Rock Band 3

It's been two years since the last true Rock Band game, and Harmonix used that time to offer something awesome for those willing to lay down some extra coin. While the core game hasn't changed really at all since Rock Band 1, the new additions of a keyboard and 100-plus button Pro Guitar offer gameplay unlike anything before.

For some, this will be just the same ol' Rock Band. For others, this is the beginning of a whole new way to experience music. It really depends how much you want to put into Rock Band 3. Not just financially (and that is an investment in itself) but also time and effort. Do you want to learn a totally new way to play or would you rather just do the same thing you've done for years? That choice really affects Rock Band 3's overall value. It's either something completely new and challenging or just more tracks to rock out to. Ultimately, the choice is yours to make.

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Rock Band 3 Video Review
You know how this works. You and your buddies are part of a band. Someone sings. Someone plays guitar. You've got a drummer. Everyone hits the right notes at the right time, you score points, you become rock Gods. No big.

Except now there are some new instruments that flip Rock Band on its head.

First up is the keyboard. This thing is solid and has received the seal of approval from IGN's own resident piano teacher. The only catch is that the keyboard's half-sized. Other than that, you really couldn't ask for a better piece of hardware to change the way you play Rock Band.

There is a really gimped-out version of "easy" keyboard for people. You play with just five keys that are all next to each other, which really amounts to playing guitar without strumming. It's really boring and really not worth the money you spend to get the keyboard. If that's all you want to do, save your money and just keep strumming the guitar.

If you're going to pay this much for a fake guitar... why not spend a little more and buy the real thing?

The value is in playing Pro keys. It ain't easy, but you can straight up play songs note-for-note and even learn a thing or two about playing piano. It's hard at first, but if you dedicate some time, keyboard becomes this really amazing way to experience Rock Band 3. I got this special little feeling the first time my fingers easily found keys for unexpected notes. It was like my hand was learning.

Adding keyboard allowed Harmonix to include songs you'd never think to see in a Rock Band game. Like Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" or Elton John's -- well, anything by Elton John, really. Some songs are just so much fun to play and keyboard completely rewrites the idea of challenge in a Rock Band game.

The one catch is that none of your previous downloaded songs have keyboard support and only 63 of the 83 songs on the disc use keyboards -- and a few of them have some pretty sparse keys. Not exactly the strongest song list for someone who wants to be the next Liberace.

Another option is the pricey Pro Mustang Guitar from Mad Catz. This guitar has more than 100 buttons, which correspond to the strings and frets on a real guitar. You can learn to play guitar using this and Rock Band 3, if you can manage to understand the somewhat insane tablature Harmonix has created.

The numbers and bars on screen tell you how to play every chord. It's a real challenge to read and requires a ton of practicing on each song in order to master them. But you'll be playing much faster than you would if you were just learning guitar on your own or even in a class.

Pro Guitar is being played on the far right.

But, ultimately, the Pro Guitar is kind of dumb. If you're going to pay this much for a fake guitar with buttons that make it hard to slide your fingers on, why not spend a little more and buy the real thing? You're just upgrading from one guitar with plastic buttons to another guitar with way more plastic buttons.

A full-stringed guitar is in the works but won't be available at launch. Though Pro Guitar totally changes how you play Rock Band 3, and is brilliant in its implementation, buying it isn't going to get you groupies (why else would you learn guitar?). Get the real deal at this point. Stop living your rock fantasies through cheap plastic toys.

Also available are some additional cymbals for your drums so you can play the true drum parts for songs. It's cool if you're a drummer, but doesn't revolutionize gameplay in the same way as Pro Guitar or Pro Keyboards.

Golden Sun Dark Dawn

A worthy successor to the Golden Sun legacy (yes, two GBA games can equal a legacy, if they're beloved enough), Golden Sun: Dark Dawn takes everything we loved about the first two games and refines it, if predictably, into a polished RPG experience that, like the first two, is equal parts tradition and innovation. It looks gorgeous, and the djinn system is even better than before Play Free Online Games.

Even more so than the first two Golden Sun games, the emphasis in Dark Dawn is on environmental puzzle solving, to the point where the battles almost take a backseat to the puzzles. Everywhere you go, your party encounters all manner of environmental blockages that need to be solved to progress, mostly involving various types of sliding puzzles to create a traversable path, like rolling logs back and forth to create a walkway, pushing stepping stones into formation and so forth.

You have a variety of psynergy spells (magic = psynergy in Golden Sun) at your disposal to manipulate objects too, like using a fireball to burn a vine in your way or using a rain cloud spell (douse) to raise and lower the water levels in the water temple. Puzzles are more than about just choosing the correct spell to cast though, and many puzzles require more thought than spamming spells til you get the right one (in fact, at a certain point you get a psynergy called "insight" psynergy that shows you what spells can be used on any particular object). Most of the puzzles early on are pretty easy, but as you progress they get tougher.

Dungeons are well-designed too – they're challenging, but not so labyrinthine that you get turned around or waste too much time being confused about where you are and what you need to do next, and a map on the top screen is infinitely helpful. Random enemy encounters aren't nearly as frequent as in the average RPG either, so you can focus on your block puzzles without being interrupted too much. Again, in much of Dark Dawn it seems like battles are secondary to exploration and puzzle solving despite the robustness and general awesomeness of the battle system.

Speaking of battle, the big feature that sets Golden Sun's battles apart from other RPGs of its ilk is the djinni. Djinni (singular: djinn) are small elemental creatures that you can collect throughout the game (some are tougher to obtain than others), and assign them to specific characters in your party. Which djinni you set to a particular character determines almost everything about that character, including their stats, class, and what psynergy spells they can use. For maximum effect, you should pair djinni with characters who match their elemental affinity (there are four elements total: Earth/Venus, Fire/Mars, Water/Mercury, and Wind/Jupiter), but experimenting with various mixes can often yield new spells and stat boosts. With 72 djinni total and four active characters in your party at a given time, each with nine slots for djinni, the possibilities for customizing your party are formidable.

Djinni that are set to a character can be used in battle like a special move, and their abilities range from doing direct damage to healing your party or buffing/debuffing. To make matters more interesting, djinni can also be used to call powerful summons (which look fantastic by the way - you can skip the animations, but you won't want to), but in order to do so, you have to de-equip the djinni from your characters (it's called putting them on "standby" in the game). Using a djinn's ability in battle automatically puts in on standby, so you can either set your djinni to standby manually before a battle, or use them during battle first to power up your summons. The more powerful the summon, the more standby djinni it requires to cast.

You'd think that keeping all your djinni on standby would be a no-brainer, since the summons are so powerful, but keep in mind that when you switch your djinni to standby, it often reduces the number of spells available to the character, so if you set too many djinni to standby you may lose access to important recovery spells and so on. It's often a tough tradeoff to decide on, and really adds to the feeling of having strategic options available so you can battle as you see fit.

All the pieces of the battle gameplay are spot on – the interaction between djinni and psynergy, the summons, the weapons and so forth – but the overall lack of difficulty means that all that opportunity and options for strategizing mostly go to waste. Battles are flashy and fun, but too easy for the most part. Not only are the actual battles themselves easy, but your psynergy recharges so quickly that you can use it liberally in healing and battles without ever having to use a single recovery item – you never feel stretched for resources or find yourself in a tight spot. At times Dark Dawn is so easy overall that it feels too much like a kiddy game that hands too much to you. If you're someone who plays RPGs purely for tough, strategically challenging battles, Golden Sun probably isn't for you.

The lack of difficulty almost seems to make sense within the story though, since most of what you do seems distinctly non-epic, and the story takes forever to actually move forward in a meaningful way. A lot of JRPG-style games fall into this trap, but it's still a bit disappointing given the potential for epic adventure (the Golden Sun even, after all, has to do with the destruction/rebirth of an entire freaking world). Although the gameplay itself is strong, the story is rife with filler and stalling tactics. Here goes (totally vague, spoiler-free):

The story begins when your best friend Tyrell breaks his family's soarwing (a personal flying machine thing – like a magic winged jetpack) so you need to travel to get materials to fix it. Then the mountain bridge pass is collapsed so you have to go the looooong way around (figures), and then of course you find villagers that need your help fixing their magic machine that requires an item that can only be found in the deepest depths of a particular dungeon, and then the next town over has the exact same predicament so you go through the motions again, then more townspeople need your help with something else… you get the picture.

Meanwhile, we're left wondering whatever happened to the psynergy vortexes introduced at the beginning of the story that could possibly be tearing the very fabric of existence apart as we busy ourselves with seemingly unrelated quests. Basically, Dark Dawn takes a long time to get to the point, and there's no real sense of importance or gravity to what you're doing. Which sort of makes sense because the protagonists are just kids, but at times it's hard to stay invested in the story because it's hard to see how anything relates to the big picture. Even as you grow fond of each of the characters, it's hard not to get impatient with their frequently derailed quest.

BUT STILL. Still! It's impossible not to love Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, because even despite the ridiculous easiness and the stereotypically meandering adventure, it still has a ton of heart (both the lighthearted and heartwarming varieties), and doesn't take itself too seriously. This is an RPG that was made for fantasy RPG lovers – everything in it seems comfortingly familiar in a JRPG sort of way, but the djinn system is still totally unique to the series, so even veteran RPG players won't be bored with the gameplay. Unless difficulty level is incredibly important to you, you're almost guaranteed to enjoy Dark Dawn's gentle adventure.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games

In November 2007, the first ever videogame starring Mario and Sonic appeared on shop shelves. It was a huge hit, despite being a bit 7/10, so it didn't come as much of a surprise when SEGA and Nintendo announced a sequel.

But with years to go until the next Olympics (we're sorry in advance), what would the next Mario & Sonic title be about? Perhaps SEGA and Nintendo would adopt the tried and trusted strategy employed by so many of today's successful publishers and rip off someone else's idea. Why not set the game in a post-apocalyptic American city? Or, how about Mario Gear Solid: Sonic of Liberty? Who wouldn't want to play, say, Mario & Sonic of War?

Alternatively, why not come up with something totally fresh and new like Mario & Sonic Fight to the Death, Mario & Sonic Explore their Sexuality, or Mario & Sonic Bring Peace to the Middle-East? Because that would be weird and stupid. But also because fresh and new doesn't sell half as well as old and familiar, most of the time anyway. And so here comes that sequel: Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games.

Cynics might assume all they've done is slap an extra word on the box, throw in some new mini-games, add a couple more characters and cover everything with a fresh blanket of virtual snow. Well, Mr Cynics, it's true they've done that, but they've also addressed some of the issues with the previous game. Plus, they've managed to make this Mario & Sonic more like ye olde video-gaymes of yesteryear, with proper objectives and skill requirements and rewards, while simultaneously making it more accessible. An impressive feat, so how's it been done?

Vancouver, February 2009. Pretty much sums it up.

Let's start with those new mini-games. Highlights include a variety of snowboarding and skiing efforts, where you tilt the remote to steer your character down mountains, through slalom gates and round half-pipes. You can attach a nunchuk and use the controllers like a set of ski poles, but all the mini-games can be played with the remote alone.

The advantage of this is twofold. First off, you don't need to invest in a load of nunchuks to enjoy the full multiplayer experience. Secondly, you don't end up inadvertently and repeatedly whipping yourself in the groin as with Namco Bandai's enjoyable but painful Wii offering, Communal Crotch Flaying.

The remote works fine on its own. The controls are responsive, with little lag and the level of sensitivity is just right, so it's easy to get back on track when you over-steer or veer off course. However, it does all feel a bit simplistic. There's not much subtlety involved and there's never a sense of having as much precise control as when, say, driving round a Mario Kart circuit. So why not throw in Wii MotionPlus functionality? Surely this is the kind of thing that technology was made for?

Proof at last that a character called Sonic known for his speed is faster than a small fat man.

According to SEGA, the aim of leaving it out was to make the game as accessible as possible. In other words, to keep the controls simple and avoid making potential purchasers think they've also got to buy a load of peripherals to enjoy the game fully. Which is reasonable enough, but you can't help wishing they'd also chucked in an option for the huge number of Wii owners who have picked up one or two MotionPlus add-ons anyway.

At least there's the option to hook up a Wii balance board. As with the Family Ski titles, you stand on the board and shift your weight left and right to steer. Once again the controls are responsive and using the board does add something to the whole experience, certainly for those who get to watch you squat and wobble around like a tit. But once again, there's a slight lack of precision and subtlety. In short, having a board adds novelty value but is in no way essential to enjoying MSOWG.

Street Fighter IV

It’s been a while, but they’re back. Actually, it’s been more than a while: it’s been a good 17 years since Street Fighter II, and nine years since Street Fighter III. In that time the 2D fighter has been somewhat marginalised, and players’ expectations have changed. In this context it’s a minor miracle that Yoshinori Ono and his team have not only stuck to a clear vision of how to take the series forward in 2D, but that Capcom has been able to excite people about it to such a degree.

Does it deliver? Does it ever. Visually, Street Fighter IV is the pinnacle of videogame reimaginings. Every original combatant is instantly recognisable, but the new level of detail has been used to characterise both appearance and fighting technique in exceptional style. Chun-Li is the embodiment of beauty and grace; her hands constantly move, and each change of stance brings a wholly different posture, while her moveset is composed of tight flourishes and flowing agility. She’s instantly recognisable as an update, yes, but after a few minutes it’s clear that this is without a shred of doubt the definitive version of the character. The game runs at a flawless 60fps and the animation and facial expressions are peerless: fighters follow each other’s movements, change stance as they move, and when a super attack is unleashed a temporary 3D camera change shows the (literally) eye-popping fear of your opponent in a welcome comic touch.

It’s when you get your hands on the joystick, however, that it becomes clear just how special SFIV is. The new angle it has brought to the series is simple, but very surprising, making the depths of the fighting game accessible to almost all players. Everyone can admire the videos of SFIII that show 15 parries in a row, or unbroken Yun combos that decimate opponents’ health bars, or counter-counter supers. Very few can replicate them. SFIII, and to a lesser extent SFII, are ultimately the preserve of a tiny proportion of their total players – the frame-manipulating and combination-memorising junkies. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that – it is, after all, why these games are still played competitively and analysed in such detail – but there is something wrong with the fact that the vast majority of players’ tactics outside of this circle consist of little more than jumping kick then sweep.

SFIV addresses this in three ways. First, the frame windows for combination attacks have been greatly increased, making it much easier to pull off short two- and three-hit attacks. Street Fighter Alpha tried something similar, of course, and was slightly too generous with its allowances for chain combinations – here, it’s balanced perfectly, to the point that a string of specific moves will work where simple button-mashing won’t. It’s in combination with the second major change that this comes to the fore, however: special moves are now much easier to pull off. The inputs are the same as ever, but SFIV is generous in its interpretation of your intentions, and much less fiddly.

It’s impossible to overstate what a change this is for the series, and the fighting game in general. Street Fighter is now more about planning your attacks and responding to your opponent rather than worrying about whether you can physically accomplish what you want to. Never been able to pull off an EX spinning piledriver? You will now. Allied to the increased ease of combination attacks, it puts seriously damaging strings of moves within the reach of the average player and places the tactical depth that is the real genius of the series firmly within reach of all, rather than just the elite.

Need for Speed

September 10, 2009 - EA's Need for Speed franchise has had its up and downs. Unfortunately, the past few years has been one of those "down" bits, with the last couple games doing nothing to advance the series in any way that you would call good. So, something had to be done, and EA decided to hand off the reins to Slightly Mad Studios, the folks behind the PC racing series GTR, to create Need for Speed Shift. So did the changing of the guard pay off?

Oh, yes it did, and in a huge way.

There are so many things done right in terms of design that this feels like the freshest take on the "simulation" racing genre in many, many years. I put the word "simulation" in quotes because while Need for Speed Shift is undoubtedly closer to that end of the racing spectrum than, say, Burnout, Slightly Mad made some very smart choices in deciding what would be realistic and what wouldn't. The result is that the team is essentially giving you a racing experience that is extremely close to the real thing in terms of presentation, while keeping the controls just arcadey enough to allow relative newcomers a much easier entryway into the game than the likes of Gran Turismo.

Click the image to watch our video review.

Let me step back a little bit before delving into the racing experience. NFS Shift returns to the track-based racing of old (and ProStreet) rather than the open-world stuff seen in most of the modern titles. You'll find mainstays like Laguna Seca, Willow Springs and Nurbergring as the backdrops to your tire burning, and each of these are brought to life excellently. They're not 100% accurate compared to their real-world counterparts however as Slightly Mad has tweaked the scenery to provide more compelling views in spots that were a little drab, but the course layouts are indeed intact, which is what's important. Given the course selection in the game (totalling somewhere around the 20 track mark), it's of little surprise that practically every meter of road in the game is fun to drive.

Unlike pretty much every modern day Need for Speed title, there's zero story involved, and I'm very happy about that. The closest thing you're going to get to some sort of tale is the voiceover that you'll hear at the start of the game, telling you that you've been given a chance to prove yourself in a BMW M3 around Brands Hatch before winning some cash and choosing your own ride. After that, the voice only returns to explain new events and the like, but never to tell you that the cops are on your tail or that your love interest can introduce you to some jackass in a garage. Nope, this pretty much as pure of a racing game as you can find, and I for one am very thankful for that.

That's not to say that the experience is drab. On the contrary, there's fantastic and somewhat atmospheric music in the menus, a generally slick interface all around and some stylistically edited videos to introduce new events. It's the sort of stuff that will keep your blood pumping between events without getting in the way.

The cockpit view is stellar.
All of that is great, but pales in comparison to what happens when you get behind the wheel of a car. And let me just say that you should get behind the wheel and not race from a third-person camera because the cockpit view is what makes NFS Shift stand out from the extremely competitive racing genre and come into its own. Slightly Mad has created an extraordinarily good cockpit view for the game, one that makes you feel like you're actually in the seat of a horsepower-bleeding supercar.

Rather than remaining static, the view shifts and undulates slightly when the gas or brakes are applied. Sitting at the starting line and revving the engine can rock the vehicle back and forth, and slamming on the brakes to take a tight corner will throw your view forward towards the dashboard. It's a dynamic camera that moves to impart the inertia and g-forces that you'd feel while racing. Fortunately, it's not overdone to the point where it'll make you sick; it's subtle enough that you know that it's happening, but may forget about it after a while. But, go into the same view in most any other racer and you'll realize what you're missing.