Here is the Game Play Footage.

Also feel free to post comments if there may have been anything I missed.

Black site :area 51 for the X-Box 360 is a first person shooter with a very contrived story which has you fighting aliens and mutant soldiers in Nevada as you make your way into Area 51 through backyards, trailer parks, desert, and driving sections while being accompanies by two AI partners.

I believe that for any FPS to be good, it must have at least one of the following. An interesting and immersive story, smooth control, a wide range of interesting weapons you can use to blow things up, likeable characters, imaginative locations, exciting multi player. Sadly Black site has none of these. The controls are sluggish, the story’s ridiculous, there are only two alien guns, you want to kill half of the characters yourself, half the game takes place in suburbia, and you’ll never find anyone who wants to play this game with you.

The game starts you off in the middle east trying to destroy a chemical weapons plant. You play as the faceless mute whose name is so unmemorable I can’t even recall it. Even in cut scenes you don’t say anything, and the only time it switches out of first person is when you die to see yourself lie down like a mannequin. In order to compensate for this, the game gives you two porters. Mr. sarcastic and Mr. loudmouth. Loudmouth does nothing but make lewd jokes and brag while Sarcastic makes smart ass remarks and witty retorts.

The three of you make your way to the missile base by running around and blowing up check points. The weapon you’ll be using for most of the game is already in your hands, a machine gun. You also get a pistol but you’ll never use that, and you’ll find a sniper rifle on the way to your objective but you’ll rarely use that. Grenades can be picked up but they are rare and you seldom throw them where you want them, so just get used to your machine gun.

Eventually you’ll get an army humvee and go into a rail shooting section which has you manning the turret while your two friends bicker like a married couple over whether they should turn left or right. This is the part of the game that destroys your disbelief, and its sad that it happens in the game’s first chapter. As you drive around through oil refineries and through drainage ditches while being shot at by everything in sight, your partners talk as if they were off-roading in Texas rather than racing for their lives. Despite an entire refinery blowing up around you, and I hope you enjoyed that part because there are several such vehicle sections in the game, some of which have you as the driver. The most annoying part of these sections later in the game is that you’ll have to abandon one vehicle, go through an area, and find a new vehicle just waiting for you on the other side for no reason.

The three of you make it through without a scratch. Loudmouth even insists on pulling over so he can take a leak, and the game encourages you to learn about the zoom function at this point by getting a closer look at him while he’s doing it! Now at this point I feel I should point out that in most of my reviews I try to avoid spoilers in the story, but in this case it is impossible to talk about this game without spoiling it, but it can hardly be considered spoiled since you see every plot twist a mile away. For that reason I have no problem referring to the only woman you meet in the game as Mrs. Evil scientist, because you figure out pretty fast that she’s morally bankrupt as all hell. She gives you guys some shots without really telling you what it is, and goes with you into battle using only a handgun.

She is the main source of my disbelief in this game because she is so morally bankrupt that any sane person would shoot her in the head, but your character just keeps following her orders without reason through the game, even when she lies to you, gets your friends killed, and shows no remorse whatsoever for her actions. She even admits to conducting inhuman experiments on innocent people before burying them alive, and yet your character trusts her. The most laughable part is that she is the one who occasional points out just how immoral she is. I know that doesn’t make sense, so let me give you an example of one of these lines. “we tortured them, experimented on them, cut into them and then burred them under concrete and abandoned them. What did we think was going to happen?” this is something that your character should be saying to her, not something she should be saying right after asking one of her victims, “why are you doing this?”

Her lies aren’t even convincing. When you first run into a mutant, one of your buddies asks what’s wrong with the guy and she says, “he has encephalitis….a lot of encephalitis.” and when you run into a giant underground snake monster she says it’s a mutation. And her amount of stupidity is staggering. She leads two soldiers into a base telling them you’re there for bombs when she is really looking for a floating crystal, and she doesn’t pay any attention to your friend who walks over and touches the damn thing.

She’s not the only unbelievable character either. Later in the game when you have a commanding officer, his reactions to you are completely over the top. The idiot tells you not to kill any of the enemies that are swarming the base, and is livid when you do in order to defend yourself. I actually reset my game the first time I went through this mission because I honestly thought I wasn’t supposed to kill them, but it’s impossible. Your melee attack does more damage than your guns, so much so that you can actually shatter cement barriers with the butt of your gun. And even the reason you are called to Nevada makes no sense. Evil scientist says its because you saw the thing in Iraq, but why should that matter? You didn’t do anything special. There is no reason to call you into this situation.

The only answer you ever really get is, “that’s classified.” in fact this game isn’t really a game, it’s writer ripping on the government. Just like books such as Congo, Starship troopers, and Sphere, Black site started out with the premise that the government and military are evil and immoral, and then tried to slap on a plot around that. The result is a completely unbelievable mess.

Even if you completely ignore the story, the game is still only mediocre. The only two alien weapons you get to use is a strange shot gun that can bounce its bullets, and a bazooka. I really feel disappointed by this because you’re storming area 51, and I expected more creativity in the technology. The game has a Gears of War health system but does it very badly. In Black site, you will look fine as you take hits, and then suddenly your screen will have a red tint as you are near death which means you only have two states: perfectly fine, and about to die.

The controls are a little odd as well. You can press the left analog to crouch while you hold it down, but you can press the D-pad down and stay in a crouch until you press it again. The one control and function I actually like in the game is that you can command your AI partners by targeting the area you want them to go to or item you want them to interact with and press a button. This does make the game even easier because you can tell your partners to go into a room without you to do the fighting.

Another problem with the game are the enemies. It’s bad enough that they are inexcusably stupid, they run past you and start shooting at your friends while keeping their back to you, but most of them can be recognized from other games. Giant underground snakes from Prototype, small skittering monsters that blow themselves up from Gear of War 2, infected humans from Halo, and the special pops guys from Area 51 on the PS2 all make an appearance. Even the aliens form War of the Worlds show up in a more nightmarish form. Now to be fair, Black site came out before most of these games which leads me to believe that those game developers cannibalized this one for content because they figured no one played it, and you shouldn’t.

The game play is mediocre, the story is utterly ridiculous, and the game is short. I beat it in one sitting and didn’t want to play it again. You can collect dossiers which contain background information on the characters and events, but I honestly couldn’t force myself to care enough to find them all. I don’t recommend this game for anyone unless you just want something to laugh at with your friends.

How do i know this you say? Well, I can’t tell you. But remeber that the information you need will always sreside in the “Unofficial farmville guide” – The First, Most update, and BEST guide on the internet. http://gameolosophy.com/games/farmville-the-unofficial-strategy-guide/

On the topic of updates, Check it out for the latest information on achievements, collections, and more strategy. If you have any suggestions for the guide, please comment at the bottom of this article, as the other one is too cramped to find anything.

Much appriciated.
Make sure you Favourite the unnoficial guide, and check back regulary for updates as well as the best tips. Remeber to use it for your calculating needs when working out profits and Exp.

Any and Most questions will be answered by me, or others when The Unnoficial Guide (link) Is commented on. To get your questions answered Post!

In addition, A lucky winner will be awarded with money to buy a certain amount of farmville Dollars. Make sure you check the Unnoficial Guide for more information soon!

http://gameolosophy.com/games/farmville-the-unofficial-strategy-guide/

James

Graphics

With its lush 3D world and colorful characters that slightly depart from their original look, this game looks visually superior to previous Spyro games. The cutscenes are even more amazing as they provide more detail with the character illustrations and background environments. The camera angles get a bit wobbly at times, but it isn’t too bad since the right analog stick can be used to give the view more control.

Gameplay

You’ll get to use new abilities and power-ups as you travel through strange places such as the Horn Dive and Brimstone bombs. There are a number of new enemies introduced in the game, which changes your strategy in each battle a little bit, but with the help of The Professor’s inventions such as the Dragonball and Aqualung,you’ll be breezing through the area in no time.

Sound

This game has upbeat music and cutesy sound effects like other Spyro games, and the voice acting is excellent, giving cutscenes a high-quality cinematic feel.

Replay

A few minigames add to the game’s length, but overall, you can finish the whole game in a weekend. Sadly, no multi-player mode is added to make this a bit more interesting to play when your friends are around.

Overall

There’s more to do and explore this time around. This is definitely the best and cutes Spyro game yet!

You have the option of training the new guy at the beginning of the game which ironically serves as your training mode. Anyone who played the first game will catch on quick as most of the controls are the same. They will also recognize the new guy as being the brother to one of the faceless grunts who died in the first game. Foreshadowing? As always the game revolves around taking cover and shooting enemies with various guns. Like any good sequel, Gears of War 2 adds a few new guns, new moves, new levels, advances the story, and even lets you ride a few of the enemy vehicles/creatures.

One new feature that will assure everyone that the game’s brutally macho mentality is still firmly intact is the ability to curb stomp wounded enemies while they crawl around on the ground. If you let leave them alone for too long they will usually die anyway, but if another enemy makes it to them, they can revive them just as you can revive your teammates. This feature amuses me because all you do is give them a pat on the shoulder, and your friend who is trailing enough blood to paint a floor with gets back on his feet none the worse for wear.

If you get injured, you can try to drag yourself over to your AI partners, but they don’t always seem aware of your predicament and may take awhile to help you. If every member of your team is put into this state, you’re all dead, and the game has no health packs or life bars. The gear skull returns as the measure of how much damage you’ve taken. The more you get hurt, the fuller the symbol becomes, and once you’ve found a safe place to rest, your damage will slowly disappear.

The game also adds a few new weapons, my favorite of which is the minigun which can’t be reloaded. You can’t run with this weapon, or jump over walls with it, but no other handheld weapon mows down enemies as quickly as this one. All of the weapons from the first game appear again, but the most useful one is the Lancer assault rifle you start with. Its melee attack is an instant kill, using the chainsaw on your gun. You can carry one other rifle-sized weapon, and I recommend the sniper riffle. It’s pretty handy in long range fights as long as you’re a good shot. The torque bow, locust machine gun, and shot gun are all back and work the same as before as well as your pistol and chain grenades. Perhaps the most unique new weapon is the shield. This weapon is dropped by one of they new enemies, and is rather odd to use in contrast to the other weapons. It can be used as portable cover which is handy, but really it’s usually easier to stick with the conventional strategies of the game.

Gears of War 2 has more vehicle levels than the first game, and each one is different. You drive tanks on dunebugy wheels, ride the Locusts’ flying Reavers and even hijack a Brumak at one point. You also ride on giant carriers and have to defend them from attackers, crawl through the inside of a giant worm, and infiltrate the Locust cities. Each level is dramatically different and very interesting in its own way, fleshing out the world in which the game takes place.

All the main characters from the first game return, and a few new ones are introduced. Nearly all of them are ridiculously hardcore bad asses who single-handedly take on entire armies while the rest of you’re helmet-wearing allies get mowed down left and right around you. I could accept this kind of storytelling with God of War because you were a demigod, and in Halo because you are a specially trained and enhanced soldier, but in Gears of War, you’re just a soldier who somehow manages to fight through ridiculous odds, penetrate into the enemy capitol city, and enter the queen’s throne room without a problem. Hell, there is literally a scene in which one of the giant vehicles is destroyed, but one of the main guys walks out of the wreckage without a scratch on him.

The characters themselves are so overly macho American that it’s almost embarrassing, especially Cole, and the fact that a large plot device in the game is a metaphor for oil is hard to ignore as well. Despite that, Delta squad is a lot of fun to listen to as they bond with each other in the stereotypical insecure heterosexual male fashion of giving each other shit and bitching about their situation at every opportunity. There is one point when Cole gets on the intercom in the Locust city and talks shit to their whole army and queen which made me laugh out loud. I do find it a little disappointing that none of the characters are able to emote anything other than bravado or anger for more than a few seconds, even when they are experiencing things that should leave long lasting emotional scars.

Gears of War 2 has an even more depressing and disturbing story line than its predecessor. Humans being tortured, inhuman laboratories that resemble internment camps, slavery and genocide all show up to make this a truly dark story which the characters don’t react to in any way other than basically saying, “well shit.” Despite this inconsistency, the story is very engaging and leaves you wanting more by the end, and the same can be said of the game play.

Any fan of action should give this game a look. It’s the personification of the chest-thumping male psyche with insanely brutal weapons, explosions and heroes that go to hell and back without being fazed by any of it. It’s a fun ride and definitely worth a look for anyone who likes to shoot things.

Image via Wikipedia

DarkBASIC is used to create games. When people see ‘multiplayer capabilities’ listed within the software features they immediately have dreams of creating the next WoW killer by the end of next week. The first question to pop out of your mouth is most likely going to be ‘Can you make an MMO with DarkBASIC?’

The short answer is – yes, yes you can. The long answer is – No, you can’t. DarkBASIC is not the same as RPG Creator or any other kind of point click interface. It has the capability to make some pretty nifty games but you do have to take the time and get to understand the language.

When you start with DarkBASIC it is possible to make an MMO as your first game, but unless you have a lot of prior programming experience it might not be the best way to start. Try crawling before jumping behind the wheel of that monster truck.

Image via Wikipedia

DarkBASIC can be complicated and an MMO requires a lot of work and effort. If you take the time to learn and understand the program, start with simple games such as board games and simple 2D shooters. You can advance from there to 3D games and eventually make that WoW killing MMO.

One piece of advice if you want to create any kind of game, and I cannot stress this enough, is originality. So many games designers are ignored with good reason. Regurgitating the same rubbish over and over again is not going to attract anyone. Before you start hammering away at DarkBASIC trying to make that MMO, sit for a moment with and take a breath.

Small game programmers cannot compete with the bigger names. Blizzard has scores of people working on World of Warcraft and unfortunately it’s hard to compete with that from your bedroom PC. With DarkBASIC you can make an MMO but in order for it to be in any way successful you will need to give it something different, something to catch the player’s attention.

We have enough run around and kill different monster games to last us until the next Half Life instalment. Before you ask yourself ‘Can I make an MMO with DarkBASIC?’ ask yourself ‘Do I have a good idea for an MMO to make with DarkBASIC?’ If you have something unique and original then by all means go for it, just keep a level head and stay persistent.

Making money from online games is not a new concept. It’s been around since the first online gamers were too lazy to play for themselves. Mafia wars is about as competitive as you can get for a casual game on a social network. The player versus player part makes ‘Hello Kitty Online’ look like ‘Hello Lazer Firing Mega Death Kitty Online’ but it exists, and for social networking that counts as an achievement.

This works in your favour if you want to make money from Mafia Wars. The more competitive the game, the more likely people are to throw money at you in exchange for beating their friends with the latest piece of in game kit.

There are three main ways of making money from Mafia Wars.

1.       The Mafia Wars Website

Creating a Mafia Wars cheat website/guide website/fan page/forum/wiki etc…  Will have an instant pull for the Mafia Wars player base (and trust me, there is a lot of them). If you can find a unique idea for a Mafia Wars website, throw a little advertising on it and display it to the Mafia Wars groups on Facebook. Just ensure you register a few additional PayPal accounts to hold the surplus of money coming your way.

2.       Selling a Mafia Wars guide

You can sell an eBook containing the secrets of Mafia Wars strategies, tips, cheats or whatever. Just make sure you know what you’re talking about and it doesn’t already exist. Then (as before) flog it on Facebook groups.

There is of course a problem with these two methods (otherwise I’d spend my time doing them rather than telling you about them – let’s be honest). It’s a saturated market. It’s so overdone you’re unlikely to stumble across something people want that they don’t already have. This is not to say it’s impossible, if you find it make use of it.  But for the rest of you, luckily I have a third method of making money from Mafia Wars.

3.       Selling Mafia Wars Items and Accounts

Yes believe it or not, people will pay real money for those Mafia Wars pixelated items and accounts. This is the easiest way of making money from Mafia Wars, and there’s a growing demand waiting for you to supply.

With a torrent of freely available Mafia Wars guides out there, I’m going to refrain from typing up another. Do a quick Google search and learn to obtain the items and accounts for yourself. But I will tell you how to sell them.

Sites such as eBay, Gumtree and Craigslist tend to remove adverts of game item sales so instead aim for website which specialise in middle manning trades between buyers and sellers for game items and accounts. You could try RealPoor.com or MarkeeDragon.com but for Mafia Wars your best friend should be playerauctions.com

Once you have a dozen Facebook accounts brimming with Mafia Wars items, and your (free) registered playerauctions.com account you’re ready to go. Try to use a name related to Mafia Wars and be careful wording your sales pitch. For your first few sales, people will be wary of being scammed so do you best to come of reliable and trustworthy.

Use other sale orders to gauge the value of your items and accounts. Undercutting your competitors price will draw more buyers to you but may start a price war. If all the sellers keep lowering their prices to beat each other, you all lose out. Try contacting the other sellers if you see this happening.

When your first buy order arrives, make the transfer as quickly as possible and leave positive feedback where applicable. Read the playerauction.com guides first and follow their policies to make sure you get paid for any goods you sell.

Making money from Mafia Wars is entirely possible. The only problem is the game itself is horrendously repetitive and dull. Once you start getting sales, have a look at automating the game play. You can buy one or create one with a macro tool such as AutoHotKey. Just be careful what you download.

I used making money from Mafia Wars as an example because of its high traffic. In reality almost any multiplayer game can work the same way. Just ensure there is a market for your sales which isn’t already saturated and you are making enough money to cover the time invested.

Batman Arkham Asylum on the X-Box 360 has you running around the insane asylum where batman drops off the super villains after he catches them. The game starts off with you bringing Joker back to his home away from home, but it turns out he arranged to throw a bigger party than any of the guards expected. He breaks loose and starts causing mayhem while you have to try and stop him.

You start out with just the trusty batarang and grapple gun as you make your way around the island, crawling through air ducts and hanging from gargoyles. You can run and climb, but for some reason you can’t jump on command but rather do so automatically if you run to the edge of a cliff or if you are near a space you can jump up and climb to the game will prompt you to press A. If you jump from high up you can glide with your cape. You can also drop long distances and your cape will act like a parachute near the bottom to cushion the fall.

Perhaps the area where the controls shine the best is the combat. I honestly don’t know how the developers and programmers managed to make batman react so quickly and fluently to button commands from the player. The combat almost seems like something you’d see in a cut-scene rather than something you actually get to play through. You press one button to launch combos and direct which person to attack with the analog stick. Rather than just punch over and over again, batman lets loose with an array of attacks which are a joy just to watch.

When an enemy is going to attack you, there will be a marker over his head. Pressing the Y button makes batman counter the attack, and the longer you go without taking the hit, the more vicious batman’s moves become until he is sending guys flying across the room with every hit and lunging to strike the next one. You also have a stun attack to knock enemies with knives off balance for a moment so you can let them have it, and you can dive out of the way if you feel pressured. once you knock an enemy to the ground, you can put their lights out by pressing two buttons near them to jump on top of them and punch their face into the ground, but make sure no enemies are nearby or they will hit you during this vulnerable moment. You’ll know when you’re done because the game goes into slow-motion when you knock out the last thug, allowing you to enjoy them falling to the ground, holding their head in agony.

Occasionally enemies with guns show up, and even batman isn’t bulletproof. This is when the stealth aspect of the game comes into play. There are nearly a dozen ways to go about taking enemies down quietly without being damaged. You can hang upside-down and wait for someone to walk under you, then snatch them up like spider man. You can sneak up behind them and smother them. You can do a glide kick and then knock them out before they get up. As you unlock new gadgets you get even more options to take out thugs without being detected, and as you do it, you truly feel like batman.

Another tool is your detective mode which highlights objects of interest and lets you see enemy skeletons with X-ray vision. This vision mode also shows you what weapon the enemy has and their stress level. As you take out more and more of their friends, the bad guys start to freak out until there is only one left who is practically wetting himself with fear. I felt a tremendous sense of predatory power as I crouched on a gargoyle directly over the last man standing as he fired in all directions while crying to himself.

You gain experience points by beating up thugs, completing objectives, and finding Riddler clues. You use these points to power up your items and combat moves so you can thrown enemies and break their limbs. The Riddler clues are either trophies hidden around, a map in each area of where the clues are, an invisible question mark you can only see while in detective mode, the chronicles of the man who built the asylum, and items belonging to other criminals which Riddler gives hints to. Sadly these hints are pretty easy to figure out, but some of the trophies are hidden rather well. You also find therapy session tapes for the super villains giving insight into their personalities. Collecting these items provide you with character trophies which you can view from the main menu, and bios of many characters in the batman universe, including those that don’t appear in the game.

The asylum itself plays out like a Castlevania symphony of night, or a Zelda map. You unlock new areas as you progress through the game by obtaining new items, but this does lead to a lot of backtracking, and you have to make a mental note of where an out of reach vent was early on in the game so you can go back and get to what’s inside it after you get the bat claw. The asylum itself changes as the game progresses forcing you to find different ways into some of the same areas, but thugs don’t endlessly respawn. Once you beat everyone in the map, they shouldn’t return unless you have to pass through the area again as part of the story.

I honestly can’t think of anything really negative about the game. You can’t drive the bat mobile, but that makes sense in the context of the game. The game is also pretty easy except for a few occasions when you aren’t allowed to be spotted, but even these events aren’t too difficult. The only area the game really fails is the boss battles. The only fight that feels like a real boss fight is with poison ivy, and she’s also the only one who managed to kill me. Any other boss fight either boils down to you beating up a bunch of thugs while the villain cheers them on, or if you’re fighting a hulking guy, you just dive out of the way and let them hit the wall before wailing on them or jumping on their back and riding them like Master Blaster. Even the final battle is rather disappointing, though the following cinematic is just plain badass.

In all, Batman Arkham Asylum is a solid game with very few flaws. I highly recommend it for just about anyone. It has the stealth action of any assassin game, the beat’em up fun of an action game, and it’s by far the best Batman game I have ever played which truly makes you feel like you are the dark night. Worth at least renting, or if you want to beat the challenge modes, buying.

Onto the Multiplayer/On-line gaming. First things first… MW2 has a lot of things that does need fixing. The biggest issues are care package glitch (which will be fixed soon I’ve heard), the fact that people abuse tactical insertion, and nuke boosters. The care package glitch is when you get the kill streak “Care Package”, or “Emergency Air Drop” and after doing a special sequence of things you instantly get another care package again. Tactical Insertion is used a lot with Nuke Boosters amongst other things. Nuke boosters are people who go on-line to play and a friend of theirs goes on too, and one kill the other until they’ve killed the other guy enough times to get a “Nuke” kill streak. The first two things can be fixed, the best we can do with nuke boosters, is to kill them constantly on on-line game play to until they leave. Oh there was one more thing wrong with the game, the match making engine isn’t the greatest. Sometime you have people who are brand new at the game playing some seasoned veterans. I personally don’t mind too much on the because if you play against people that are better than you, you can get better you’re self.

I know I’ve made it sound like I may not have really liked MW2 but in reality I’m addicted to the game. It’s more fun when you do play with friends on-line, but even without them you can still usually find a good group to play with. It’s really hard to really portray how fun the game is in words, especially the on-line game play. You have a lot of maps along with over 10 different types of games to play. There is a reason why Modern Warfare 2 is the most searched game play videos on YouTube. Speaking of YouTube, if you do watch any of that stuff on YouTube check out Hutch, and SeaNanners. They give a lot of tips and tricks on COD Moder Warfare 2.

In all I give Call of Duty Moder Warfare 2 an 8 out of 10. If you like First Person Shooters, I’d say go pick it up and see for yours self.

Image via Wikipedia