Recent game demo releases

Finding yourself a bit bored with the current games that you’re playing? Want to try out something a bit different but don’t really want to shell out the cash for a game that might not live up to your expectations?

Well there have been a bunch of demos released recently for some upcoming (and already released) games that we’ve made available in our ever-growing Downloads section for you to have a go at without having to throw down a handful of notes or getting out the credit card.

Action/Shooters:

Role Playing:

Racing:

Sports:

Strategy:

Bioshock Review

Bioshock is arguably one of the best games of 2007, with its stunning graphics, enthralling gameplay and a fresh new perspective on the FPS genre most will agree that Bioshock is well worth playing. However, like most games that can make a claim to this it has a few points of contention as to just how great it is.

To give a rough idea of the story of Bioshock, the game is set in the 1960’s and you are the sole survivor of a plane crash, out in the middle of the ocean. Swimming to the closest refuge, you find yourself at the doorstep of Rapture, a grand underwater city who’s success is based on the genetic material ADAM, and is run by an idealist patriarch figure named Andrew Ryan. However upon entering the city, you find that it has been trashed, void of sane inhabitants and filled with mystery, dark secrets and a lot of people who are either already dead, or are looking to add you to the pile. Although at points the story or some characters may seem shallow, the greater majority of the time you’ll feel immersed in the surreal, if not downright creepy, world of Rapture.

For the greater part, gameplay will run rather smooth, with many of the challenges presented to you throughout the game not being exactly mind straining, and most delays in figuring out what to do next will only be determined by just how much of a retard you plan on being. This is not to say the game is lacking in entertaining goals to be accomplished, only that it would take a monkey with a sever brain disorder not to figure out how things should be done. Like most games however, there usually comes a copious amount of questing before you’re able to progress to the next stage in the story and you’ll soon find yourself muttering under your breathe every time a door locks up, or the roof collapses, or you find yourself carrying out the eccentric whims of a madman for his own dark pleasure (this will happen more than once).
For an FPS, Bioshock has been well thought out, lending new ideas to the genre making it much more enjoyable than your average shoot-em-up. The ability to upgrade weapons and abilities is a bonus that makes the game much more dynamic, allowing you to kill enemies much faster and more efficiently. Plasmids bring in more than just different kinds of weapons, allowing you to accomplish certain goals, or even alter the way you play the game, where as tonics allow you to boost your characters strength, agility, EVE etc.
But this implies that you have some sort of choice in how you upgrade your character, and you do so far in as you can choose where to place the upgrades. This doesn’t mean, however, that you will necessarily survive for long as you really should just be throwing everything into strength to be able to get past the splicers that seem to live on steroids and up the dosage with each passing level.
And really there’s nothing wrong with that because Bioshock essentially is an FPS, and nothing more.

The experience of the game is probably somewhat disappointing for most due to the unfulfilled promises that developers have been screaming into our ears since the games announcement, of creating a new hybrid genre of FPS/RPG, with a whole moral choice dilemma to boot. Looking at the game closer, not much is delivered as it’s hardly what would be called and RPG. Yes, you can increase, build on, and change your abilities, but so what? A lot of FPS games are starting to take on this trait now, and Bioshock is about as subtle as a knife in the back in how it goes about it. The gameplay is rather pointed in what area of expertise it wants, no – requires you to specialise in (beating the ever loving crap out of anything that moves) and gives you enough room to power every ability up to a point where your very touch will cause a splicer to crap itself and die, making the whole idea of a strength building system kind of pointless, and taking the challenge out of an otherwise enjoyable game.
As for the whole moral choice aspect, deciding on whether to release the little sisters or to harvest them, doesn’t have a great impact on story. When you release the little sisters you receive less ADAM than you would if you harvest them, meaning that you’re greatly rewarded for being an evil bastard and destroying little girls for your own dark ends, where as releasing them and denying yourself the ability to strengthen up is roughly the equivalent of chewing on the pistol with the safety off.
It was a great idea, but they didn’t think it through very well, but with the announcement of at least two more sequels it’s something they can definitely improve on. Some developers should just learn when to stop blowing their own horn and shut the hell up.

Over all, Bioshock is something I would (and have) happily sit down and play for hours on end, and it’s flaws aren’t really flaws, so much as they are moronic stuff-ups by the developers for promising something they couldn’t deliver on.

8/10 – Play this game if you get the chance!

Review written by Wingus.

Tax man coming to your game soon…

The concept of Real Money Trading (RMT), the exchange of real world currency for virtual online goods (often known as Gold Farming) is definitely not a new practice, and has likely been around for as-long as MMO's were known as Massively Multi-player Online games.

A short time ago it was noticed by the main-stream media that players of online games were able to sell off their exploits for real-cash, it is only recently however that the government has caught on.

The American Congress recently did some research on the "Virtual Economy" and are possibly going to tax virtual-profits.

With a game like Second-Life which has sanctioned RMT between in-game currency (Linden dollars) and real-life currency (US dollars), taxing virtual profits is logical. As turning a virtual profit is the same as investing in the stock exchange and making a few dollars.

The overall picture becomes blurry when you look at games that don't have official RMT, such as World of Warcraft, Everquest2, EvE Online etc. While these games don't officially support the practice of RMT (most even state its against the games ToS), the market still exists for people willing to part with real-life dollars for virtual ones.

It is this "black-market" trade in which the Tax man is most interested, as it is already a huge industry (do a search on "wow gold") and is growing larger every-day. The problem that arises is that once you can quantify exactly how much 100g is worth in USD and its associated tax, its not much harder to work out a tax on "virtual-sword of uber" based upon its in-game gold worth. 

With this in mind you can plainly see why companies (such as Blizzard) are very hesitant to provide a RMT source for players, as the possibility exists where-by your monthly subscription fee could double simply because you won some Epic item that is worth thousands of gold.

So what do you all think, is Real Money Trade something that we will see more official support for?, or is it something that you think needs to be destroyed completely? Leave your comments and let us know.