Gears of War hit the shelves with all the hype and expectations a next generation shooter could hope to inspire, and by most accounts, the hype was justified with an Xbox hit. Critics and casual gamers found themselves in awe of the breath taking graphics, graphic content, cinematic feel, and the innovative game play.

All the praise heaped upon the home console game left a bit of jealousy, or at least a healthy dose of curiosity, from those not blessed with an Xbox 360, but that need be not the case anymore. Gears of War has been wonderfully ported to the PC, keeping everything great from the console version and adding a fair share of additional content.

From those of you not already familiar with the core game, Gears of War is a 3rd person shooter of epic proportions. Your character is a tough talking hulk of muscle and attitude, a criminal branded as a traitor whom is busted out of jail to aid in the fight against an alien race, the Locust.

It isn’t exactly made clear why this war of races is raging, but it is clear that it is a genocidal fight to finish. The Locust are ruthless slaughterers, a take no prisoners sort whose raison d’etre is to do violence and little more, which is exactly the same sort as you and your human comrades.

You shoot and saw your way along a path determined by some pretty flimsy story telling, weak motivations and McGuffins popping up along the way, leaving a trail of death and destruction on a planet already in ruins.

The settings are stunningly realized landscapes of pure chaos. You see some pretty grim stuff on your travels, and boy does it look awesome. The graphics, which were amazing on the 360, are ridiculously impressive on the PC port.

The level of detail, even with the sometimes slightly bland palate of greys and dull greens, the models, the frame rate, the polygon count, and whatever else might pique the interest of a modern gamer, is like wow. The game looks so good. The cut scenes are gorgeously rendered, really cinematic in nature like the rest of the game, and are well directed.

Gears of War is presented as a long action movie. The story is spare and shallow at best, but it is enough to move along the action. The voice acting is good considering the script provided, not the headiest bunch of dialogue, but it gets the job done and never feels inadequate for the story that the game is trying to tell.

The game never promises what it cannot consistently deliver, and what it can deliver, it does by the boat load with such enthusiasm that you cannot help but get excited.

Audio wise, Gears of War delivers. The score is unapologetically over the top. There are dark orchestral movements, hard hitting action tracks, and heroic/patriotic themes, all of which amp up the emotion like only the most successful action packed blockbusters can do. The rest of the audio is superb as well. The gunshots ring out loudly, explosions quake the speakers, and the voices are well recorded. This a game that is best played at high volume.

The gimmick of the game is its main game play mechanic, the duck and cover system, which is absolutely essential to a successful gaming campaign. While it has be lauded as being incredibly innovative, revolutionary, it really is not. It is not the game’s fault that people have been making such a big deal about the combat system, but this type of thing has been done before, and done very well.

Not the greatest game ever made, but certainly not the worst, a PS2 title, Kill. Switch., put tons of emphasis on the same type of combat seen in Gears of War. This is not a knock against Gears of War, but it does take away from of the newness of the game if you have already played titles such as Kill. Switch.

I like the duck and cover system, however, it can get slightly tedious. You simply cannot be as impulsive as you can in many other shooters. If you do not rely on the environment to protect you, and patiently get shots off over or around your cover, you will get shredded quickly. You die after minimal hits, but you can recharge your health if you wait it out a while, which can slow down the pacing of the action.

If you take your time and play it as the game designers intended, you can get through the game without much difficulty on the default “casual” setting. The next highest setting will give some people a bit of trouble, especially during the latter sections of the game.

It seems that additional intermediate difficulty settings should have been included for those intermediately skilled players that form the majority of gamers. An even more difficulty setting can be unlocked with the completion of the main game.

Gears of War is not a long game by any stretch of the mind. In an era of when games routinely take 30 or more hours to complete, and much longer sometimes if side quests and extras are taken into account, Gears of War seems all too brief.

The first time through is a rush of excitement, a genuinely interactive cinematic experience that thrills from start to finish, but the second time through is slightly less enthralling, and by the third run through, it feels stale. If the main storyline starts to bore, however, you can always hop online for some multiplayer action.

The PC version is very close to the Xbox 360 version with a few exceptions. If you have a machine that has excellent stats, the game runs smoothly with better looking visuals than the original console version. If you have a machine that just barely meets the system requirements, expect to turn down a lot of the visuals, like shading and the ilk, and still suffer from some frame rate issues. I have also heard that some people can simply not get this game to work on their machines, and that there are serious, game destroying bugs present in some instances.

Gears of War for the PC also has 5 new stages at the beginning of the last section of the game. They are fun levels that let you take shots at a mega villain only glimpsed at in the 360 version, and they are very well made, design wise.

This may not be a problem, but there is a lack of continuity between the new levels and the rest of the game. The additional levels are huge and occasionally offer options on how to progress through areas, which is contrary to the strictly linear nature of the rest of the game.

Plenty of games are ported from consoles to the PC that just do not feel like PC titles. This game feels like a PC game. The mouse and keyboard feel natural. It is a bit odd how often you press the space bar, which is usually relegated to door opening and other such tasks, but you learn to love it. Everything is responsive and should be a smooth play for any veteran PC gamer.

Gears of War is a great addition to any PC game collection, though, if you have played through the 360 version your share of times, you might be better off not shelling out for this one. The graphics are stunning, the atmosphere is appropriately apocalyptic, audio is top notch, game play is solid. The bar has been set high with this one. Other than some potentially buggy PC play and brief completion time, Gears of War is a truly great shooter.

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Okami, exhibit A in the case for video games as high art, stands alone atop the artistic achievements made in the medium, a document destined for a future filing in the Library of Congress, is a stunningly well realized collaborative project between true artists.

It has visuals, audio, interactivity, and narrative that out paces nearly everything else in the gaming world, and it is loads of fun. First released over year ago for the PS2, Okami has found a new home on the Nintendo Wii, where it fits right in among a plethora of Wii games that stress original art design and wider appeal. This game has that wow factor that makes it irresistible to even total non-gamers, if only as a thing to sit down and watch for a moment or two.

Okami is about a blighted Japan, cursed by the powers of Orochi, an eight-headed serpent of evil. It is up to Amaterasu, a deity in the form of a sleek white wolf, and his friend, Issun, a talkative glowing bug, to restore vitality to the land.

You travel far and wide using y our magical powers to turn dark to light, death to life. You expel the evil from the land with a flash of a brush, literally painting the world anew, freeing it from the pestilential miasma that has blanketed it for years. It is a wondrous tale tale of good versus evil, a battle betwixt the gods of another land that has the future of the world at stake.

The most striking component of this game is the art design. It is bursting with unique character renderings, landscapes, and interfaces. You meet chatty humans, dangerous monsters, and others along your journey through a gigantic game world of both great beauty and grim desolation.

There are mountains ranges, coastal towns, rivers, forests, bogs, and more. The great variation in terrain gives the game world a feeling of immense size and complexity. All of this is pretty standard in the best games of today, but no other game have the magic of Okami.

With every gallop of the white wolf, you leave a trail of vegetation, blooming flowers, grass, and a spray of loose petals. With a wave of the Wiimote you can restore life to a whithered tree and return it to the splendor of nature’s potential, turn whole areas of sedge and decaying matter to a fertile meadow bustling with life.

It is a refreshing experience to rejuvenate the land when so many other games simply focus on laying waste to one’s surroundings. The exquisite grandeur of the whole enterprise is astoundingly satisfying.

As much as I could say about the visuals, the audio is nearly as impressive. The variations in setting and action are perfectly paralleled by the score, which includes vast arrays of musical instruments performing appropriate musical pieces for the given circumstances.

At times it is almost Peter and the Wolf-esque with the voicing of certain melodies and instruments for characters in the narrative. It never comes across as gimmicky or unnatural, but the very opposite. The music has an organic feel the entire time, even when segueing between tense battles with demonic hordes and the care free romping through the countryside.

Aesthetics aside, Okami plays great. It is easy to pick up and never gets frustratingly difficult. The battles are relatively easy and can mainly be avoided, the puzzles are fun and logical, you never feel as if you have to stumble upon the solution to advance, and the innovative use of the central game mechanic, which is the ability to paint symbols with a “celestial brush” on the screen that execute some kind of action, adds a lot depth to both the battles and the puzzles.

You get over a dozen symbols that you can pint over the course of the game, and they all come in handy at some point or another. Some you will use again and again, like the ability to draw a line through an object to cut it in two, or the sun symbol that turns night to day.

It is almost surprising that this game did not debut on the Wii since the painting seems specifically made for the Wiimote. It is exactly the kind of innovative and functional game mechanic that best benefits the Wii.

With the kind of curb appeal that Okami has, it would have been easy for the game designers to offer up a bit of eye candy, a nice score, and a new game mechanic, then call it a day. People would still pay for it and be impressed with the package enough to not regret their purchase, but Okami delivers far more.

Okami is a very long game that rarely drags. The main story line lasts over 30, and playtime could easily extend much longer if all the secrets and extra side missions were completed. It is the length of serious action RPGs that have stood the test of time, those that sell for a small ransom on Ebay a decade or so after release. Okami is that sort of game.

If you did not get a chance to get Okami for the PS2 when it originally hit the shelves, do yourself a favor, please, and pick up this title for the Wii. It may even be worth getting for the Wii even if you have it on the PS2 thanks to how well the Wiimote works with the celestial brush and the wide screen support. Okami will age slowly and gracefully, and will always be relevant to serious gamers for its innovative visuals and game play.

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There is something to be said about the sprawling narrative arcs, feelings of freedom and open endedness, high resolution graphics, surround sound orchestral scores, and other advances in modern video games, but there is also something to be said about the simplicity and quaintness of a game like Bubble Bobble.

The Wii’s Virtual Console makes available another classic of the NES era, and it is surely one to be purchased for the 500 Wii points that is asked. It combines an easy to learn, hard to master battle system, cutesy animation, enough level variation, and considerable length to make it an overall must have. It is like Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, and Pac-man all mixed into one game.

Bubble Bobble is a 2 dimensional action platformer featuring 99 levels of fun filled mayhem. The game follows a couple of dragons, or at least some sort of large lizard, Bubble and Bobble, on their quest to rescue their girlfriends from unknown depths.

You control one of the cutesy mythological beasts, while a buddy can play as the other in 2 player mode, on your descent through increasingly challenging levels, which are single screen sized rooms of varying design. The dragons spit bubbles instead of flames, which works by encapsulating the myriad enemies they encounter.

Once an enemy is wrapped up in a bubble, they begin their ascent toward the ceiling, where they lazily float until popped, yielding delicious power ups and bonus items, like fruits and vegetables, jewelry and other valuables. The more bubble encased enemies you can kill in a single jump, the more plentiful the power ups and bonus items.

This game is all about efficiency, like if you take too much time, an invincible white enemy appears and chases you around. When all the enemies in a level have been dispatched, the screen moves down revealing the next level, and so on until the end of the game.

The level design really keeps things interesting. Each level has its own look and theme, and the platforms, barriers, and walls are arranged in new and exciting patterns throughout the game. The art is cute, which fits the game just fine. The audio is similarly chipper, with its singular melody repeating for the entirety of the game, which, I suppose, could potentially get a little grating, though, it is all in good ‘ol 8 bit fun.

Where the game truly shines is its addictive game play. The constant challenge to destroy enemies with optimal efficiency, to collect more power ups and bonus items while chasing bigger and bigger scores, creates an endless competition with yourself.

There is a pluzzler like feel to this action game, an instinctual need to solve each level in the least amount of moves possible, which adds a bit of weight to the play.
All in all, Bubble Bobble is a top tier video game that has proven itself through an absurd number of ports, and this Wii’s emulation is no different.

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I could be stating this a bit early, but I am beginning to believe that the PC RPG is dead. I don’t mean the MMORPG, I mean the standard RPG, you know the solo player one where you make a character (generally in a fantasy world) and then go off on an epic adventure of some kind.

In fact I can’t think of the last PC RPG that was actually not a first person shooter in disguise. This is kind of sad really, I mean the PC is a great platform for this kind of game, with multiple input/output sources, better than average graphical abilities, and a host of other benefits over the standard gaming platform (though to be fair the platforms are quickly catching up). So my question is why they don’t come out?

I can tell you why. Greed, plain and simple, greed. Why create a single player game that you sell for fifty bucks, when you can create a multi player game that you not only sell for fifty bucks, but then can bend some shmuck over a barrel for another 15 bucks a month?

The thing that sucks is I actually agree with this. See the RPG as we know it started out as a bunch of friends gathering around a table and playing make believe together. In essence the true spirit of the RPG is in playing with multiple people.

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However as video games became popular, the video game RPG began its rise. Soon those tables that were once the only place to get an RPG fix became something that seemed almost unnecessary, not only that but video gaming has always been considered a lot cooler than playing Dungeons and Dragons so it is no wonder the console and PC began to replace the home experience.

Add to this the now popular MMORPG and there is almost no reason to actually game at a table anymore except in a LAN. I just wish not every PC RPG was a MMORPG.

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PC games have had an on-again, off-again relationship with numerous genres throughout its lifespan. Early games were of course limited in scope and relied mainly on text and ASCII art, making role-playing style games prevalent. Soon point-and-click graphic adventures took over, followed by shooters and strategy games, and most recently MMORPG’s.

New PC games are still largely dominated by shooters, MMORPG’s and strategy games, though games across other genres can still be found, including sports games, single player RPG’s and adventure games.

On the verge of seeing release are many highly anticipated new PC games that will continue to push the envelope and raise the bar for graphics and immersion. First up is Mass Effect, an improved version of the somewhat controversial, highly successful and critically acclaimed Xbox 360 RPG from Canada’s Bioware, no stranger to PC games.

The popular The Sims series will see new releases and expansions in the future, as will other established franchises such as Alone in the Dark, Samurai Warriors, Neverwinter Nights, Lost Planet, Devil May Cry, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Heroes of Might and Magic.

Not to be left out are the many promising stand-alone games coming shortly, such as Dracula: Origin, WorldShift, Hei$t, The Tomorrow War, A Vampyre Story, Dimensity, The Political Machine 2008 and The Abbey.

While there’s been a consistently raging debate for many years over which format is better or more powerful, PC or home console, there’s little doubt that new PC games being played on top of the line PC’s are sights to behold that consoles have trouble matching.

Perhaps not so much at the moment of a new console’s launch such as during the recent launches of the Xbox 360 and PS3, which were arguably more powerful game machines than PC’s for a short lived time, but as static consoles age while PC technology continues to progress, this gap becomes slightly more apparent.

To stay on top of all the great new PC games on the market, keep your browser pointed right here at http://www.gamerzreviewz.com/ for in-depth reviews and coverage of the hottest new PC games.

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