Hard Days For The Knight

consciousness your character goes through a process of self discovery and learning about his or her past. All this while combating sabotaged maintainence droids and other vile creatures.

With characters from KOTOR popping up for a visit it gives you a sense of being part of a long saga. The user interface and the look of the game too are reminiscent of the predecessor, however the story grips you and keeps you engaged in the gameplay and doesn’t give you an overwhelming sense of deja vu. Also present is the original game’s deep system of ethics. The missions that you choose to perform, the people that you work with, even the things that you say in casual conversation all can have effects on your force alignment. This intricate conversation system is one of KOTOR 2’s biggest plus points. Essentially, if you do bad things or are rude in your conversations then you will lean towards the dark side of the Force. However, in practice, things get a little more complicated than this. Sometimes, doing the right thing the wrong way, or doing something that looks like the right thing, but really isn’t, can earn you some dark points. In this game, there is also such thing as a gray area and the player must try to navigate this in order to keep from earning points that would jeopardise your choice of alignment. Your actions also influence the personalities of your fellow party members, these are your allies or teammates and characters you can play. The more you lean towards the dark side the more corrupt your team mates get.

Tech Specs
Technically the game is not too demanding and would work fine on an averagely configured computer. That has a flipside of course and that’s the lack of zing in the graphics department. Tested on a PC that just made the cut, the game ran perfectly well and did so again when tested on a high end machine with 2.4 GHz processor, 1GB RAM and a 256 MB graphics card. On occassions you could see the character type out commands on non-existent keyboards.

One of the biggest pluses though was the sound and the music. The sound effects are crisp and very clear, and the voice acting is done very well. With a unique dialogue set and a great background score the game has one of the best sound among the RPGs.

The Final Word
Though the game takes the galactic saga forward it doesn’t quite bring in any new twists to the Revan-Malak storyline. This game as a stand alone RPG is as good as any around today, but the expectations were sky high after KOTOR. If RPG is your cup of tea the KOTOR 2 is a must play more so if you think you are a Jedi reborn. We would give it an 8/10.

The demo installed and ran without any problems on our considerably underpowered machine: Pentium 4 1.7 GHz, 512 MB SD RAM, and Intel’s onboard Extreme 82845G graphics chipset. This is definitely a plus.

The graphics are stunning-compared to EA’s ‘Cricket 2005’. The sound effects are great, and the players are instantly recognisable. We played a Manchester United vs AC Milan friendly-the demo version only offers a small selection of matches.

The gameplay is very good, and the precision with which you can control players and the passes they make is very impressive. Memorising the different buttons for each command can be a little tiresome at times. Personally we feel the game is better suited for consoles!

The full version is said to have amazing reality, especially in the Manager Mode, where you control a club for 15 years! Everything from budgets, the coaching staff to playing the field by buying and selling players is possible. With over 20 leagues and about 10,000 players to choose from, FIFA 2006 is as real as it gets for soccer enthusiastic gamers.

The standard customisation features, such as Create A Player, My FIFA and Team Management lets you control everything from a player’s body type to team strategy. All in all it promises to be a great full version.

Advanced intricacies include something called team chemistry, which defines how well your team gets along and gels! This is good and brings even more reality to the gameplay.

The AI is pretty decent, and if you don’t figure out the control fast, be prepared to have opposition players (computer) run circles around you.
Those used to playing earlier FIFA versions will love 2006, and will have no problems controlling players. The graphics are much improved and the moves are much more realistic than ever before. The commentary, to be honest, as with all EA’s games, needs work, and gets boring after the first 2 games!

Overall this is a great game for soccer fans, and well, is perhaps the only decent game they can go out and buy anyway. So whether we give it a 10 or a 2, soccer fans will still buy it! We give it an 8/10 rating, by the way! We hope you enjoy the demo as much as we did!

So we have yet another First Person Shooter Game based on the Vietnam war. However, this demo of VietCong looks promising. The good part is you can be a US Marine trying hard to capture a crucial post or you could be a Vietnamese guerilla warrior.

The game doesn’t have the usual gung-ho Seargeants or ovezealous Captains as characters. Instead you play the role of a normal Private. If you choose to be a Vietnamese fighter the game perspective changes by 1800.

The graphics for the demo are above average and the battle  scenes enthralling, as they capture the tension of the war. The hide and seek nature of the fight adds a fresh look to the FPS. Watch out while sneaking through the tunnels!!

No other war game manages to give such a sense of phobia of being confined in a small space. The bullet shells ejecting from the firing guns looks pretty realistic even on a modestly configured PC. The sound adds to the gameplay however it does tend to be a little slow at times but overall doesn’t prove to overshadow the graphics. With Half-Life2 and Doom 3 raising the benchmark in the graphics department a better job should have been done. 

If you are used to the typical shooting games you’d do well in the demo. In the multiplayer online section you can drive the vehicle, which you have snagged after killing your oppenents, as well. Though not a novelty it adds a bit of a fun element to an other wise relatively tense game.

After a first look at the demo we would give it a 7/10.