Rush for Berlin Gold

Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Developer: Stormregion
Genre: Historic Real-Time Strategy
Release Date: Jun 12, 2006
ESRB: TEEN
ESRB Descriptors: Blood, ViolenceOnline Modes: Competitive, Cooperative, Team Oriented
Number of Players: 1 Player
Number of Online Players: 6 Online

Getting into a World War II real-time strategy game is a challenge these days. So many have shown up on our doorstep the past couple of years that newcomers can only get the Nazi-weary public’s attention by doing one thing wildly differently or everything incredibly well. You can put Rush for Berlin in the latter category. While this by-the-books effort from Codename: Panzers developer Stormregion is a rehash of WWII RTS conventions, the entire game is so well designed that you don’t much care that you’ve seen it all before. If you can stand to liberate Stalingrad in a computer game one more time, you should sign up for a tour of duty here.
Just don’t expect anything new. All of the standard WWII RTS conventions are respected so much here that you won’t need to even glance at the manual to get the lay of the land. Four separate campaigns that begin with the final push into Germany let you wage war as the Western Allies (which only seems to comprise the US and UK–sorry, Canada), Russians, Germans, and French. A total of 25 solo missions (figure on 25 to 30 hours of play) take you through well-worn WWII hotspots such as Bastogne, Stalingrad, and bombed-out downtown Berlin.

Game structure in Rush for Berlin follows the usual recipe, too. Units include golden oldies such as GIs, mortar teams, medics, Sherman tanks, Panzer tanks, recon vehicles, supply trucks, and so on. As with most other WWII RTS games, Rush for Berlin’s focus is firmly on tactics. There is no base building or resource collection, although you are often required to capture enemy factories or headquarters to use for such things as tank and troop production, as well as resupply.
Stormregion does do a pretty admirable job of livening up these familiar surroundings. Missions take place on huge maps that are packed with detail. The 3D engine does a fantastic job of rendering all sorts of little touches that add atmosphere to every setting, and almost every building, tree, and bunker can be blown up, knocked down, or rolled over with an armor column. At times, though, too much detail is crammed onto the screen. Muddy trenches, blocks of ravaged apartments, and weather effects such as heavy snowflakes always look great, but they can cause serious slowdown when accompanied by a lot of moving units. Larger-scale battles, particularly in the Western campaign, really get bogged down at times. Thankfully, outstanding sound effects during these massive battles make up for the occasional visual issues. Every shot, explosion, and round fired by a Panzer booms out of the speakers so forcefully that it feels like you’re playing a Medal of Honor-style WWII shooter, not an RTS.
Scenario design is geared to put you into the boots of the soldiers on the ground. Objectives move freely between big military goals such as conquering Nazi headquarter buildings and blowing up German 88s to squad-level maneuvers such as chasing down and killing a tank commander hopping from one Panzer to another, stopping German engineers from wrecking Russian foundries, and even using a control panel to solve a puzzle presented by moving walkways. You won’t mistake this game for something like Commandos or Silent Storm, but the inclusion of these hands-on sequences does give Rush for Berlin a more varied personality than the usual cataclysmic, big-picture RTS.
Also, there are a lot of glimpses of real history to give the game historical heft. The Bastogne mission, for example, takes place in the middle of a blinding snowstorm, which conveys how alone the real American troops must have felt on that New Year’s Eve in 1944. The Russian seizure of the Brandenburg Gate is set in the cratered landscape of Berlin, emphasizing the utter ruin that Hitler’s war brought upon Germany. Even the German campaign, which moves the game into an alternate history where Hitler died in the Stauffenberg bomb plot of 1944 and his successors fought to achieve a more noble peace (with high-tech weapons such as the Me-262 jet fighter, no less), rings true because it is a credible look at what might have been.
Officer hero units also add historical flavor. While they unfortunately aren’t given individual names, they do have specialties that adeptly evoke some of their national character. The Russians, for instance, feature a political officer with the special ability to dole out double rations of vodka to fire up troops for limited periods of time and attack troops with explosive-placing dogs, while the Allies boast the likes of an SAS officer who can call in paratroopers.
Artificial intelligence is generally up to the challenge of bringing WWII battlefields to life. Troops in Rush for Berlin are quite smart in certain situations when it comes to attacking and defending, so you don’t have to do any micromanagement. Infantry troops, for instance, know enough to automatically approach enemy tanks and then wipe them out with magnetic mines. Fully computer-controlled allies aren’t as bright, however, a fact that gets somewhat aggravating when playing missions where you have to support them. One Allied mission that centered on repairing computer-controlled tanks was particularly frustrating, because these tanks frequently refused to attack the enemy in a sensible and prompt fashion. Pathfinding is another problem, especially when dealing with armor and mobile guns on maps with a lot of city streets. These units will frequently get jumbled up, bump into one another, and end up taking the long way to destinations.
Enemy forces are more astute than your buddies, too. This provides a fair bit of challenge in most missions (meaning that you need to make frequent use of the save anywhere feature), as the enemy seems to always focus fire on your most vulnerable or most useful units. Still, there are times when the computer’s ability to readily target and take out your finest troops seems like a cheat. One moment you’re marching along nicely with a sizable army, the next you’re reaching for the reload button because unseen snipers in the trees have just taken out your invaluable medics with a couple of shots or curiously perfectly placed guns in a bombed-out courtyard have turned your tanks into scrap metal. Levels feel like deathtrap puzzles a bit too often.

Multiplayer introduces two new modes of play to the usual deathmatch and domination games. RUSH (Relentlessly Utilized Score Hunt) and RISK (Race-Intensive Strategic Kombat) aren’t quite as memorable as games as they are for their names, though. The former is sort of neat in that players are given between one and three random tasks to accomplish, although they involve nothing but old-school victory conditions such as destroying all enemy units on the map, defeating an enemy team, or collecting supplies. But the latter is pretty much the same style of game as that in the solo campaigns, albeit with two or more players rushing to seize the same objectives. At any rate, multiplayer is a bit moot at present. Few people are playing online, at least with the full retail version of the game. Only demo matches seem to be up and running on a regular basis, but they aren’t compatible with the out-of-the-box game.
Basically, Rush for Berlin is a very good representation of the WWII RTS formula by pros who really know their way around the Battle of the Bulge. If any game is capable of convincing genre veterans of shivering their way through the Battle of the Bulge one more time, it’s this one.
By Brett Todd, GameSpot

Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium 4 1.7 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 4000 MB
Other: DirectX 9.0c compatible 3D graphics card
Recommended System Requirements
System: Pentium 4 2.7 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 1024 MB
Video Memory: 128 MB
Hard Drive Space: 4000 MB
Other: DirectX 9.0c compatible 3D graphics card

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Ship Simulator 2008

Publisher: Lighthouse Interactive
Developer: VSTEP
Genre: Naval Sim
Release Date: September 2007
ESRB: EVERYONE

I always feel that ships tend to lose out in the transport wars of gaming. I mean, you get great flight-based games and so many excellent car-orientated games, from arcade racers to simulations and driving-based free roaming titles, that there are too many examples to list. In terms of simulations, these days you can find a game that simulates almost anything from managing a zoo or a railroad empire to simulated people, piñatas and spaceships. Of course, when it comes to simulation, the one title that comes to mind is Microsoft Flight Simulator, which has sold millions of copies over the years – but can the same exposure be generated by the simulation of ships? Possibly, as the popularity of pirate scenarios in both gaming and film may well get fans interested in such nautical naughtiness. Don’t don your eye patch just yet however, as there are no pirates or looting to be done in Ship Simulator 2008.
When Ship Simulator 2008 rose from the seas and planted itself onto my desk like a jellyfish that has been washed up onto Blackpool beach, I must admit that I wasn’t overly excited about the prospect of playing it. It’s the second instalment of the series by Lighthouse Interactive, the first being Ship Simulator 2006, so the original must have sold enough copies to warrant this sequel. At installation you need to register a license key, to receive patches and updates such as extra ships and missions, which at least shows that the developers want the game to succeed and not sink without a trace (I wonder how many more nautical themed jokes I can think up!)
Ship Simulator 2008 starts off with a simple yet pleasant main menu accompanied by some atmospheric music, a lot like the CDs that are meant to relax your mood with dolphin and whale sounds. Further investigation showed that I could try my hands at a variety of missions or choose the Free-Roaming approach. You can create your own profile, which saves your progress as you complete the missions, although unless you are a ship enthusiast I can’t see many people wanting to complete them all.
There are various missions available, ranging from saving stranded captains to using tugboats to move items from one harbour to another. In general they can be grouped into five distinct mission types, with the first type concerning itself with placing your boat in a particular area. Another mission type is rescuing random people who have fallen from their vessels (the game never states how they ended up there, must be mutiny on a major scale!) The monotonous mooring, towing and anchoring missions are by far the most boring, while the missions that I enjoyed the most tended to be the ones that required me with my speedboat/water taxi to hit some ramps at breakneck speeds. The final mission type is the time-consuming ‘Taxi’ mode.
The Free-Roaming aspect is pleasant enough; each time I played it, my ship would appear in a different place due to the random generated nature of this feature. However, I suspect that only sea captains and my marine sailor mate Dave will enjoy this beyond the first half an hour of playing. Microsoft Flight Simulator offers a wide variety of places to fly to, which is not the case here, with only a small number of cities or ports on offer. These ports/cities/harbours include New York, Marseille, San Francisco and even the Solent, which separates mainland Britain from the Isle of Wight. There are also several open water environments to try your seafaring hand at.
The graphics in the game are above average; the various weather effects and sunsets are nice to look at, but the ships don’t seem very real. The speedboat for example isn’t particularly awe-inspiring; it seems to be lacking something when compared to the other vessels in the game, such as the VLCC Latitude or the Vermass. I expected my speedboat to be by far the sexiest vessel on the seas, so it was a little disappointing that it wasn’t. The Titanic makes an appearance, but it would have been a fantastic inclusion to have designed a mission where I could have saved it from its meeting with Mr. Iceberg. The various ports do look like some time has been put in to ensure they look lifelike; if you’ve ever been to New York, which I’m lucky enough to have visited, or any of the other environments depicted in the game, then you will certainly appreciate the little details that have been included.
To be fair, there isn’t an awful lot of time spent on ship control as you play, so I found myself gazing at beaches and the other scenery. There are thirteen vessels available, all of which can be viewed in first person as you walk around them. This is a very thoughtful inclusion but again it’s really only going to be of the ship-spotters. One aspect I’m unimpressed with are the poorly designed people who you save from Davy Jones’ locker; they look stick-like and when you pick them up they just disappear from the water, and you’re told they’ve been brought on board. It wouldn’t have taken long to develop a little set-piece where you could throw a life-preserver into the water and the person in distress could have grabbed hold and then climbed aboard.
The sound is nothing special; the engine noises begin to grate after a while, although the ambience of seagulls calling and the splashing of waves is relaxing. I would have loved to hear some of my crew telling me that I was going too fast or that I was going to hit that beach. You can take pictures, which is a bonus, and the pictures do look fairly picturesque. If the developers had modeled the ship systems in a little more depth and simulated other aspects, such as currents, then I would have got a much better idea of what it takes to be a captain on a modern merchant ship and thus would have become more immersed within the game. I know for a fact that working on the sea is a far more demanding occupation than this game suggests, so in this way it fails to truly simulate the experience.
None of the ships seem to sink even if they have 100% damage, and the actual damage on show is poorly represented. The damage characteristics also seem a fair bit out; hitting a mountain at 6 knots gave me 1% damage, whilst the mountain itself still looked the same. There are a few technical issues that need a mention, such as when I was halfway through one mission and suddenly ended up in another. Also, only some parts of a ship are accessible, where others can’t be explored. Some missions may take a couple of hours to complete too, although that doesn’t mean that they are enjoyable.
A lot needs to be added before the next installment if the developers want Ship Simulator to become a success. More ships and allowing full access within their interiors would be a good idea for starters. The missions could also include real-life scenarios, like fishing for King Crabs in torrential weather on a small fishing boat, whaling, hunting for sharks, entering the speedboat into races or stopping a massive oil carrier from sinking and losing its cargo. There are a fair few options available to the developers that can be added to improve the game. There’s no save feature available within missions either, which is definitely needed.
Ship Simulator 2008 will only appeal to ship afficianados, but even they may find the lack of features a turn-off after a while. It’s a pleasant enough game to kill a couple of hours on a rainy evening, but there are many more games out there that are either more relaxing or more fun to play. Hopefully the developers will take note of this and have some of these ideas included in the 2009 version, because at the moment you’re likely to jump ship and swim for different gaming shores sooner rather than later.

Reviewed by Christopher McNally for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).

Windows XP or Vista

2.4 Ghz Intel Pentium IV or AMD Athlon processor

1 GB RAM

4x CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive

Approx. 500 MB free hard disk space

128 MB 3D accelerated video card with support for Vertex and Pixel shader 1.1

(Nvidia GeForce 5900, ATI Radeon 9800 or comparable)

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Age Of Empires

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Developer: Ensemble Studios
Genre: Historic Real-Time Strategy
Release Date: Oct 26, 1997
ESRB Descriptors: Animated Violence, Animated Blood
Number of Players: 1-8

When you first play Age of Empires, a warm feeling develops in your gut. Warcraft meets Civilization! Real-time empire-building! And does it ever look sharp and feel right.
But an uneasy feeling builds as you get deeper into it, a sense that all is not quite right. This is not quite the game you hoped for. Even worse, it has some definite problems. The pitfall when you review a game as anticipated and debated as this one is to make sure you criticize it for what it is, not for what you wish it was. I wish that Age of Empires was what it claimed to be – Civilization with a Warcraft twist. Instead, it is Warcraft with a hint of Civilization. That’s all well and good, but it places it firmly in the action-oriented real-time combat camp, rather than in the high-minded empire-building of Civilization. The result is Warcraft in togas, with slightly more depth but a familiar feel.

Age of Empires places you on a map in an unexplored world, provides a few starting units, and lets you begin building an empire. Each game unfolds the same way. You begin with a town center and some villagers. The villagers are the basic laborers, and the town center enables you to build more of them and expand your settlement. The villagers are central to AOE: they gather resources, build structures, and repair units and buildings. Resources come in four forms: wood, food, stone, and gold. A certain amount of each is consumed to build various units and buildings, research new technology, and advance a civ to the next age.

There is no complex resource management or intricate economic model at work here. What you have is the same old real-time resource-gathering in period garb, with four resources instead of one or two. As your civ advances, you develop greater needs for these resources, but the way in which they are gathered and used becomes only marginally more complex (certain research can cause faster harvesting or more production). It appears on the surface to be a complex evocation of the way early civs gathered and used materials, but beneath the hood is the same old “mine tiberium, buy more stuff than the other guys” model. It is the first hint that AOE is a simple combat game rather than a glorious empire-builder.

There’s no denying the thrill the first time a villager chucks a spear at an antelope and spends several minutes hacking meat from its flank with a stone tool. This is the level of detail that brings an empire-building game to life. If only those villagers would grow and develop over the course of the game, it would make it so much more interesting. If only they would trade in their loincloths for some britches and maybe some orange camouflage, and switch from spears to arrows and rifles. Yes, that’s another game, but it could easily have been done in AOE, and why it wasn’t is a mystery.

The overall impression of AOE dips further with the prickly issue of unit control and AI. As you expand your city with new and improved buildings, you develop the ability to produce new and better military units. These fall into several categories: Infantry (Clubman, Axeman, Short Swordsman, Broad Swordsman, Long Swordsman, Legion, Hoplite, Phalanx, and Centurion), Archers (Bowman, Improved Bowman, Composite Bowman, Chariot Archer, Elephant Archer, Horse Archer, and Heavy Horse Archer), Cavalry (Scout, Chariot, Cavalry, Heavy Cavalry, Cataphract, and War Elephant), and Siege Weapons (Stone Thrower, Catapult, Heavy Catapult, Ballista, and Helepolis). With the completion of a temple, a priest becomes available that can heal friendly units and convert enemy units. Naval units come in the form of fishing, trade, transport, and war.

The problem is that while enemy AI is savvy and aggressive (it can afford to be since it appears to cheat with resources), your units are bone-stupid. Path-finding is appallingly botched, with units easily getting lost or stuck. There is a waypoint system, but that hardly makes up for the fact that your units have trouble moving from point A to point B if you don’t utilize it. Military units will stand idly by while someone a millimeter away is hacked to pieces. They respond not at all to enemy incursion in a village and wander aimlessly in the midst of battle. Was this deliberate so that the gamer needed to spend more time in unit management? If so, it was a poor idea, since there is simply too much going on midgame to worry about whether your military is allowing itself to be butchered in one corner of the map while you are aggressively tending to a battle in another portion. There is no excusing this flaw, and it seriously diminishes AOE’s enjoyability. Finally, there is the fifty unit limit that is irritating many players, but in light of the game’s already troublesome play balance, it was a solid decision to force users to build units more selectively.

AOE obviously is sticking close to an early-empire motif, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that. Stone, Tool, Bronze, and Iron are the four ages, and with each come new structures and military units. You don’t earn these advanced ages – you buy them with resources. Advancement is a simple matter of hoarding and spending food and gold. The overall welfare of your state is irrelevant as long as it survives: happiness is not measured, trade is barely modeled, and the state exists merely to produce a military machine to crush everyone else on the map. Naval power has a woefully unbalancing effect upon gameplay, with a strong navy able to shred the competition at the expense of reality.

Micromanagement is the name of the game in AOE. There is no unit queue, and to build five villagers, you need to build one, wait, build another, and so on. With units acting so stupidly, you should be able to set their level of aggression and the manner in which they attack (a la Dark Reign), but that is also not an option. Diplomacy is relegated to tribute and nothing more, and alliances are hard to form. You can be allied, neutral, or at war with other civs, but if the radio button is still set to “allied” when an opponent starts firing on your units, your units will not fire back, defend themselves, or even flee. They will just be destroyed. Cues as to exactly what’s happening on the map are obscure; the duty has been relegated to unrelated sound effects. Does that bugle call mean my building is finished being built, or my units are under attack? How about some help, people? Victory conditions can also be irritating. There are several campaigns that require that specific goals be met, and these quickly grow tiresome. Thankfully, there is an excellent custom generator that lets you set map size, starting tech, resources, and other features. This is the saving grace of AOE, and what kept me coming back again and again. The main reason is that it let me change some of the insane default victory requirements, such as when the victor is the first to build a “wonder” (through another massive consumption of resources) that stands for 2000 years. These 2000 years can pass in about twenty minutes of game time. That means that as soon as an opponent builds a wonder, you create a whacking huge navy to go over and blow it up. Not a very subtle way to maintain an empire. In fact, there is no strategic nuance: It is merely a brawny muscle contest. For all its historical trappings and pretensions to recreate the early progress of civilization, in the final analysis it does not even have the depth of a pure combat game like Dark Reign or Total Annihilation.

If all these judgments seem harsh, it is only because Age of Empires looked, and pretends, to be so very much more. It still has tons of potential and a fundamental gameplay that remains entertaining enough to overcome the flaws and merit a fair rating. The system can go very far with some fine-tuning, but as it stands it seems downright schizo. Is it a simplified Civilization or a modestly beefed up Warcraft? It’s almost as if the designers started out to create one game and ended up with another. With such beautiful production and the fundamentals of a vastly entertaining game, it’s sad that it fell short of the mark. The disappointment is not merely with what AOE is, but with what it failed to be.

By T. Liam McDonald, GameSpot

Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium-90 or equivalent
RAM: 16 MB
Video Memory: 1 MB
Hard Drive Space: 130 MB

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Faces of War

Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Best Way
Genre: Historic Real-Time Strategy
Release Date: Sep 12, 2006 (more)
ESRB: MATUREOffline Modes: Competitive, Cooperative, Team Oriented
Online Modes: Competitive, Cooperative, Team Oriented
Number of Players: 1 Player
Number of Online Players: 16 Online

It’s surprising that developers are still finding ways to screw up World War II real-time strategy games. Games like the fantastic Company of Heroes should be the rule by this point, not the exception, seeing as developers have stacks of games to pick apart to see what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, as Faces of War proves, this isn’t the case. Many RTS versions of the noble crusade remain packed with flaws, including dull, derivative missions and control problems, and this game is no exception. Even though developer Best Way has already produced the well-regarded Soldiers: Heroes of WWII, here the company has made a primer on how not to make a WWII RTS. Faces of War hits all of the potholes that have wrecked similar games in the recent past, and it’s driven into a few new ones.

By now, you probably know the drill when it comes to World War II-themed strategy games. The solo part of the game features the usual three campaigns (there is no skirmish option), so once more you get to tear up Europe with the Germans, Allies, and Soviets. There are no surprises here, although the developer has thrown something of a curveball by picking up the war after the midway point of 1944. You come on board for the final stages of the conflict, so, for a change, there isn’t a focus on the standard WWII-game headline battles like D-Day (which is represented in a bonus mission outside of the formal Allied campaign) and Stalingrad (which isn’t featured here at all). Chances are that you’ve liberated Omaha Beach and blasted that infamous Russian city to rubble a few dozen times in other games already, though, so the (partial) absence of these engagements is refreshing.
That’s about all that is refreshing about Faces of War, though. Everything else has been scooped out of the big bag of WWII RTS game clichés with both hands. Gameplay is something of a cross between Commandos and a typical larger-scale WWII RTS. You take charge of a small squad of troops and don’t have to deal with resource management or even minor management tasks such as ordering up reinforcements, but you do have to deal with large numbers of enemies. Overall, the designers have sort of hit the sweet spot between solving level puzzles and blowing the hell out of everything that moves.
Still, missions all deal with tired, bog-standard objectives like blowing up radio stations, rescuing generals, detonating bridges, and stealing secret plans. There are lots of vehicles, gun emplacements, and tanks to hop into, plus loads of buildings to enter and use to set up shooting positions, but the end goals are still very, very familiar. You can choose to play assignments by either tactics or arcade rules, but both feel like a Sgt. Rock comic brought to life, with your squad going up against insane odds and stacking bodies like cordwood. Best Way seems to have compensated for the lack of unique settings by swamping every level with foes. Combat is fast and busy in such a never-let-up style that the incessant action soon begins to wear on you.

Levels have also been overdeveloped to the point where you have no real freedom. They aren’t as rigid or as puzzle-heavy as those you would find in one of the Commandos games, although there is typically just one way to complete objectives and usually just a single way to get there. You need to do everything in perfect order to activate a trigger spawning backups (like a column of tank reinforcements) or setting up the condition needed to take out the battalion of enemies that attack you at the end of each mission. A lot of levels feature extremely dissatisfying endgames that you don’t control, where the cavalry shows up out of the blue like a deus ex machina, for example, or you suddenly win the day just because you managed to stay alive against withering enemy fire for a long-enough period of time. Often, these victory conditions aren’t spelled out, so you’re left mindlessly killing enemies in the hope that the level will eventually end.
Also, if you don’t follow the moves “suggested” in midmission officer voiceovers to the letter, you have no hope of winning battles. You don’t even have a choice when it comes to taking on secondary objectives, as you always have to complete them ASAP or get shredded by hidden mortars, blown away by a King Tiger tank, or overwhelmed by enemies who often pour out of buildings like clowns out of a funny car. This is one extremely linear game in which everything feels scripted.

Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium IV 2.0 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 64 MB
Hard Drive Space: 2500 MB
Recommended System Requirements
System: Pentium IV 3.0 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 1024 MB
Video Memory: 128 MB

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Playboy The Mansion

Publisher: Arush Entertainment
Developer: Cyberlore Studios
Genre: Business Strategy
Release Date: Jan 25, 2005 (more)
ESRB: MATURE
ESRB Descriptors: Nudity, Strong Sexual Content, Use of Alcohol

The life of Hugh M. Hefner, the man whose lifestyle Playboy almost seems named after, is the stuff of dreams. Or, as it might seem in Cyberlore’s Playboy: The Mansion, the stuff of good PR. You’ll take control of a virtual Hef to try to build the Playboy empire while rubbing elbows with celebrities, frolicking with Playboy Bunnies and Playmates alike, and throwing a seemingly endless string of parties along the way. Oh, and you’ll publish a magazine or two. Yet despite the bacchanalian context, this Sims-style strategy game comes off as cold and mechanical, capturing none of the devil-may-care attitude you’d expect and casting Hef’s idyllic lifestyle as a hollow grind established purely for the sake of selling more magazines.

The idea is that as a young, vital Hugh Hefner, you take the magazine from the first issue and build it up from there. However, in the game’s mission mode, you’ll get a good head start by having already acquired the famous Playboy Mansion. The game breaks down into three easy pieces. Of course, your primary concern is publishing your magazine, which demands that you acquire a set number of pieces of content: one cover shot, one centerfold, one article, one interview, one essay, and one pictorial. You’ll need to hire a small staff of journalists and photographers to produce most of the content, as well as a new Playmate each month, but for the cover shots, essays, and interviews, you’ll need celebrities.
To get connected to celebrities, you’ll need to throw some parties…a lot of parties, actually. By inviting prominent figures from the worlds of politics, sports, and just about every arm of the entertainment industry to your get-togethers, you’ll be able to strike up conversations with them. And after you’ve gotten to know them, you can ask them to contribute to the magazine. Social networking plays a big role in Playboy: The Mansion, though its execution is extremely shallow, making it easy to go from perfect strangers to best friends, to business partners, to intimate partners with a few clicks of the dialogue menu.
Successful parties will increase your overall fame, which helps sell magazines. To throw a successful party, you’ll need to make sure you’ve invited a group of compatible people, in addition to hiring Playboy Bunny hostesses to keep the rooms alive and providing plenty of other activities to keep your guests happy. To keep the Mansion as fabulous as possible, you’ll have to take some of your magazine money and reinvest it in the grounds. There’s an extensive amount of customization available, letting you determine the floor plan of the mansion as well as the furniture and various decorative pieces that are housed inside.
It seems like there’s a lot to juggle in the Mansion, but in reality it only requires as much tending as you feel compelled to invest. Time seems kind of nebulous, and you have no hard deadlines for when you need to have each month’s issue finalized, allowing you to collect the content you’ll need at your own leisure. Similarly, if you don’t want to obsess over the interior design of the Mansion, you can simply do the bare minimum to keep guests happy and be done with it, since Hef’s own personal satisfaction isn’t a factor at all. In fact, rather than being harrowing, which might even be preferable, Playboy: The Mansion is just dull. Your goals and your means to them are laid out pretty plainly, and the obstacles between you and success are numbered.
The game gives you the option of playing in mission or free-form mode. The mission mode provides you with additional goals to meet as you publish magazines, throw parties, and expand the Mansion, while the free-form mode stays true to its name by letting you play however you feel fit. Though the PC version’s mouse-based controls feel a bit more natural, especially given the heavy influence of The Sims, experiences with the PS2 and Xbox versions aren’t too different from each other, both in terms of navigation and overall presentation.
The most compelling bit of content inside Playboy: The Mansion involves the unlockable extras, which include classic Playboy covers, centerfolds, and interviews with celebrities ranging from Snoop Dogg to Jimmy Carter. The dozens of photos from across Playboy’s history provide an interesting retrospective on the magazine, and to a certain extent, American pop culture at large. The interviews hold up without any nostalgic assistance and simply represent good reads. Ironically, the articles might just be the best reason to subscribe to Playboy: The Mansion.
The game plays an awful lot like The Sims, and its presentation similarities to Maxis’ suburban lifestyle simulation are many as well. The game is mostly played from a three-quarters overhead perspective, though you can spin the camera around and zoom in and out at will. The people in the game all have a pleasantly nondescript look to them, à la The Sims, and after interacting with dozens of unique celebrities and staffers, they’ll all start blending together.

Similarly, the girls who pose for the cover and centerfold shoots, despite having different hairstyles, skin tones, and bra sizes, are otherwise indistinguishable. Combine this with the limited animation routines the girls go through during the photo shoots, and over the course of publishing a year’s worth of Playboy magazines, it’ll start seeming like you’re just taking pictures of the same girl in a different wig…which, if you think about it, is kind of creepy. The overall look is mildly playful and a little chunky, and despite a bevy of topless models galavanting around the grounds, the game never even proffers a close brush with titillation. It makes some effort, but the bland, somewhat mechanical look of the game keeps it from being anything more than just slightly bawdy.

Buying sound systems for the Mansion can provide you with some good background music that covers a pretty broad range of tunes, from fairly stock rock, hip-hop, and techno stations to more-unusual options, such as an industrial station, a flamenco station, and a jazz station. More curious than the eclectic nature of the soundtrack in Playboy: The Mansion is the rampant censoring. Having already earned a firm M-rating with its healthy attitude toward toplessness (both digital and otherwise), Playboy: The Mansion’s self-censorship seems almost hypocritical. Though Hef and everyone else who visits the Mansion speaks in some house-brand version of simlish, the gibberish language spoken by sims in The Sims, you have a handful of assistants and executives that will regularly dole out useful information in plain English. Their utility far outstrips the chops of the voice actors, whose reading of the expositional dialogue is often stilted and unnatural. The music is the most prominent element in the game’s sound design, and it does inject a little personality into the proceedings. However, the game still can’t help but feel kind of dry.
Beyond simply not being a particularly compelling game, Playboy: The Mansion really seems to balk at presenting the swinging spirit of the Playboy name, and it openly treats both Hefner and the Playboy reader like a commodity. Like Hef himself, who has gradually shifted from outspoken cultural icon to caricatured corporate mascot, there’s not a lot of Playboy left in The Mansion.
By Ryan Davis, GameSpot

Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium(r) III 800 or 100% compatible or equivalent
RAM: 256 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 1500 MB
Other: Windows Media 9 Player or later

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Zeus : Master of Olympus

Publisher: Sierra Entertainment
Developer: Impressions Games
Genre: Strategy
Release Date: Sep 30, 2001 (more)
ESRB: EVERYONENumber of Players: 1 Player
Zeus: Master of Olympus follows in the same tradition as Impressions’ other real-time city-building games, including Pharaoh and the Caesar series. These games combine the urban-management elements of Maxis’ SimCity along with the colonial and imperial objectives of Blue Byte’s Settlers games. Yet although Zeus is similar to its predecessors, it offers numerous enhancements and improvements that make it a much better game. These include features and options reminiscent of Ensemble’s Age of Empires real-time strategy games as well as MicroProse’s classic Civilization series. As a result, Zeus plays like a best-of-all-worlds combination of some of the greatest strategy games ever.
As the title implies, Zeus is set in ancient Greece. However, the setting doesn’t have too much of an impact on gameplay. For the most part, Zeus plays exactly like Caesar and Pharaoh. The only surface differences are the products your people produce and the food your people eat. Just as in the previous games, your goal is to manage every aspect of an ancient city. From agriculture and housing to employment and military, everything is under your control. You must make sure that you have enough jobs for your people and enough people for your jobs. You also need enough food to feed your people and enough profit from exporting goods to cover the high cost of importing the goods you aren’t able to produce. It’s a high-wire act and becomes even trickier as your city grows in size.
As you get into the game, you’ll notice there are actually some key differences in the way that Zeus plays compared with its predecessors. Impressions has made some significant changes to the mission structure so that – while the basic gameplay is still the same – it’s now much more fun to play. A typical campaign, called an “adventure,” works as follows. You begin with a tract of empty land. You build your city from scratch, as you aim for some preset, easily achievable goals. Once your city is functioning smoothly, the mission ends. The next mission will put you in charge of the same city, but your goals will be a bit more complex. Usually, these will involve having to attract a legendary hero, like Hercules or Perseus, to your city to perform some task. Once that’s done, it’s on to the next mission. Eventually, you’ll choose a site to colonize and begin again from scratch. Then it’s back to the parent city, this time with all the benefits of having a colony, including increased trade and a yearly tribute of money or goods. By this time, some of your neighboring countries will probably have been offended or will have become jealous, and so it’ll be time to start invading or defending. The final mission will end with your having to accomplish some larger goals that ensure that your city is thriving and free from rivals.
While some of these ideas were implemented in Cleopatra, the expansion to Pharaoh, they are fully realized in Zeus. Specifically, your city remains exactly as you left it from mission to mission. Adventures range from five to eight missions and typically take quite a while to finish. There are seven in all, and they get increasingly difficult. Moreover, they each focus on one particular aspect of Greek history or mythology; one will have you aiding Jason through his tasks, while another is about the Trojan War. The only problem with the adventures is that the integration of the mythology occasionally seems like an afterthought. For instance, in an episode called Hercules’ Labors, Hercules himself only plays a small role. But overall, the mission design is first-rate.

Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium-166 or equivalent
RAM: 32 MB
Video Memory: 2 MB
Hard Drive Space: 550 MB
Recommended System Requirements
System: PII 266 or equivalent
RAM: 64 MB
Video Memory: 4 MB
Hard Drive Space: 650 MB

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Company of Heroes

Publisher: THQ
Developer: Relic
Genre: Historic Real-Time Strategy
Release Date: Sep 13, 2006 (more)
ESRB: MATURE

Offline Modes: Competitive, Team Oriented
Online Modes: Competitive, Team Oriented
Number of Players: 1-8
Number of Online Players: 8 Online

Company of Heroes is a visually stunning real-time strategy game that depicts all the violent chaos of World War II with uncommon intensity. Set during the invasion of Normandy toward the end of the war, Company of Heroes takes its cues from Saving Private Ryan, by portraying both the sheer brutality of the war as well as the humanity of its combatants. Many other recent WWII games have also drawn influence from Steven Spielberg’s landmark film, but Company of Heroes is even more graphic. This and the game’s highly authentic-looking presentation are its distinguishing features, and it boasts some frantic, well-designed strategic and tactical combat to match. Company of Heroes trades a wide breadth of content for an extremely detailed look at WWII-era ground combat, and its action is so fast paced that it’s best suited for the reflexes of an experienced RTS player. So if you’re unfazed by any of that, you’ll find that this latest real-time strategy game from the developers of Homeworld and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is one of the best, most dramatic and exciting examples in years.

Provided you have a powerful-enough system and graphics card to fully appreciate the visuals in Company of Heroes, you’ll quickly be struck by the level of detail depicted in the game. Infantry move in teams, darting from cover to cover. They may be ordered to occupy any building on the map, and you’ll see them shutter the doors and take aim out the windows. Vehicles are shown to scale, so tanks and other armored vehicles look big and imposing, and, indeed, they are. Infantry seem almost helpless against tanks, and you’ll hear the men screaming as tank shells explode around them, sending bodies flying, while lucky survivors dive out of the way. Yet by attacking a tank’s vulnerable sides and rear armor with explosives, it’s possible to turn the tables on these lumbering threats…turning one of the most basic confrontations in Company of Heroes into a thrilling cat-and-mouse game, much more than a typical clash between a couple of RTS units.

What’s more, the battlefields themselves have at least as much character to them as the various infantry squads and vehicles as your disposal. The quaint French towns that are the set pieces of many of the game’s skirmishes truly look as if a war was waged there once the battle is done, since buildings will catch fire and collapse, telephone lines will topple, blackened craters will appear in the wake of artillery blasts, and more. These changes aren’t just cosmetic, either. Those blast craters provide cover for your infantry, while the ruined husks of blown-up tanks might interfere with a machine gunner’s line of fire.
The game focuses on the Allies’ invasion of German-occupied Normandy in 1944, specifically on close-quarters skirmishes between infantry and armor. Company of Heroes presents a number of novel twists to real-time strategy conventions, but at heart this game works like other RTS games do, by putting you in charge of base construction, resource gathering, and tactical command of various military forces in an effort to defeat the opposition. The game includes a good-sized single-player campaign spanning more than a dozen missions, in which Able Company lands on Omaha Beach on D-Day, liberates a number of key towns and strategic points, disrupts German supply lines and secret weapons, and finally helps crush the remnants of the Nazi war machine in France. It’s an exciting campaign, tied together with cutscenes and mission briefings coming from a variety of voices, which creates a few threads that help tie the missions together. In addition to the campaign, you can play skirmish matches with up to seven computer-controlled players on a series of different maps, and you can also jump online into the proprietary Relic Online service to challenge other players in ranked and unranked matches. The Relic Online service is a cut above most similar offerings, and lets you easily find a ranked match against players of similar skill or host a match with your own custom settings.

Because of its limited scope of the Second World War, Company of Heroes has only the two playable factions, which it calls the Allies and the Axis–but really they’re the Americans and the Germans. In the campaign, you always play as forces from Able Company and you’re always fighting the Germans. There isn’t a separate campaign from the German perspective, though the Axis faction is fully playable in skirmish matches and online, and turns out to be fairly different from the Allies despite the basic similarities between the two sides’ weaponry. In fact, in a strange departure from similar games, Company of Heroes always forces you to play Allies versus Axis, even in multiplayer matches. Matches with more than two players are always team-based, with one side as the Allies and the other as the Axis, and so forth. While the game’s units and battlefields are unusually detailed, it’s hard not to wish for additional playable factions and a greater variety of settings, especially given how well Company of Heroes handles the American and German sides.
The gameplay in Company of Heroes is all about frontline combat, and forces you to quickly explore the map. You typically start out with a headquarters and a squad of engineers, who can build structures and setup defenses. Maps are divided up into territories that all have a resource point in them, and the resources you’ll need are manpower, munitions, and fuel. Infantry may capture neutral or enemy resource points, causing them to indefinitely contribute a flow of the given resource to your military efforts while also increasing the total number of units you can have in your army. However, all your territories must be connected for the resource flow to continue unabated; if an enemy takes a key territory, this may cut off your supply lines. All resources are used for building more-advanced structures and vehicles, but you only need manpower for basic infantry, who may use special abilities like hand grenades or armor-piercing machine gun rounds for a one-time cost of munitions. Munitions may also be spent to upgrade individual squads with special weapons, like recoilless rifles useful against enemy armor, or Browning automatic rifles that can suppress opposing squads. Your infantry squads are highly resourceful, acting as single units that can be effective down to the last man. They’ll last much longer when attacking from behind cover, such as a row of sandbags or the bell tower of an abandoned church.

If you’ve played Relic’s last real-time strategy game, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, you’ll note that many of these conventions were derived and extended from that game. However, Company of Heroes still plays quite differently from Dawn of War because of the nature of its densely packed battlefields and its even greater focus on unit tactics. You have some very interesting options to consider, such as how, when faced with an antitank gun manned by a squad of three, you may attempt to destroy the thing altogether with heavy weapons, or flank the gun and kill its squad, taking the artillery piece for your own. Heavy machine guns and other special weapons work much the same way. One of the great things about Company of Heroes is that, in spite of its somewhat glamorized portrayal of World War II, the game looks and behaves realistically, in how the sorts of tactical maneuvers that are central to the gameplay feel intuitive in practice. For example, you’ll naturally want to avoid making your infantry rush a machine gun nest head-on, especially since the withering fire from a German MG42 will force your squad to drop prone, pinned down.

Minimum System Requirements
System: 2.0GHz Intel Pentium IV or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 64 MB
Hard Drive Space: 6500 MB
Recommended System Requirements
System: 3.0GHz Intel Pentium or equivalent
RAM: 1024 MB
Video Memory: 256 MB
Hard Drive Space: 6500 MB

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