modes: single player and co-op storyline campaign, skirmish which you can set to PVE or play with a combination of other players together or against each other in the tradition of online pvp play that’s now commonplace, and the recently added mode of The Last Stand. The campaign consists of you or your gaming partner following a series of linear and also randomly generated conquer and defend missions with your squad of hero units which have leveling through combat/objectives (also a level cap) and the acquisition of relics (wargear) that modify the combat characteristics/tactics of each squad. You can only play as the human Space Marine faction in the campaign.