007 Nightfire on my PC!

While not entirely crappy, 007 Nightfire is a game I'll never play again. I will try not to praise GoldenEye all the way, first because I know and you know that one's a freaking awesome game and second, because this is not GoldenEye, this is Nightfire.

Ported by Gearbox in 2002 -the same that gave us the Half-life expansions and Halo (I guess)- Nightfire is your standard FPS bringing you Pierce Brosnan as James Bond! -I think that's pretty cool- I don't know much about the Bond books, only the movies, but it appears that this one is not taken from any of them, it's like a made up plot from both the books and the movies. The intro of the game is just awesome -and in my opinion better than many of the openings from the movies-, The song is "Nearly civilized" by Esthero by the way, it's a collage of all the cheesy images we like from the movies, very pretty.

A nice thing is that the graphics are really good, and the modeling of the characters is just perfect -2002 perfect for the stupid kids that dislike old games because of the 'Shitty graphics'-, the faces look nice and the environments are well done too, visually, I have nothing to say. The music is nice and the sounds too -despite some that i'll talk about later- but overall it's ok; the controls are fine too, tight and responsive; weapons and gadgets are nicely made and all, nothing to say there either...

One thing that I must admit is that, even if the plot is well made, It felt rushed and I always felt like I was left out of it, even to the point that I didn't get it right at all, I don't know, it was like getting someone to resume me Moby Dick, you can get to know what happens, but it's not like you actually read it.

One of the shittier aspects of the game is AI, they are plain dumbasses! I don't know how to explain myself, but they are simply dumb, sometimes you shoot one from a distance and he turns around and runs the other way while the soldier besides him is just standing like nothing happened, or he runs and shoots the hell out of a wall or runs straight at you while you shoot him, or shoots a rocket to you while standing just in front of you, I mean, they feel dumb and odd. One thing I just hated is that sometimes you shoot the shit out of them and they keep on shooting you -pretty much like the soldiers from Half-life, but at least those where smart- or you shoot them in the head and they don't die -the inverse is totally likable, sometimes you shoot them in the arm and they die instantly :D-, also they scream things, but all of them say the same thing, like "Identify yourself" -while you're shooting him- or some things in japanese that sound really stupid, at first it seems ok, then you get bored of it.

Sometimes I felt that there was a lot of unfair challenge, I know this is some kind of stealth game and you have to avoid enemies and all that, but there are times you are walking and just killed a bunch of dudes when the door behind you opens and a guy with a rocket launcher blows the shit out of you! Come on! I don't have an eye inside my butt hole!

While playing I felt that there was no technique or tactics or anything, yeah, you can go past by some guards and all that, but I preferred to run and gun everyone because there are times that you are going stealth fine and a dude like a kilometer away spots you and alerts the 50 guards you just left behind and they shoot the shit out of you -Pretty much like the mercenaries from Far Cry-

Your partners are crap too, there's this mission where Allura -I guess it's her- joins you and she is carrying a sniper rifle, but damn she's so dumb! she never shots that shit! sometimes the guards are in front of her shooting you and she just stands there watching! sometimes when you reload, she respawns in front of a guard and neither of them does a damn thing xD

The game is really buggy at times, sometimes you try to open a door, but you have to be standing at a very specific spot to get it open, also, there is a part near the end of the game that a camera spots you and alerts the guards, but I’ve never been able of finding where the hell that camera is placed! On that same spot, there’s a security room, you can’t open the door, the guards come out and you’re set, but sometimes they don’t open the door and try to shoot you through the door, and this is a game stopper, I stood there like ten minutes trying to get them to open the door and eventually had to reload the game. Sometimes the corpses fly away when they die xD

A special mention goes for the ninjas near the end of the game, they are just fucking shit! You can’t shoot them because they run around and they take like a million bullets to go down while they can bring you down in no time -I mean, it’s James Bond, not Chuck Norris-

Even walking in the game is odd, you feel like you’re floating or something; and the guns feel odd, I don’t know how to explain it, but they are odd, they don’t feel like when you play other games and you feel the shots, remember playing Return to castle Wolfenstein? Remember how it felt shooting Nazis with a Luger? Remember how it felt shooting vortigaunts with a shotgun, like a real shot? Well, that doesn’t happen here, it’s an odd feeling that makes it even more bothersome and crappy to kill the dumb soldiers, even the sounds of the shots sound odd, and that makes your experience even crappier.

Well, this has gone too long right? To wrap things up, 007 Nightfire is a good game but fails in many many aspects and that is what does not let this game become a great game –or get close to Goldeneye-, I enjoyed playing this game, but sometimes I hated it and wondered why the hell was I playing this shit. Play it if you can have it borrowed or something so you don’t waste your money in it –Or if you can get it for a console, try it there, I’ve heard it’s better there-

PD: At least, boobs look nice :D

Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the NES!!

Hello! I was playing some NES games on this web page where you can play with no need to download today and stumbled across this one game: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; At first, I remembered the AVGN's review on this game, it's hard to forget when you see on someone's face the fear and hatred they feel about something, and, if I don't remember wrong, he didn't show a lot of gameplay on his video review, so I said "Well, could this game be as shitty as the AVGN said? let's find out n_n

Well, at first the game seems fine to me, the music is not that bad, it's like a creepy MIDI organ, but it sounds good. The start is a little odd, you have the credits as any other NES game and then the phrase "A strange case of Dr. Jekyll"... what is that for?... anyway. The start screen, I gotta admit it, I like it as cheesy as it might seem, the title is on big letters and a green blueish hand creeps from the bottom of the screen and you use it to select start or continue if you were playing and died. If you don't do anything you can see Dr. Jekyll working on his lab or something.

As the game starts you see Dr. Jekyll walking out out of his house, the music is fine, the graphics are pretty to see, 8 bit splendor xD, as soon as you get out of the house a woman apears behind you and hits you... what the hell?!... anyway, the game is a side scroller, and basically you have to walk forward avoiding the townspeople that wants to kill you; What's wrong with these people?!! Dr. Jekyll is youst walking happily and everyone wants to kill him, I mean, did he kill someone or steal or what?!! There are people that walk by and hit you, there are women that run to you and hit you, there are kids that shoot you, birds that shit on your head, dogs, cats, gravediggers throwing dirt and the most hedious and horrible ones, some purple wearing dudes that leave bombs to your side, those are the ones to hate! and when you get hit, you get thrown all the back way to the other side of the screen;
you jump with A and with B you use a cane like thing, but it doesn't do ANYTHING!! why would someone put a weapon on a game with no use!! it means that some idiot programmers said:
-Hey, let's give him a weapon, like a cane.
-Ok, so he will be able to hit people.
-Nope, this weapon will do nothing! awesome right?!!
-Yeah!

Trying to succed on this game is really hard; you have a life meter that measures... you life, and you have a "meter" meter... it's like an "angry" bar that depletes as you receive damage from people, when it depletes completely, you transform into Hyde, the world becomes all horrible and monsters appear, and you have to kill as many as you can to transform back. The first time you will do what you see on the AVGN video, you start walking, soon you are so beaten by the people that you transform into Hyde and a lightning strikes you and you're dead... fun right?...

Playing for a while, I got used to the game, my biggest problems where the purple guys, they are a real pain in the ass, but to bypass them, you have to wait until the sound of the bomb stops and jump, that way, the bomb doesn't reach you; The dogs are horrible too, they attack three times, they run to you, come back and attack you and turn around and attack you again! you have to jump over them to avoid them, but the jumps are slower than the dog, so most of the times, the dog will hit you on his second attack; besides those guys, there is not much of a challenge on the first level. Ah! and the l ightning thing, it seems that when you transform to hyde, he starts from the beginning of the level, and if he reaches Jekyll's position, then the lightning strikes and you die, don't ask why...

I managed to get to the second level or screen, and here it becomes a little harder; there are this stupid birds that fly across the screen and crap on you, also, the dogs and purple guys appear more often, you can get your ass kicked real quick, and worst, th e position of enemies on screen is random, so learning when one comes is not really that useless, but neither that useful.

I couldn't get past this level, if I had tried more I would have kicked my computer; This game is really frustrating, it looks good and all, but the gameplay is just awful! So, now you know how fucking awful this game is... don't play it, I have emotional wounds that will be hard to heal... :(

Well, back to playing Gun on my pc :D

Call of Cthulhu: Dark corners of the earth on my pc.

Call of Cthulhu is one of the hardest, scariest and greatest games I've played lately. Developed by the now late Headfirst productions and published by Bethesda softworks in 2005 for the Xbox and 2006 for the PC, it's a Lovecraft inspired stealth and survival horror FPS -is that well written?- taken out, mostly, from the story "A shadow over Innsmouth" by that author.

The game is mostly known for it's numerous glitches, some of them are specially bothersome because the actually refrain you from continuing the game. What is less known, is that the game is actually fun and challenging -really, really fucking challenging-, and the story is really well made and sucks you in as you play.

You are Jack Walters, a police detective who is one of the best at solving hard cases, who is internated into Arkham asylum -no, we don't get to see The Joker :(- after a raid at the house of some strange cultists. After that, he turns into a private detective with amnesia of what happened at that house and sporadic fits of schizophrenia. Jack is contacted to take the case of a missing person in Innsmouth, and, as he goes there, he finds that the town is not so friendly with outsiders and that there might be more than there seems to be about the case, as he is followed by some entity that watches him from afar.

The game is more "stealthing" than shooting; actually, trying to shoot your way out of places in this game is not such a bright idea, and that's what makes this game awesome and fucking hard, because you have to think and take your time to do what you must, and when you do, you have to be real careful not to get caught or you are fucked.

There are some places, like the one when you get chased out of your hotel room by the fishermen, that are really really really hard, everything is timed really tight and if you lose one second, you get caught; actually, that part is the best, the hardest and the most exciting chase scene I've ever played in a game -there's is a let's play of this game on youtube, watch the attack of the fishermen part, it's just awesome!-; It took me a million times to get past it, but when you get through that, you feel Godlike. There are also some other hard parts, like the scape in the back of the car, and hard games don't mean awesome games, but this game managed to blend being difficult with entertaining -as fucked up as that sounds like- and did it great.

The graphics are good, perhaps not awesome, but they are good; it has this grainy look that makes it feel like an old movie and it looks awesome. Sometimes the graphics seem a little lazy, especially when in caves, everything looks alike and you don't know where the fuck to go, and sometimes you don't even see it because it is too dark -yeah, I was forgetting that, this game is really dark, it's one of those "I can't see shit" games- or because the wall blends with other wall and the path seems hidden; Besides that, the game is pretty to see.

The gameplay is great, the controls are good, your standard FPS controls, responsive, nothing about them. Something I hated was that... COULD JACK WALTERS BE ANY SLOWER?!! I mean, he walks real slow! yeah, you have to take your time and think and take it easy and all that, but when ugly half man half fish creatures are trying to eat the living shit out of you, you must be able to run!! you can only go slow or slower -slower is to get past enemies and dont get noticed, like holding your breath and walking on your toes-.

A great thing is that there is no HUD or anything on the screen, you only see the ambient and your gun, there is nothing on screen, no crosshair, no health bar, no ammo, no nothing, just you and the game; some people find this shitty, I find it awesome, more thrilling. But now comes this, how do you see your health? and that's just awesome, your health can be seen in the menu as an EKG, pretty much like Resident evil, but that's not what I find awesome, this is: during gameplay, as you get wounded you check your health by Jack's responses, as he is dying you can feel him having a hard time walking or shooting, moaning, his heart beating and his breath getting rougher, also, the color of the screen starts draining to the point of being almost black and white when you are about to die; also, if Jack is wounded on the leg and breaks it, you limp as you walk, and he moans in pain and the leg makes this awful breaking sound; if you get wounded on the arm, aiming is difficult.

The healing system is also great, you pick this med kits that have bandages, splints, sutures and antidotes and you use them depending on the wound; if you have a scratch use a bandage, if you have a cut use a suture, if you have a broken limb use a splint; I find this better than that system where you lay back and regain your health; that's just stupid, I wish that actually happened, if I was ran over by a car I'd just wait for my legs to regenerate.

The shooting is also great. As you have no cross hair, you are forced to aim with the small irons of the gun itself; just as if you were holding the gun. The plot is great at well made, the story is fluid and draws you in as you play; the farther you get, the more you want to know about what is happening; this is in my opinion one of the few scary games that are actually scary.

And this is what everybody knows, the glitches. I'm not gonna lie, the bugs and glitches are a real pain in the ass!, I know the game was rushed out and, as Headfirst died, there was no one to actually take care of them, but fuck they are a pain in the ass! The first one -of the two I ran into-. is the saving, if the PC's clock is not on 24 hours format, the game does not save shit, not even autosaves; it's not such a thing, but it's bothersome.

The second, and the most shitty one, the one that almost made me send this game to shit was the Shooting with the cannon to the island one; here, you are amid a storm on a boat, your objective is to get to the cannon and shoot some wizards on the reef; well, I got into the cannon and saw the reef, but when I zoomed in, I couldn't see shit! All that happened was that the numbers went away, but the reef wasn't zoomed in! And this one is a game stopper, you can't advance if you get this glitch, I tried everything, restarting the level, starting from a previous save -never save on top of the previous save-, shooting blind, every fucking thing and there's no way out. How did I solve it?... I had to download a save state after that point, yes, seems like almost everybody gets this glitch, so, someone who is a great person and God owes him heaven, uploaded a save state right after the cannon thing, so that everyone could bypass the cannon and continue the game. Awesome right?...

The game is great, despite the glitches and game stoppers and all that crap, the game is awesome; good plot, good graphics, great gameplay and some interesting aproaches on the method of doing an FPS -I always say, if it's not broken, don't touch it, but the ideas from this game are good actually- It's a game that I really recommend, play it and see for yourself.

One thing before I finish... The ending... don't get me wrong, the ending cinema is awesome; I mean the very last part of the game. You are in an underwater cave and just defeated the last boss, when suddenly the army attacks the caves and everything starts falling on your head, so, you have to RUN away... that wouldn't be hard if, one, JACK COULD RUN!, and two, if this part wasn't timed, and I tell you, timed by the milisecond, you lose time and you are fucked and everything falls on you and you fucking die... Just so you have an idea on how hard this is, I reached the ending of this game a couple of months ago -I play other things too and sometimes I study... sometimes XD- but I have never, ever been able to finish it, I get to a rock corridor, and when I "run" into it, the ceiling collapses completely and I die... so, for me, that's the ending of the game, Jack dies. End of story.

PD: Thanks for reading and sorry for the lack of images and using images from other places and not from my game, but when I tried to capture the images, the game just crashed, or the image was way too dark; if someone knows how to take good game stills, I'd be glad if you told me how.

Nosferatu: The wrath of Malachi on my PC

I'm a big fan of Survival horror games, I mean, who isn't?! they are just awesome! Games like Alone in the dark, Darkseed, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, F.E.A.R, Doom -Fits here in my opinion- and more and more and more; Games with awesome action ridden horror secuences, horrible things lurking around to eat the flesh out of your bones, great ambients that chill your bones, and the amazing feeling of not knowing what the fuck to do, you know what I mean, simply awesome! Now, I want to talk about this one game: Nosferatu: The wrath of Malachi.

Nosferatu is a survival horror first person shooter videogame for the PC, developed by Idol FX and released in 2003 by iGames; after a little research, I haven't found any other games by Idol FX, I just keep finding this one and some other called "Drake", but I don't know what that one is about or anything so I can't say anything more there, but perhaps someone might inform me. It's loosely based on Bram (NOT BRAN) Stoker's "Dracula", or perhaps a little more on F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" -By a little I mean just the title and the vampire's character, because the game has little to do with any-

The game begins with you as James Patterson as you arrive late to an old creepy castle on top of a cliff, where your sister Rebbeca is going to get married with the son of some rich Transilvanian Count... by night... I mean, could it be more obvious that something is not fucking right?! anyway, James arrives late and as he gets there, he finds out that something's gone totally wrong when he finds that the luggage of his family is at the entrance and that the main door has been covered with crosses; out of a sudden, he realizes that the Count is a vampire and he must save his family and friends from the dark forces of evil -How did he learn this I have no fucking clue...-

This is your standard FPS, the main idea is to save your family from being vampire's dinner in a two hour time limit, there are three buildings where you can look for them, tho, the game is very lineal in a way, because the access is really limited to the first building, and you can't get into another if you haven't finished the first and so on; also, you have a time limit to find each of your friends or they get eaten -when one of them dies, you get a movie with some odd images and a voice telling you the pain and suffering that person dealt with due to your incapability of rescueing that person, people might find it cheesy, for me it's pretty cool- You have your standard combat weapons, a sword -swords tend to look shitty on FPS games in my opinion- a revolver, a flintlock gun -the best one, slow tho-, a cross, wooden stakes, holy water, machine gun etc. The whole game has a movie like style which makes it really beautiful to see, you have old tape like lines going across the screen all the time and a grainy appearance, making it look like an old scary movie.

This game adapted something that sounds real cool but fucks things up in the end: The castle is completely random, the rooms and everything aren't the same everytime you start a new game. At first I thought "hey, that sounds good" and thought that it might add up a lot for replay value; and it does, don't get me wrong, but sometimes, the rooms are so random that you don't know where you are or where to go; I have not such a problem with that, but what I hate, is that the random thing, sometimes puts people too far away or in places that are hard to reach and they end up dying just because it was too fucking far!! and when you find a person, you must return to the entrance because that's the safe spot and they give you stuff like garlic or guns, so you don't have too much time to waste running on rooms that look almost the same of to far away places!! Another thing I hate is that the monsters respawn, and when you go back to rescue a person, you find yourself in a room that you had already cleaned, but packed with monsters! and I'm not sure, but the monsters attack your friends and they die!! Something really funny, is that characters jump to avoid things, and they can jump like three or four times their own size and land all stiff.

The graphics are not so great but not that bad either, the characters seem a little square and choppy, but that's ok; there are little combat animations, perhaps to give the feeling of enemies being real fast, but it makes them seem really shitty and the path recognition is really bad, so they find themselves getting stuck on things in the room -you get used to this and don't notice it farther ahead-; still, they are not to be taken lightly because two or three monsters can get you by the balls in no time. You have a stamina -or perhaps a fear- bar, that goes up as you fight monsters; when it's really up, James has a hard time walking, his breathing goes all rough and shoots with a shaky hand. The whole lay out of the castle -tho repetitive- is really pretty and massively gothic, and, having times when action is completely paused and you are not fighting any monster, you can check the surroundings and appreciatte the pretty images.

What is really great and what makes the atmosphere of the game is the music, old fashioned movie like strings ambient music going all over the game makes it more creepy, the upbeats when a monster appears are bone chilling that you find yourself jumping out of your seat or looking all over the place to find that nothing is following you -some people find this bad, I find it good, you end up walking on your toes-. Also, some things that pump up the creepines are the dark voices you hear at times, the scary laughs, the odd sounds and things like that, specially when you use the cross, it is accompanied by some odd multiple voiced prayer that is just fucking creepy.

The ending of the game is pretty, but is a little downbeat, and Nosferatu and later Malachi aren't that of the hard bosses you'd expect; The normal vampires you find creeping out of coffins are more of a fight than the last bosses -and who is Malachi? the prophet from the Bible? did he turn against God? or that creepy kid from Children of the corn?-

To wrap things up, Nosferatu is a rookie, low-budgeted game with some flaws, still, the game is good enough to bypass all those flaws and give out a great gaming experience and a good couple of scares (people, stop fucking focusing on the bad things of games! there are games with glitches for example, Call of Cthulhu: Dark corners of the earth, but they are fucking awesome games! and shouldn't be qualified as bad just because of some thing.) In my actual experience, I had a great time playing Nosferatu and enjoyed every single bit of it; a very recomendable game if you like creepy stuff and old scary movies. Not the best horror game out there, but a great horror game.

My "Top ten" games of this ten years!!

Well, I had nothing to do and was reading an watching some stuff, so I decided I was going to make this list; the top ten games that have really touched my soul in this ten years. I really don't play that much on consoles, not that I don't like them, I don't have any (sobs), so mostly this are PC games, except for three of them, and games that I have played, I know someone will say "hey, where's this game or that game", that's why I want to make clear "The games that I HAVE PLAYED", yes, my computer's hardware has refrained me from playing some awesome kickass new gen games that most people consider awesome, but for the games I've played, this is my top ten favourite.

10 - Audiosurf.

Many people don't know this game's existence or don't like it. Audiosurf is a music based puzzle/race game hibrid or something, released in 2008 on Steam. The gameplay is really simple, you upload a song from your PC and the game generates a race course based on the song's tempo, you race a pod -very similar to FZero- and try to hit color blocks that in a way match the song, while avoiding grey blocks. the idea is to collect groups of at least three blocks to gain points, and that's pretty much it. There are other play modes, but this is the basic. The ambients are really pretty, everything is like a moving fractal image -fractals are pretty right?- not depending on high tech graphics or advanced hardware, I guess it could run on pretty much anything with enough RAM.

The reason I like it, is because it can be played once and again and it's not esy to get bored of it, worst for me that I'm listening to music all the time, has massive replay value and is really addictive. It works on the same idea of Guitar hero and alikes: you simply like music, and few things are better than playing while listening to your music -perhaps killing zombies while listening to your music... but someday we'll find out-.

9 . Castlevania: Harmony of dissonance / Kingdom hearts: Chain of memories.

I couldn't decide wich one of this two, so this one is a tie. Perhaps the only games I've played on Gameboy advance that aren't a pokemon.

The first exception on my PC games is: Castlevania: Harmony of dissonance, released by Konami in 2002 for the Gameboy advance; following the steps set by Symphony of the night with a Metroid like 2D castle map, sets Juste Belmont and his friend Maxime Kischine back on Dracula's castle, looking for their childhood friend Lydie Erlanger, who is being held captive inside.

Most people like better Symphony of the night or Aria of sorrow but I have not played those really well, so, for me, this is the one I liked the most, I liked Circle of the moon, but this one has a little something. The gameplay is awesome, the plot is well rendered and it draws you into playing more, the graphics and music are pretty and it's really fun to play; I managed to get two different endings and both are equally satisfactory. Definitively a game to be remembered, just like all the Castlevanias (yes, I like Castlevania 2 for the NES and the N64 ones too...)

The second one is Kingdom Hearts: Chain of memories. I have never really played the ones on bigger consoles, but this one was really satisfactory. Released by Square Enix in 2004 and remade for the PS2 in 2007 (2008), Sets Sora and his friends -Donald, Goofy and Jiminy Cricket- in Castle Oblivion, where Soras' memories are to fade as new appear while he travels across the castle, which is build up from Sora's memories (now we know why it's named Chain of memories), trying to recall his friend Naminé, who is being held captive in the castle (yeah... pretty much like Castlevania right?)

The gameplay is a mixture of RPG and figting card game, where you can attack your enemies if the number of the card you play is higher than the card your enemy played. It's very pretty to play, the graphics are GBA good and the plot is great. At first, I thought this would be a dumb game because of the Disney characters, but this is one of the many times I've been dead wrong. The ending is really good and there's a second story after you end the game the first time. Awesome game, play it if you can.

8 - Max Payne.

Everybody knows Max Payne, and if you don't, you've lived under a rock (and if you only know the 2008 film, you're dumb and don't know what you've missed). An amazing third person shooter game developed by Remedy entertainment and 3D realms in 2001 and ported to the PS2, XBox and GBA by Rockstar (yeah, the GBA version is really good). You're Max Payne, a NY police agent that lost his family, killed by a trio of drug addicts on the new design drug called Valkyr; later Max becomes an undercover agent, investigating on some mafia bosses; no one knows his existence but his friend Alex Balder, who gets shot by an unknown person, thus, Max loses his identity as a policeman, comes to be the main suspect of the murder and specially, becomes a non existing person who has nothing to lose; this way, Max begins a one man war against the whole mafia.

The story of the game takes you deeper and deeper as you play it, as you discover more of the character himself and as you fight his inner demons. The comic book-like story board with the cheesy characters make a pretty sight and the gameplay is well made and entertaining. Max Payne is one of the first games that used the "Bullet time", in my own words, the capability of slowing the whole game so you can see where the bullets are coming from or where your enemies are so you can get a better shot or dodge a couple of bullets, pretty much like the bullet scenes from Matrix. Great replay value also. It was followed by Max Payne 2: The fall of Max Payne, which is a great game too and theres a Max Payne 3 scheduled for 2010... but we can only hope for it to be true.

7 - Unreal Tournament 2004.

Unreal is an awesome game, that's it. I first played a demo of Unreal Tournament out from a Internet connection installer CD that also had a Quake II demo and some other game named SIN that i've never heard of again; it was absolutely awesome. Then I played it again on the awesome holy and missunderstood (makes a bow and the cross sign) Sega DreamCast; that was as close as nirvana as you could get back in the days.

Then it's Unreal Tournament 2004, released on that date by Epic games, Digital extreme and Atari, used the Unreal engine 2.5; featured all the things that made it's predecessors awesome, but including greater graphics, new weapons, new gameplays, team building and fighting, smarter AI and the most awesome thing a FPS battle game could ever have: tanks, gun torrets, aircrafts and spacecrafts!; This addition made it possible for awesome great scale epic action battles to take place! Shredding aliens and people to pieces had never been this awesome. There is no way words can explain how awesome this game is, you must play it.

On 2007, Unreal Tournament III came out, but I have not played that one that much, needless to say, it's awesome.

6 - First Encounter Assault Recon (F.E.A.R)

A great way way to mix first person shooter games and horror. Developed by Monolith productions and released by Vivendi and Sierra in 2005, takes you into the character of "The point man". You are like a S.W.A.T. team, sent to eliminate a man named Paxton Fettel, who used a batallion of mind controlled soldiers to take control of some military base or something; but as you chase the man, some odd things begin to happen, hallucinations and paranormal activity that involve a little long haired girl in red.

F.E.A.R. managed to mix two of my favourite things: First person shooters and japanese-like horror; of course, this game is not the only one nor the first one, but manages to make it in a very pretty way. A very pretty thing is that, when you look down, you can actually see the characters feet and body, unlike most FPS's that you can't see them.

I can't say a lot of things of this one because I haven't actually finished it, but one thing is for sure: It's an awesome game. Play at night in the dark, but don't forget a spare of underwear... you'll need it.

5 - Jet Grind Radio.

Out from the awesome (makes a bow and a cross sign) Sega DreamCast, developed by Smilebit and published by SEGA in 2000, Jet Grind (or Set) Radio placed you at the battle of three on-line skaters gangs for the territory of Tokio-to. You are Beat, a guy who ran from home trying to join a gang of on-line skaters: Later, Beat decides to start his own gang, "the GG's" and begins a graffity spray tagging war with the other rival gangs.

The game is really fun to play, you have to spray paint your tag all over the place before the cops get you, and replace the other gang's sprayed tags with your own, sounds really simple but the game can become really challenging ahead. The music was awesome in my opinion, J-Popish electro music that really fits the ambients, there's even a soundtrack CD. This game, like (makes bow) the DreamCast console, where way ahead of time, being one of the first (if not the first, at least it's the first I saw) games that used the Cell-shaded graphics, making the game look like a cartoon, and which is used now by other games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind waker and Prince of Persia. This kind of graphics, added to the bright colors and the J-popish music made a really beautiful game to watch and play -and probably a real torture for epileptic kids-.

The game was followed later by Jet Set Radio Future on Xbox, I haven't seen that one.

4 - Uplink.

Uplink is the proof that only a nice plot and a well made and addictive gameplay are needed to make an incredible game. With not great graphics -actually, this game has no graphics at all- Uplink is a great game with a great fanbase community and a great amount of MOD's -actually, I have one where the photos of people have been changed by the FBI's most wanted-. Released in 2001 by Introversion software on Steam, this game is a movie-like hacker emulator, pretty much like the hacking done in the 2001 movie Swordfish. As a friend said, "It's a nerd's game" and in a way, it is.

In Uplink you become an agent of a corporation named "Uplink" which helps hackers from all over the world to do their hacking stuff. Set in the year 2010 XD, basically, you access the Uplink computer located in one point of the world -I guess that's the only graphic, a map of the world where you can see the I.P. of the computers you have access- and from the database, you can accept contracts from different companies, asking you to hack into someone's system and erase something or steal data or create false identities, among others. You can buy your hacking softwares and tools out from Uplink, you can also upgrade your gateway and secure it so you can run before the feds find you; things gets better when by April on the game's date, you receive a mail from a dead agent saying that a corporation is working on some virus that is surely to cause computer apocalypse, later that company contacts you to work for them, and to help them attack another company with the new virus that is being developed, just the moment this other company contacts you, saying that they know everything and they want you to joint them against the other and into building a program against the virus... geee, what a tied up plot!.

Uplink has no graphics at all, runs as if it was another program on a computer, achieving more points to the feeling of real hacking -I even played a couple of friends into thinking that I was really hacking-. Something I find really cool, is that you can follow the games plot, choosing one of the ways, or ignore it at all and continue freelancing, taking jobs from the Uplink database. The game achieved a goal on the emulation, you have to be really clean on the jobs you do, buy hacking tools and know what to buy, erase every log on any computer, avoid trace, you have to break passwords, disable security systems and even record peoples' voices to be able to crack voice protected systems. It's a good game, sometimes it can be a little repetitive and really hard, because if you do only one miserable thing wrong or leave or erase one wrong log and the guys on the computer you hacked trace you, your gateway and PC gets detroyed and you get kicked out of Uplink, meaning this a game over and you have to start back from scratch.

3 - Clive Barker's Undying.

Coming back to the FPS's, Clive Barker's Undying is a Horror FPS game released in 2001 by Electronic Arts, based on the Unreal engine :D.

Undying, places you in the role of Patrick Galloway, an adventurer who visits his friend Jeremiah Covenant in his creepy dark mansion, set in 1923. Patrick has an odd stone that helps him see ghosts or things that are not there, he is also capable of hearing voices that call his attention to things that cannot be seen. His friend Jeremiah asks him for help on paranormal matters dealing with his health and that have destroyed the Covenant family.

Jeremiah and his siblings, while they where children, found a circle of standing stones -pretty much like Stonehenge- and an occult book and started playing with it, summoning a curse onto all five of them, and when they became adults, one by one became mad and died, being Jeremiah the only one left, the dead siblings return to take vengueance upon the one that is left and the one they blame.

It's pretty much like a Lovecraft history turned into a game, the plot is absorbing and the graphics are very pretty; the game sucks you in as you discover more about the Covenants' curse. No words can describe it, saying more is revealing more of the plot and ruining the game. It's a must play.

2 - Doom 3 and Resurrection of Evil.

We all know Doom, The grandfather of FPS's sided by Wolfenstein 3D; Doom is the concept of everything a first person shooter is. This is the only game saga I can say I have played complete or almost complete -Doom 95, Final Doom (Doom plutonia, Doom TNT), Ultimate Doom, Doom 64, Doom RPG I and II for the cell phone, Doom 3 and Doom RoE, even the Simpsons' Doom MOD; I haven't played the boardgame, the Rougelike thing, and the iPhone one-. Developed by id Software and published by Activision for Windows in 2004, and ported to the Xbox in 2005, Doom 3 has become the most successful game produced by the id company and has received favorable reception from the gaming community.

You take the role of the nameless Marine who is sent to UAC's mars base, where you get the order of finding a scientist that has gone missing, when you find him, he warns you something about the teletransportation experiments held by doctor Betruger, when a teletransportation occurs and some horrible hellspawns appear and start destroying everything; the teletransportation experiments ended up opening a portal to Hell itself, and bringing an invasion of blood thirsty demons into the base. As you fight your way across the base and across zombie scientist and zombie security guards with guns, Sargeant Kelly gives you orders to acquire a distress signal to call for back up, and so, the game is on.

Doom 3 gave a great step on the graphics out from Doom I and II -not meaning that they were bad games-, using the id tech 4 engine which allowed more realistic lights and shadows that scare the hell out of you and make you feel like you are really inside a demon and zombie infested futuristic base on mars. Some people don't like it, because it stays with the same theme of the first one's of fighting your way through a buch of hard to kill monsters, but, that's the essence of Doom and what made the first Dooms awesome, and also does the same on this one.

Resurrection of Evil, is an expansion of Doom 3 developed by Nerve Software and id Software, released on 2005, eight months after the release of Doom 3; taking place two years after Doom 3, a crew is sent to mars after finding an anomaly coming from one of it's satellites; the crew finds the Hell stone, being a human heart shaped thing, and are attacked by a horde of demons that try to retrieve it. The marine gets the thing back to Doctor Elizabeth McNeil as she tells the marine that the only way to destroy it is to return it to where it came from: Hell... easy task right? This way, the marine returns to the base where Doom 3 took place. There are no big differences between Doom 3 and RoE, just the addition of a couple of new guns and new hard to kill enemies; but is a great twelve chapters addition after having played Doom 3. I just love this games :D

AND FINALLY MY NUMBER ONE:

1 - American McGee's Alice.

Alice is a child's tale... gone completely insane. Published by Electronic Arts in 2000, American McGee's Alice is -I think I can call it- a third person shooter, based of the Lewis Carrol books "Alice's adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the looking glass, and what Alice found there".

Set years after them, Alice is found sleeping, taking tea with her friends, while in the house, a cat drops a candlestick, starting a gigantic fire that burns up the house and leaves poor little Alice as the only survivor. From the guilt of being the only survivor and the memoirs of her parents screams, Alice loses her mind and is interned in Rutledge Asylum where she remains lying on her bed with her rabbit doll. Ten years later, the rabbit talks to her and takes her again down into the rabbits hole and back into Wondrland, but this time, Wonderland has become a twisted, horrible death place under the rule of the Red Queen -This is seen as a really beautiful intro at the game, you really should see it- Saying anything more is ruining the great plot of the game, so play it for yourself.

The World of Alice is all twisted an gloomy, the ambients are so gothic, dark and scary, but someway they are pretty at the same time, helping with the gone-insane idea of the game. Your task is to go through Wonderland and destroy the Red Queen, you have available a Vorpal sword that you use to shred into bloody pieces the cards that want you dead, among other weapons like dices that summon demons, jacks that pierce enemies, etc. The game is greatly done, it's really fun to play and has a lot of replay value, the music is so beautiful but yet so twisted that fits exactly the mood of the game; the graphics are excellent, they are pretty to see, the game uses the id tech III engine used on great games such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Quake III -though I don't like Quake III that much...-

If you have not played Alice, do it, it's a great game and an awesome experience, the game is really satisfactory and leaves a nice print. The plot is great and the ending is awesome; Surely is a game that you have to play before you die.

Well, this were my top ten games, if I were to add a bonus or an 11, that would be 2001's Return to Castle Wolfenstein, that game is awesome, though some find the mixture of nazies and horrible monsters way odd, i find it blissful. Thanks for reading my list.

Demon's castle on my mobile phone

I was cycling through my usual java games download page when I saw this: "Demon's castle". The title itself is really atracting like "Oh my fucking god! a castle full of demons and all that shit" and the image looks pretty good; all I could think of was that this might be like those platform games where you go around killing monsters (or demons) pretty much like Castlevania, and actually it is exactly that, just like a Castlevania. It's a sidescroll where you start at the entrance of a castle and monsters appear and you have to beat the shit out of them, you have three different kind of weapons, I think fire, ice and lightning and that's almost it, beat the shit out of everything in your way.

Those kind of games work fine, sidescrolling beat the shit out of everything action, Castlevania is a perfect example, you've played them and you know they kick ass. there's a couple actually for the mobile phone, I have on mine a "Castlevania Dawn of sorrow" which is actually awesome and pretty much hard I must say, despite the fact that the controls are a little shitty, it just great; I also have this other "Castlevania", great also, it even has a remixed version of a classic Castlevania song (I can't recall it's name now) which makes the gameplay more awesome, the bad thing, it's on Japanese... yeah, I can't understand a shit out of the menus or the storyline...

There is this other game that emules Castlevania that I've been playing, it's called "Soul of darkness", I must dare to say that this one is even better than Castlevania Dawn of sorrow, the gameplay is the same, advance through the stage beating the shit out of everything, you get to upgrade your weapons, you have magic attacks, you find pieces of shit that when you collect them your health or your magic goes up, you can transform in some of your enemies in certain places, well, the game is good, recomendable, its a little hard and tricky sometimes, play it.

Then it's Demons castle... I even erased a song because I was lacking 85 kb (yeah, my phone is all stuffed) and I must say, I'm gonna regret that 'till the end of my life, This game is fucking shit! It's the same as if you get a drunk bum to shit on the street, then a dog to pee on the shit, then a woman to squirt her used tampons on top of it and then taking everything and putting it into your cel phone! what a horrible piece of damnation this is! The music sucks pig's ass, it's like a bad rendered MIDI looping all over again, the graphics are not that bad, looks pretty, but fuck! CAN'T HE WALK ANY MORE SLOWER?!! I don't know if you can run, I haven't found how to, but i guess that, if horrible things and demons are following you to eat the living shit out of your ass, THEN YOU MUST BE ABLE TO FUCKING RUN!! Movement is sooo dull and stiff, even when he jumps is shitty, just going through that tiny screen of your phone is like an eternity, IT'S FUCKING SLOW. Another thing, the enemies are always too up or too short to hit, there are some tiny motherfuckers that are so short that most of the time you can't hit them without getting hit!! what the fuck! if it's a beat the shit out of everything game I guess you should BE ABLE TO BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYTHING!! but there are this enemies that you just cant hit!

Enough of this shit. This shit sucks whore's ass. play it if you want, but you could as well play with a dog's turd, perhaps that will be more fun.

The Queen of the damned movie on my PC

One of this days, I was going through Youtube and found links to watch The queen of the damned, I had never seen this film, but I had read the book; I had always heard good and bad reviews about it, as you always do, a film is good for ones and bad for others, specially when it's a movie based on a book, so I watched it...

WHAT A MOTHERFUCKING COCKSUCKER BUSFUCKER ASSLICKING PIECE OF WHORESHIT!!!! This movie sucks so many balls in different levels!! The movie is not that bad, but if you know the book you'd rather stick a fat greasy cock in your eyeholes than watching an awesome book get gang banged and fucked like an 18 years old girl in a porn casting.

So, this movie is "enjoyable" is you don't know that it's of a book. I left a comment on the last link of the movie as DTPoe and a guy sent me a message about it, it was a really good review about my comment so i'd like to post the answer I gave (a little edited) as the review of this film, it reveals a lot of the film and the book's plot, so think about that before reading from this point if you have not seen it or read it (and plan to do so). thanks a lot.

-"When i wrote that comment, i never thought it would make such a hit on anyone, actually, i thought all the film fans were gonna rip me a couple of extra ass holes XD

Good to finally find someone who agrees with my opinions, most people have seen the movie but don't even know it comes from the two books (yep, i know it's from The vampire Lestat and The queen of the damned XD) or even know who Anne Rice is.

For the movie I think the change on Lestat's maker was inevitable because of the need of story compression into one and a half hours, but still, in my opinion, I've always felt that Magnus creating Lestat and leaving him for his own was a key on his attitudes and choices farther ahead, many things would have changed if Magnus had been a great loving father or if Lestat had never been orphan not minding who his father was XD Still, i think you are right on the idea that Marius could be his father anyway, but i think the relation between Marius and Lestat works perfectly because of Magnus leaving him orphan. And yes, the separation on the film was so lousy, not the exciting and full of feeling scene that Mrs. Rice describes in her book.

Also, i agree on the statement that a simple storyline works better, but i think that, even being a long story, many things could have been covered as in the book or at least alike, than simply changing the whole plot, It's as if the makers of Interview with the vampìre (to mention a film) had said "Yeah, we are making this book into a movie, but, this characters Lestat and Claudia, no, they have to go" FUCK THAT! It makes absolutely no sense, as if I do a film on Othello, but "sorry Desdémona, no room for you hehe" and hope that it works, and specially talking about the twins, yeah, the plot in the movie works a bit, but you are not watching a movie based on The Queen of the damned and The vampire Lestat, you are watching an "X" vampire movie, as if i ask my grandfather to narrate Moby Dick for me, he's gonna change the whole thing and make up a new ending. I think they were a little lazy in many aspects of the film, sometimes, I've thought the producers put too much effort on the music of the film (which is awesome) rather than the film itself.

Something I always felt displeased, but i think nothing could be done about that, is that, The queen of the damned, In my opinion, is mostly about the origin of vampires and the duality of Akasha, how she tries to make good but as her opinion tells her and how she struggles with what she believes and what is, rather than being a book about a woman that destroys everything and other vampires want dead before she kills them. and it was a big let down that none of that was included in a film called The queen of the damned. As you said, i appreciate the film for some elements, but as i just said, it's an "x" film, not The queen of the damned XD and yeah, the book ending is perfect as you said, the discussion with Marius and the adventure with Louis were key and necessary, and i just hated the representation of that they did in the film, makes me feel like Lestat and Jesse go into David's dispatch in an evil way, not in the naughty playful way i read in the book, not to mention it was Louis and Lestat, not Jesse."-

Well, rip me a new ass hole if you want, i don't fucking care, i could use twenty more, i would spend less time pushing the turd out when shitting. Thanks for reading again, take care.