During Dungeons’ tutorial, your own assistant describes that as being a Dungeon Lord isn’t simply about defeating heroes as well as fending off attackers. It is more like running a this halloween farm, in which you heroes are the animals as well as your job would be to have them docile making them body fat before the unavoidable slaughter.

You do this particular through satisfying the actual adventurers’ various requirements: treasure, gear, knowledge, and combat. The exact combination and quantity of what they need depends on their class as well as degree. For example, mages love scrolls as well as your local library, whilst melee courses love gear. Because they satisfy these requirements, they accumulate “soul power,” the actual currency that will pay for the majority of dungeon updates. Once they possess accomplished their goals, they struggle to depart your dungeon.

This is when your dungeon lord provides them the actual axe. Once you defeat them, every thing they took is delivered to you plus they are carted off to prison, exactly where these people gradually wither away while offering you with their soul energy.

However, it is important to remember that Dungeons’ outdoorsmen tend to be stand-ins for players. They are vulnerable to getting bored or even discouraged if your dungeon doesn’t have good pacing as well as fulfilling challenges. To maintain all of them entertained, you have to hit all of them with the best mixture of creatures, materials benefits, and attention chocolate.

Which last element is what makes Dungeons feel like a game title regarding degree style. To maintain outdoorsmen relocating the best direction such as visitors to a haunted-house, you must lure all of them with gentle sources and decorations. Utilizing all these tools, you can apply a considerable amount of control more than where characters proceed, what they do, and just how rapidly they are doing it.

That’s essential because there are two things you need to avoid no matter what. The very first is overpopulation. If too many outdoorsmen tend to be coursing with the dungeon at the same time, they begin slaughtering creatures having to break a perspiration, and they start looting your treasures quicker than you are able to replenish them. It makes sense a mob associated with bored stiff, discouraged characters. That can bring all of us to the second factor you want to avoid: When characters get bored, they try to destroy the heart of your dungeon, which finishes the overall game.

It’s fantastic enjoyable, and because the characters obtain stronger and much more challenging as the game continues, your own dungeon remains the are employed in progress. I love watching a group of characters get caught up within exploring a particularly thrilling step, following a path of visual breadcrumbs We remaining on their behalf. It is also rewarding to build a particularly awesome space to captivate the adventurers.

Nevertheless, Dungeons includes a large way of measuring aggravation and tedium. The actual heroes’ numerous needs are similar enough that the “one dimension fits all” method of dungeon style will usually get the job done. Additionally, there is not a lot incentive to make heroes happy. There are plenty of of them playing around which picking away a large number of marginally happy heroes is all about because efficient as nabbing happy ones. Taken collectively, individuals 2 elements kick a lot of the technique out from under Dungeons.

I’m also not sure how I experience getting my personal dungeon lord playing around eliminating characters. It’s a routine touch inside a game that’s, for the most part, fresh as well as amusing. Additionally, it appears discordant when Dungeons spends a lot period pointing out the actual absurdity of the Diablo-style Role-play game, and then employs exactly the same conferences as well as rewards. Besides, presently there arrives a place where you are so hectic playing around with your dungeon the almighty you have virtually no time to enjoy the fun of dungeon construction.

Nevertheless, Dungeons offers sufficient laughter and selection to beat it’s shortcomings, and the marketing campaign throws enough contour golf balls in the player to create up for its strategic shallowness. It could have better pacing and a little more selection, but because it is, Dungeons is a very amusing, really pleasant surprise. My needs tend to be satisfied, and I do not feel like at risk of the actual exit just yet.

Benefits: Creatively sadistic dungeons are exciting to construct; the actual campaign retains points challenging.
CONS: Exactly the same techniques work again and again; you can end up in no-win situations; the early-game is dull.

The Good :

• Action-packed combat is fun from the start
• Both Metropolis and Gotham City look great
• Beautiful comic-book cutscenes punctuate story missions
• Changing gear doesn’t mean you have to change your looks.

The Bad :

• You reach the level cap and stop earning new powers incredibly quickly
• A variety of interface and voice chat issues
• Combat and missions get predictable
• Not enough content to keep you invested beyond the free month.

If you’ve never played a massively multiplayer online game before, DC Universe Online is a good place to start. This isn’t just because of the DC Comics license, though that might be what first draws you to this light and breezy take on the genre. After all, this is your chance to take to the skies above Metropolis like Superman or skulk in Gotham City’s shadows like Batman himself. But it’s the way DCUO mixes action-game sensibilities with traditional role-playing progression that makes it immediately enjoyable. If you’re a seasoned role-player you’ll find it refreshing as well–but only to a point. The speedy level progression and focus on all combat, all the time might prove tedious if you’re someone who enjoys exploring new worlds for the thrill of mystery and discovery. The largely instanced, repeatable endgame content is fun, but it’s not inviting enough to make it worth paying a monthly fee for it. But even if it doesn’t provide enough new content to sustain you beyond a couple of weeks, DC Universe Online is generally entertaining, and comic book fans will be happy that the license was handled with care.

It’s hard not to compare DC Universe Online to the comic-inspired games that came before it: City of Heroes, City of Villains, and Champions Online. If you’ve played one of them, you might be disappointed that at least initially, DC Universe Online doesn’t offer the cosmetic flexibility for which those other superhero-themed games are so well known. That isn’t to say that the character creation isn’t robust, though you might have your imagination somewhat stifled. Of course, DC Universe Online instantly stands out by having heroes and villains alike share the same world. Once you tailor your creation to your liking, you select a weapon (if you want to play with other weapons, don’t despair; your options expand later); choose a basic power set (gadgets, ice, fire, and so on); and choose one of three available mentors, such as Lex Luthor if you’re a villain, or Wonder Woman, if you’re a hero.

Fortunately, if you are disappointed by the initial creation options, you aren’t stuck with this vision of your hero or villain forever. You earn and buy new gear as you play, but equipping a new cape doesn’t mean you have to change your physical appearance. You can equip that cape for its improved stats without removing your demonic wings if they’re more consistent with your overall look. In your main headquarters (the Hall of Doom for villains; the Justice League of America Watchtower for heroes), you can purchase additional cosmetic items, and when you hit on a look you really like, you can lock the entire costume–or just individual aspects of it.

After character creation, you are treated to DC Universe Online’s fine tutorial, which does a great job of explaining why the world is burgeoning with superpowered individuals and demonstrating just how different the game’s combat is from other online role-playing games. This is an action game in online role-playing form. When you press a button on your controller or mouse, you swing your blade, shoot your bow, or fire your rifle. There is the slightest amount of latency between your actions and the ones onscreen, but it’s not enough to diminish the immediacy of battle. In most MMOGs, your key press doesn’t necessarily translate to immediate contact between your weapon and your foe. DCUO’s directness makes it fun for almost anyone from the get-go and a refreshing change of pace from typical entries in the genre. Superpowers are limited by your power bar (RPG vets might think of this as their mana pool.) Weapon skills, on the other hand, can be strung together with abandon, whether that means whipping your staff around like an overly enthusiastic drum major or leaping backward while you fire your dual pistols as if you’re auditioning for a John Woo film.

Fluid combat animations, sparkling visual effects, and the combat’s general responsiveness keep DCUO fun for quite a while, though it loses some of its luster over time. As you level up, you spend points on new combos, which not only make you more effective in combat, but also make battles more visually appealing. Nevertheless, the button presses/mouse clicks required to pull off grandiose moves aren’t complex, and some attacks are effective enough to repeat over and over without throwing in too many variants–particularly when those reliable combos result in stuns or other such effects. A main drawback to the combat is the targeting. You can’t choose your target–only hit the auto-target button and hope for the best. In the early going, this isn’t such a big deal. In endgame raid dungeons filled with foes, on the other hand, it’s too easy to select the wrong target and pull a group of enemies you’d rather have left alone–especially when the action gets really hectic and your view is obscured by bright flames and jolts of lightning.

DC Universe Online may not always escape the tedium that comes with its button-mashing combat, but it does a good job of masking monotony in a number of different ways. One such way is the tactical use of the powers you earn. These powers come from a few different trees, including one that focuses on so-called “iconic powers,” inspired by the famous abilities of various heroes and villains, such as Batman’s batarangs. You can only equip up to six of these powers at a time, though you can set up a couple of different loadouts and switch between them. For example, if you look to Circe for magical guidance, you might be able to switch between damage and healing roles, and have a separate set of powers for each loadout that complements those roles. This setup recalls similar limitations in Guild Wars, where individuals and groups could exploit their tactical potential with interesting, varied skill sets. And in the same way, playing with your loadouts in DCUO might reveal effective combinations that make you a more helpful teammate. It’s too bad that the result summaries that appear at the end of certain player-versus-player matches and group dungeons don’t recognize the hard work of those playing a controller role or supporting their team in other ways. (Only healing and damage stats are revealed.)

A big difference between DC Universe Online and Guild Wars, however, is that Guild Wars showers you with new spells and skills even after you reach the level cap, whereas DC Universe Online focuses almost exclusively on gear once you reach the endgame. You can spend some in-game cash and “respec” your character–that is, reset your powers and skills and allocate your points elsewhere. But you stop earning experience (and thus, fancy new abilities) once you reach level 30, and unfortunately, you encounter that ceiling very quickly. You could conceivably reach that point after only a few days of play, and even playing casually it might only take a week. The downsides to reaching the level cap so quickly are perhaps obvious to longtime MMOG veterans: a diminished sense of progression and the tedium that arises when exploring familiar dungeons and PVP arenas many times over. And, you can’t ease any tedium by exploring the various diversions you might expect to find in an online RPG, such as crafting or a player auction house.

The upside to the compressed leveling curve is that you never encounter content gaps in which you have to search for things to do or grind until you reach the point where new missions become available. Missions come to you fast and furious from the talking-head heroes and villains anxious to push you toward your next task. Or, you might receive assignments from various non-player characters strewn about the cities and elsewhere. Almost all of these characters are fully voiced, many of them rather well. Mark Hamill does an excellent job as The Joker, as he so often does in other games and on television. The mentors all sound quite good, as do a few other lesser heroes and villains. Other voice-overs sound as if they were performed by the local junior high drama club and lack the tongue-in-cheek comic timing of the better performances. The beautiful comic-book cutscenes that conclude instanced story missions and other missions, on the other hand, are consistently superb. Some are funny; others are legitimately moving. But all of them are gorgeously detailed and colored, and they’re animated as if multiple cels were layered on top of each other.

The missions themselves aren’t as vibrant as the scenes that close them. Kill a bunch of these things and interact with some of these other things is usually the extent of what you do, sometimes pausing to carry this thing over to that glowing spot. These copy-paste objectives can get old, though the mission voice-overs do provide an interesting context to some of these tasks. Villainous objectives are particularly enjoyable, as they often entail doing some horrible thing to an innocent bystander. These mission chains end with the aforementioned instances, where you get a chance to fight alongside a famed hero or villain–or beat up on one. These instances are usually more varied than your other tasks. For example, you might need to destroy computer terminals before Supergirl can utilize them. For even more mission variety, you can join other players in group instances called alerts. Alerts are longer–and more spacious–than story instances and might have you (for example) beating up on HIVE drones, taking down their mothership, and then facing a boss that may not be all that challenging but nevertheless takes a long time to defeat.

PVP arenas and group dungeons send you to a few iconic locales, such as the batcave and Bludhaven, though you will spend the majority of your time in DCUO’s two main cities: Gotham City and Metropolis. Missions send you from one hot spot to another in either of these two urban centers at a slick pace, and you won’t find any wondrous new vistas when exploring the nooks and crannies. Yet there is a good reason to keep a keen eye on your surroundings. Orbs dot the landscape, and investigating them unlocks little bits of backstory and other narrative scraps to collect. When you complete a themed collection, you earn new loot. There is another good reason to pay close attention during your travels, however: Both cities look lovely. Toxic yellow clouds hover over abandoned parking structures in a darkly lit Gotham. A derelict roller coaster is a stark contrast to the skyline in the distance. Green parks, sunny lighting, and tall skyscrapers make Metropolis a joy to travel in–and above. Some instances–warehouses, offices, and the like–aren’t particularly eye catching, and many character models are devoid of detail. Yet these aren’t huge faults in a game that excellently re-creates famous fictional cities and then encourages you to gild them with glowing rings of fire and colorful balls of energy.

Whether you prefer to stay solo or group up, DC Universe Online goes out of its way to be friendly. In some cases, simply standing near another player that performs a mission task–successfully defending a pedestrian, for example–gives you credit for the same task. Kill stealing is rare because you get credit for the kill as long as you landed a single hit on your target. Furthermore, your travel options (flight, acrobatics, and superspeed) make it easy to get across town in a relative hurry, particularly if you upgrade your travel method in the associated skill tree. Even when you’re on your own, missions stay relatively easy, though the frequency with which enemies respawn can lead to occasional frustration if you’re adventuring alone. Of course, you can always group with friends or join a league (DCUO’s guild equivalent) if you want company. And you need company if you want to take on bounties, which are familiar, powerful superheroes and villains that pop up in Gotham City and Metropolis. You can also take down opposing players by joining a player-versus-player server, temporarily activating your PVP flag to make you vulnerable to the opposition, or by joining others in the competitive arenas.

DC Universe Online’s player-versus-player arenas aren’t as potentially unbalanced as those in Champions Online, but stuns and knockbacks are prevalent, so skills that deliver and protect you from such punishment are more helpful than when you’re dishing out pain on non-player enemies like OMAC cyborgs. PVP is one of DCUO’s late-game mainstays, rewarding you with currency that can be spent on better gear, which makes you more powerful and, of course, then leads to even more gear. Grinding arenas to earn new items isn’t the only endgame option, however. Once you reach that upper limit of level 30, you gain access to some of DC Universe Online’s more entertaining options. These include larger raid dungeons, new four-person instances, and two-person dungeons called duos. Duos are particularly enjoyable, such as one in Gotham University in which you slash up (or beat up, or shoot up) swarms of mummies and scarabs before confronting a histrionic Isis. If you were hoping for a greater challenge from DC Universe Online, the endgame content is where you will find it. Don’t expect to bring down Chemo, for example, without a game plan and a good player in the tank role.

Which version of DC Universe Online you choose to play depends entirely on which quirks you’re more willing to endure, though some issues are common to both platforms. Voice chat is a nice feature when it functions, though that only happens to be some of the time. Sound effects sometimes go missing or get muddled when there is a lot going on at once. Neither platform allows you to drop missions or share them with your groupmates. PC players will be immediately struck by the console-focused interface and the overzealous profanity filter, which inexplicably can’t be turned off. However, loading times on the PC are zippy, and the game runs smoothly as you soar across the skies. The PlayStation 3 version is noticeably more sluggish. Menus take too long to pop up; the frame rate chugs along every so often, or the game might freeze for a second or two; and the telltale texture pop-in common to games using Unreal 3 technology is all too prevalent. Yet all things considered, the menus are simple enough to navigate using a controller, and the combo-focused combat feels natural on the platform.

These and a few other scattered glitches aside, DC Universe Online is relatively stable at this early stage, which makes it an even more attractive option for anyone who tends to shy away from these sorts of games. If you are one of those people, DCUO’s flashy, combo-driven combat and visual pizzazz will draw you in from the beginning and keep you entertained for a few weeks. It’s also hard to ignore the license’s appeal, which is best showcased in the excellent scenes that play at the end of instanced story missions. Yet DC Universe Online tips its hand early on; in all too short a time, it stops offering any real surprises, remaining approachable but never wading too far from the shallow end of the pool. If you’ve been around the block and are looking for a new virtual world, this isn’t the universe to call home. But if you long to face off with Mr. Freeze or stop The Flash dead in his tracks, this is a fun way to flex your superpowered muscles.

The Good :

• Accessible, satisfying tower defense gameplay
• Stylus controls work well
• Loads of things to do beyond just beating the campaign
• Competitive multiplayer option is a blast.

The Bad :

• Early campaign levels offer practically no challenge
• Touch-screen is overly crowded which is occasionally detrimental to gameplay.

You’re trapped inside the house; brain-craving zombies are closing in from all sides; and there are no firearms or weaponized power tools in sight. What do you do? In Plants vs. Zombies, now available for the Nintendo DS well over a year after it debuted on the PC, you have only one option: to strategically surround your home with a selection of combat-ready plants. Both the plants at your disposal and the zombies you’re disposing of in this tower defense game come in a wonderful variety of shapes and sizes, and are introduced gradually as you play through the occasionally challenging campaign. The DS version of Plants vs. Zombies boasts the same campaign, minigames, and bonus features found in last year’s Xbox Live Arcade version, and while it lacks that game’s cooperative play, it does include the excellent competitive mode.

Most of your time in Plants vs. Zombies is spent either on your front lawn or out back, where there’s a slightly larger garden with a pond running down the middle of it. Both are divided into grids, and each square can accommodate any one plant of your choosing. Zombies shamble, sprint, and swim from right to left toward your house, while you establish defenses that can include any of almost 50 different plants (though no more than 10 different species in any one level). Sunflowers are used to collect the sun that serves as currency, wall-nuts obstruct zombies for as long as it takes for them to be chewed through, potato mines explode when zombies step on them, peashooters do exactly what you think they do, and so on. As your arsenal increases in size, you have to choose which types of plants you’re going to take into each level. You’ll inevitably have favorites, but these decisions are also based on a sneak peek that you get of the zombies that are going to attack. If you see that some of the zombies are going to be attacking by floating over your garden suspended from balloons, for example, you need to make sure that you have a plant that can either puncture or blow away those balloons. Though most levels have you doing much the same thing, the ever-changing zombie horde and the different plants that you use to combat them–as well as levels set at night and in fog–prevent the action from getting repetitive.

Also keeping the action fresh are levels that take the form of different minigames. For example, there are levels in which you use wall-nuts as bowling balls, and other levels in which the plants in your arsenal are dealt to you randomly like playing cards. All of the minigames that pop up during the campaign can also be played outside of it, via a menu that lists more than 20 different minigame types. You can do battle against invisible zombies, you can play a Bejeweled variant with the plants in your garden as zombies attack, and you can even raise your own undead in a zombiquarium. Unique to the DS version are four new minigames, including one in which you have to shout (or at least speak quite loudly) into the handheld’s microphone to keep your plants awake; a gameplay mechanic that thankfully only shows up once in the entire campaign. That misstep aside, Plants vs. Zombies is a game that just keeps on giving you more fun things to do long after you’ve beaten the campaign. Invite a second player and, regardless of whether or not they have their own copy, this great game gets even better.

It’s unfortunate that Plants vs. Zombies’ competitive multiplayer isn’t playable online, but it’s a lot of fun to check out with a friend. If you’re playing as the plants, the only real difference between competitive and solo play is that you have to concern yourself with attacking stationary zombies on the far right of the screen while defending the house. If you’re the zombie player, you have to defend those stationary zombies while deciding which of your undead minions to send on the offensive. You use tombstones in place of sunflowers, your resource is brains rather than sun, you have only three columns of the garden to play with, and your minions are mobile rather than rooted, but these obvious differences aside, playing as the zombies isn’t wholly unlike playing as the plants. There are 18 different zombie types to choose from, though you go into each match with an arsenal of only five. If you choose the quick-play versus option, both players have access to only basic minion types, but if you randomize the loadouts (not recommended, since this can result in overly one-sided matchups and even games in which it’s impossible for the plants to win) or opt for a custom game that lets you pick which types you want, you have the option to include some really formidable frontal-lobe munchers. Digger zombies mine their way under the garden and then attack plants from the rear, catapult zombies drive vehicles equipped with long-range weaponry, and trash-can zombies are slow moving but heavily armored, to name but a few.

The DS version of Plants vs. Zombies is played exclusively with the stylus, which works every bit as well as the mouse controls in the original PC game. The only downside is that while the top screen serves almost no purpose whatsoever, the touch-screen is incredibly cramped because it displays not only your garden but also all of the “buttons” used to play. The garden practically fills the entire screen on its own, and as large zombies move along the top row they often obscure the icons that you need to tap in order to select plants. You can still select them if you tap the right spot, but this lack of visibility can still cause confusion on occasion. The visuals can cause confusion elsewhere as well; the plants and zombies are much bigger in relation to the squares that they occupy than in other version of the game, and it’s not uncommon for plants that you’ve placed at the front/bottom of the garden to almost completely hide those toward the rear/top. This rarely causes significant problems during gameplay, but in levels where zombies drop in on bungee cords and steal your plants it’s occasionally tricky to identify which plants have been taken.

Despite its overly busy visuals, the DS version of Plants vs. Zombies is still easy to recommend because it boasts the same ingenious game design, uncomplicated controls, upbeat audio, decent difficulty curve, and frequent player rewards. Both the PC and Xbox 360 games (not to mention those on the iPhone and iPad) are cheaper to buy than this $20 DS version, but if you’ve never played Plants vs. Zombies before, this is still a great way to find out what you’ve been missing out on.

The Bad :

Films of the ’80s are notoriously responsible for spawning a deluge of supercheesy fashion fouls, hokey acting atrocities, and cringeworthy fads. To some extent, the Back to the Future movie trilogy is guilty on all charges, but if thoughts of flaming tire tracks left by a heavily pimped-out DeLorean evoke feelings of fuzzy nostalgia, then you’ll find lots to love in this resurrection of the franchise. As an all-new episodic adventure game series, Back to the Future: The Game shows a lot of promise with its debut installment, even if the puzzle complexity and overall difficulty is dialed down a bit lower than it is in developer Telltale’s other games.

Instead of rehashing the events that played out in the films, Back to the Future: The Game explores new territory and continues the time-hopping adventures of Marty McFly and Doc Emmet Brown. It’s About Time picks up a few months after the events of the third film, and all is not well in Hill Valley. Doc has gone missing for months, and the city is determined to sell off his estate to cover his past-due financial obligations. Marty is reluctant to let the sale go through, and even more reluctant to let any of Doc’s possessions go to his nemesis, Biff Tannen. But soon the DeLorean mysteriously shows up with a recorded message from Doc who is stranded somewhere in the past, and Marty has bigger problems to deal with. Marty has to figure out a way to save his old pal, which kicks off an oddball time-traveling rescue mission set in Hill Valley’s prohibition era. The entertaining story that follows is enhanced by believable character interactions, imbuing the adventure with a great sense of authenticity.

Marty and Doc are strong and likeable lead characters, and the impressive visual designs mixed with the expertly delivered voice work make them all the more entertaining. Doc is actually voiced by Christopher Lloyd, while the other main characters are voiced by sound-alikes. The killer verbal delivery sounds spot-on, and Marty sounds especially good. Even with a cartoonish sheen, the characters and locations really come to life in the first episode. The game is one of Telltale’s best-looking efforts yet. Hill Valley offers a highly detailed and interesting streetscape to explore. However, it’s a little disappointing that the town is not more interactive. When Marty enters most buildings or storefronts, your point-of-view remains stuck out on the sidewalk. During such moments, Marty typically engages in a quick snippet of dialogue behind closed doors before being booted back to the street. There are only a handful of key indoor locales in which to venture around. They’re well developed and offer some neat puzzles, but they’re few and far between.

You control Marty’s movement directly using the WASD keys to help him navigate from scene to scene around Hill Valley, while the mouse is used to interact with hot spots and select inventory items. There’s also an alternate mouse-only option that has you left-clicking and dragging in a given direction to draw Marty there. Both control schemes are functional, though transitioning from one area to the next often switches camera angles and makes readjusting your walking direction confusing.

A well-penned story, compelling characters, and a stellar presentation drive the game more than anything else. When it comes to the gameplay and puzzles, It’s About Time is surprisingly light on challenge and content. The flow and scope of the game is very standard adventure-gaming fare. You follow the plot cues and often find objects to interact with or items to pick up and carry around until they’re needed. Most puzzles you encounter are interesting and well thought-out. For example, trying to figure out a way to con the young version of Doc into finishing a peculiar invention to unknowingly save his older self has you running around on a cavalcade of amusing errands. The puzzles almost always skew on the easy side, so while they’re still enjoyable to solve, you shouldn’t come to It’s About Time looking for a challenge. If you do find yourself stuck, there’s a scalable hint system that you can call on to give you a nudge in the right direction.

Despite lacking some of the complexity and puzzle depth of Telltale’s other work, Back to the Future’s premiere episode still holds you pretty tightly in its grip for the few short hours it takes to plow through it. It’s a brief trek that packs plenty of plot and personality to balance out its other shortcomings. Considering the strength of the story and the fact that the plot thread runs throughout the whole series, you’re sure to be left feeling anxious to see what comes next. This series holds a lot of promise, and the taste in episode one definitely provides a strong foundation for Telltale to continue building on in upcoming episodes. The future looks bright indeed.

Have you ever read the story of King Richard the Lionheart and his historical crusade against Saladin’s Saracen? Me neither, although the RTS from Paradox and Neocore almost had me tempted to open a history book. Paradox used much of Total War’s formula and tweaked it just enough to be accessible, but still contain a ton of strategy elements to make successful strategies feel completely satisfying.

With two separate campaigns, you can play as Richard the Lionheart conquering Jerusalem or Saladin trying to protect it from the crusades. Anyone familiar with King Arthur the Role-playing Wargame will feel right at home. Total War veterans will also feel a sense of familiarity as they can command armies on a grand scale, but the game has been more streamlined and simplified if you will, to let the player get on the battlefield without much downtime.

Instead of single units, you control groups that can join together to form massive armies. Although RTS games generally follow the “He who has most units wins” formula, it doesn’t quite work that way in Lionheart. All preparations, such choosing units and supplies, are done before battle, unlike most strategy games that have upgrades and gear that must be bought mid-battle. No matter how large, an opponent who has lost half of his army to your careful tactics and strategies has little hope of ever recovering.

Another major part of battle is morale, as units with low morale will stop obeying your mouse clicks, and start running away from the enemy. That usually starts a chain of events making your other units follow suit. Hero units can raise morale as long as they are near an army, and different potions will ensure that your men don’t cower in fear.

Each unit has a significant amount of detail, right down to the shine and design of each armor piece. It’s nice to see that the developers didn’t slouch on unit design in a game that usually doesn’t require the player to zoom in so much. The environments are equally impressive in scale. My only problem was that the game crashed on me mid-mission twice.

Siding with different factions throughout the campaign will unlock special units and bonuses. For instance: allying with the French King will focus on heavy cavalry and siding with the Papal Court will make recruiting units much easier. The faction system provides incentive for multiple playthroughs to see how each faction alignment affects the overall gameplay.

Playing as the Saracen however does not provide different factions, as they are on a quest to free their lands from the crusaders. In its place is a tech tree, with three branches that let you upgrade hero units, upgrade armies or add other general bonuses.

The two multiplayer modes included won’t beckon you forward, but they do provide fun diversions. Attacker vs. Defender mode has one player trying to invade an area while the other repels the assault. Attackers get more gold to spend on troops, while defenders get more military equipment, including access to special weapons. Domination mode gives each player the same amount of resources, pitting them in a race to capture vital points on a given map.

Lionhearts campaign is an enjoyable one, with incentives for multiple playthroughs to try different factions tech tree upgrades, not unlike an RPG. There are dozens of strategy games that allow you to amass grand armies and command medieval battles, but few that offer the element of real choice. Lionheart: King’s Crusade is all the fun of battling heathens and crushing homelands, but without those pesky plagues.

Lost Horizon stars a charming smuggler turned adventurer named Fenton Paddock. Developer Deep Silver sure liked Indiana Jones and the persona of Han Solo because a little bit of both can be found in Fenton. Even the title screen is a movie theater, having Lost Horizon as the main feature.

Once a British war hero, Fenton gets called back to duty unofficially when his close friend Richard goes missing in Tibet. Though this simple rescue mission quickly turns into a quite larger adventure, ultimately to find the city of Shambala, before the Nazis get to it first. Throw in a sassy girl sidekick into the mix, and you got yourself all the right ingredients for a grand adventure.

The story gets interesting very early on, which makes going through the game that much more enjoyable. Unlike the comical antics of Monkey Island or Jolly Rover, Lost Horizon takes itself quite seriously, despite Fenton’s humorous attitude. It’s Fenton’s persona that is easy to identify with. He’s an easygoing guy with a genuine drive to help people, who even at the worst odds, keeps a positive attitude.

The heart of this game are the puzzles. Maybe it’s because I haven’t played many adventure games in my day, but most of these were very challenging. Thankfully you don’t have to go on a scavenger hunt across the screen, trying to figure out what is clickable. A simple press of the Space Bar will show you exactly what you can interact with.

That, however, does not make the process any easier. You still have to figure out which items work with what to progress, and this is often no easy task. An early example of this is Fenton trying to leave for Tibet. He needs a map of Tibet, which a specific person has. Another person at a bar can tell you where he is, but he needs a photograph to remember who you’re talking about. This picture is in your safe, for which the code to unlock it is in your wallet, that you lost in the water and later a boy fished out. Needless to say, it doesn’t end there and continues on for quite a bit.

Don’t get me wrong, the long puzzle segments are appreciated as they provide a good challenge, but if you’re stuck, you’re out of luck. There is an in-game hint system—if you can even call it that—which only vaguely tells you what you should be doing. It does not tell you at all how to do it, so you’re stuck until you figure it out, or look up a guide. I like difficult puzzles that challenge my way of thinking, but when I’m stuck and just want to move on, I would appreciate a decent hint system that actually tells me how to proceed.

While going on this grand Indiana Jones styled adventure, it helps that the presentation is top notch. Only the characters are 3D models, while all the backdrops are beautifully painted with slight animation effects (such as water ripples in the Oasis or blankets swaying in the wind in the bazaars of Morocco) that really breathe life into them. The voice acting is also well done and gives each character personality.

Lost Horizon reminds gamers that the adventure genre is still very much alive, can still be entertaining, have a gripping storyline, doesn’t coddle gamers by having challenging puzzles that will have you saying “How did I not see that!” after finally figuring each one out, and that not all great adventurers need a fedora.

Under the terms of this new strategic partnership, Shanda Games is in charge of maintaining and operating the MMO in the region. Shanda said in its announcement that Final Fantasy XIV servers for mainland China are to be separate from servers for other regions such as Japan, North America and Europe. Square Enix is handling those servers directly.

The launch date for China is “to be determined.” Final Fantasy XIV for Windows PC launches in Japan, Europe, and North America September 30. The PS3 version of the game launches March 2011. Final Fantasy XIV is the first Square Enix MMO deployed in China.

To that end, the company posted the first entry in a series of blogs on how to use XNA Game Studio with Windows Phone Developer Tools to make Windows 7 phone games. The posts cover samples, articles, and labs designed to get existing XNA devs up to speed or introduce total noobs to the joys of indie development on Xbox Live.

Lest you think you can’t get anywhere with Xbox Live, let us point you toward one-man developer Ska Studios (a.k.a. James Silva). He created indie-hit I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1, which is now so popular that it’s getting a Hot Topic T-shirt line and a theme song release on Rock Band Network. This is after 308,000 sales on Xbox Live.

In the interest of educating would-be indie devs on Windows 7 phone, Microsoft has guidelines and a free set of Developer Tools available here. The Windows 7 phone is expected in the U.S. this November. The last of the Developer Tools hits the web September 16.

PCs are a very interactive means of enjoying the latest in entertainment. Personal Computers allow users to access games and play them at their free will. One can download games and use them for entertainment of all sorts. Once games are downloaded from internet it is possible for users to transfer them to other devices such as gaming consoles. So, PC can be used as a nice platform for storing of games. PC Games are very entertaining and the user does not even realise while playing the games when time has passed by.

The PC Games are very effective and are available in all possible forms. Full version games are a great source of entertainment. Action games such as racing, puzzle, pirates and air assault are all-time favourites. The crusader tank or mad truckers are also equally fascinating games. They help users overcome all sort of boredom in life.

The PC generally have large memory space and the hard disc too is effective for storing of large files. So, it becomes very easy to store gaming files on the PC. Another interesting thing about the personal computer is that it has large screen and that is all the more appealing. The player can enjoy games and experience an effect that is similar to playing games in video halls.

With PCs, there is no question of battery charge getting elapsed. The Personal Computer is supported by a backup. So, even if there is a power failure the user can still continue playing games on the PC. Playing games on computers has always been fascinating and children as well as adults love to spend their precious time playing fabulous games on their PC.

Spacewar! by PDP-1 is considered as the first ever computer game which got released in 1961. It consisted of two player-controlled spaceships maneuvering around a central star, fighting each other. The first generation of PC games came with text adventures or interactive fiction. By the middle of eighties, the popularity of personal computers increased and this led to the use of graphics as an important factor. The video game market suffered a major crash in the beginning of eighties because of the flooding of the poor-quality games into the market. Big names including Atari recorded losses in the crash. This made different companies to rethink over the marketing strategies. It was the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System that brought back resurgence to the console market in the United Kingdom.

The contemporary gaming world is entirely different from its infant days. Technological advancements including high quality graphics have made latest PC games a different experience. The success of 3D console titles like Super Mario 64 sparked interest in hardware accelerated 3D graphics on PC. The post 1995 PC game market witnessed some best PC games like Tomb Raider which revolutionised the video gaming world. With the support of graphics accelerators and improved CPU technology the kids PC Games got expanded to brighten phases of entertainment.