NFS Rivals review

NFS Rivals review
     Rivals doesn't really have a storyline, but then this is a driving game so we can't say we care too much. The game gives you two play options: take the wheel as a racer to tear up the free play world that you exist in, or play as cops trying to keep the peace.

There are no boring cutscenes that try to help you justify anything, and certainly no backstory about how you are only racing to save your family being held by some Ray Liotta looking character. It's all about the fun.

    That doesn't mean to say that there isn't a campaign to complete, but you'll not only be hard pushed to care, but also to remember you've got to complete certain tasks to progress in the first place.

Set in the make-believe world of Red View County, Rivals' vast map is completely open and waiting to be explored. There is a range of different areas but with a huge focus on the countryside rather than city racing.

Dynamic lighting, rain, nightfall, sunsets, lens flare, dust, snow, and falling leaves all help breathe life into the gameplay, giving you a greater sense of realism than ever before.

Damage your car and at times the handling reacts accordingly, including driving on burst tyres. Crashes, you'll have plenty of them, are epic, although it's disappointing from a realism point of view that your car doesn't end up a complete wreck when you get back on track.

Interacting with the surrounding environment can be a bit hit or miss though.

Drive along a dirt track and the PS4 DualShock 4 controller slightly rumbles so you know you aren't on the smooth tarmac, but smash through a farmer's barn and you'll feel nothing.

As you can probably tell there are a lot of chances to get distracted in Need For Speed: Rivals. Like in Burnout, the premise is to drive to different locations around the world to complete specific missions, races, takedowns or escapes depending on which faction - racer or cop - that you've opted to play.

       What Rivals brings that’s new to the part is a system it calls AllDrive. Hot Pursuit introduced the idea of Autolog, where the game actively pits you against your Xbox Live or PSN friends, comparing achievements, finishing times and progress so that you were playing with each other, even when you weren’t doing so at the same time. AllDrive takes a different tack, signing up to six racers into its open world, and breaking down all the barriers between solo and online play.
The joy of Rivals’ structure is that it encourages you to just drive around and explore, finding hidden tracks and daredevil, chasm-spanning jumps, or just enjoying the feel of high-speeds on the open road. Meanwhile, the advantage of point-to-point, open-road racing over the courses you’d find in a more serious racing sim is that you can’t learn the tracks. Instead, you learn how to respond to sudden changes of direction, pitch or camber, and how to push each car to the edge of its performance. The result is an arcade racer where everything flows, whether you’re simply racing your way from checkpoint to checkpoint.

   It’s furiously addictive, too. Each career is divided into chapters, and each chapter has you moving through the cop or racer ranks by completing several to do lists of objectives, that might be as simple as just getting silver in a time trial event, or as tricky as hitting five racers with pursuit tech upgrades. Completing lists and ranking up unlocks new cars, liveries, events and upgrades, and it’s not long before you’re trapped in a cycle of competing to get a new car and new upgrades, then seeing what you can do with your new car, then working again to go up the next level.

 

      Is it faultless? Nope, and a lot depends on how much you’re frustrated by the occasional technical problems. At one point I lost connection to our shared game, dropping us mid-event back into a single player game world, and forcing  to find and start the event again. It can also be annoying to be a whisker away from winning when some clown comes out of nowhere and – whether by accident or design – smacks you clean off the road. A handful of objectives are peculiarly difficult to manage, and sometimes you wish the cops would just leave you alone while you finish your time trial or race.

     Yet, overall Need for Speed: Rivals is everything you might want from an arcade racer. It’s ridiculously fast, ridiculously thrilling and a wonder to play.  

   Video Games Genres Part One

   Technology industry has greatly advanced in recent decades, the most important achievements are in the IT field .Today, processors and graphics cards have advanced greatly,from which  video games benefit.
Video games are very popular especially among young people but many adults over 30 years have gained this passion.Many fans start to play at an early age, small games that are not difficult, then move forward.
This "industry" of video games has evolved a lot and still is.
   Today,you have available many types of video games to choose from.
   Each category has its own video game fans, depending on individual personality and preferences.
   A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction between humans and an interface that generates feedback on a video device.You can play on a PC, console(Xbox,PS).
   Video games are categorized by their gender.There is no universally accepted criteria.
   The following is a classification of the most common video game genres with a brief description and examples. Many of the games can be found in several categories due to the subjective nature of many genres. For example Legend of Zelda game series has elements of action, adventure and RPG. This becomes increasingly more pronounced because many of the games that are produced nowadays are already designed to be hybrid, combining the features of one or more styles (eg action RPG like Diablo, Vagrant Story, and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance).
   The main categories of video games:
Action
Action games are basically games where a player uses his reflexes, precision to overcome traps, obstacles to carry out his "mission".
• Fighting

These games emphasize one-on-one battle between two characters, one of which can be controlled by the computer.
Many of these games include a single player mode, but the real draw to this genre is the ability to demonstrate one's skill games against a friend. Examples of franchises in this genre include Street Fighter, Soul Calibur, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Virtual Fighter, Dead or Alive, King of Fighters, and Bloody Roar.


Shooter

• FPS (first person shooter)
A FPS is a game in which the player follows the action from the perspective of the first person . Another element that characterizes the FPS genre is that the games that are part of this category shows the player a diverse arsenal of firearms. Example: Crysis, Far Cry 2,Call of Duty.


• TPS (Third Person Shooter)

The player follows the action from a perspective in which the character of the game is seen from a distance. This view gives the player a wider view of the surroundings, as opposed to the view limited first-person shooter.
• Shoot'em up
It is a shooter game genre in which the player controls a character or a vehicle (often a spaceship) and large numbers of enemies while stopped projectiles intrare.Examples: Space Invaders, Space War.
• Tactical Shooter
These games are like variations of the first and third person shooter that focuses on realism and highlight the tactical, such as planning and teamwork. Winning is likely to be dependent on capturing a target, rather than to gain when killing a lot of them.Example:: Raven Shield
• Rail Shooter
It is a sub-genre of first-person shooter, the  navigating through the game environment is not under the player's control explicitly. This type of game limits  interaction between player and tactical objectives of each stage, and progresses from scene to scene by moving the camera specific player positions, along map..Example: House of the Dead

Xbox One vs PlayStation 4

Xbox One vs PlayStation 4

Microsoft vs Sony

      So,in an objective manner,I will try to mention all the pros and cons.Why should you choose one in favor of the other?

    Sony has a distinct advantage of initially releasing one week ahead of Xbox One and two weeks ahead of Black Friday, the major holiday sales day in the U.S. At least both systems will be out in North America before Black Friday begins.

   Well,first,everyone looks at the price Xbox One cost aprox. $499 and PS4 $399.So,why is a noticeable difference between them?Let's see their features:

  Both have box-like designs;PS4 is smaller.

Their hardware specifications are tremendous:

Xbox One:

• CPU:Custom 1.75 GHz AMD 8 core APU
• GPU Clock Speed:853 MHz 
• RAM:8GB DDR3 + 32MB eSRAM 
• OS:Xbox OS
• Flash Memory:8GB 
• Storage:500 GB Hard Drive, External Hard Drive 
• Optical Drive:Blu-Ray/DVD
• Display:4K, 1080p, 1080i, and 720p resolutions
• Web Connection:Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 
• A/V Hookups:HDMI input and output (4K support)
• Motion Control:Xbox One controller, Xbox One Kinect, SmartGlass
• Camera:1080p Kinect camera
• Graphics:Semi-custom AMD Radeon GPU

PS4

• CPU:Semi-custom 8-core AMD x86-64 CPU 
• GPU Clock Speed:
• RAM:8GB GDDR5
• Flash Memory:
• Storage:500GB
• OS:Orbis OS
• Graphics:Semi-custom AMD Radeon GPU
• Optical Drive:Blu-ray Disc, DVD
• Web Connection:802.11 b/g/n Wireless, Bluetooth 2.1, USB 3.0, Ethernet 10/100/1000
• Display:Video output formats
• A/V Hookups:HDMI out port, digital out optical port.
• Motion Control:DualShock 4, PlayStation Move, PlayStation Vita
• Camera: 1280x800 pixel sensor capable of capturing video at 60 frames-per-second

As you can see bouth of them have similar technical specifications. So lets talk about the differences between them.The Xbox One aims to take over your living room (which it can’t help but do, since it’s absolutely massive) and become the main box under your TV.As a result it offers great features such as being able to  immediately bring up your Skype account and call up your mate on your TV. By saying “Xbox watch TV” you can switch from gaming to television without having to search for the  remote control and change input channel.
Meanwhile, the sleeker PlayStation is less concerned with doing everything and wants to get gaming right.In this respect, its second- screen feature is a winner.If you have the portable PSVITA you can play all your PS4 games away from your console (in the next room, abroad, in the garden) provided you have an internet connection.Plus the user interface of the PS4 is simpler and cleaner because it’s not trying to do quite so much, the controller is more comfortable in the hands with the addition of atouchpad, which lends it to downloadable games such as Angry Birds. To top it all off, it’s cheaper.
Sony hasn’t really gone just for the gamers either, and like the One, includes music streaming, movie rental and streaming services such as Netflix on its box, because it knows that the future of gaming is probably not on a console and to survive in the long term it too will need to offer more to the living room than just playtime.

   

So after reading this, you have to decide which is better for you. If you want something that is trying to do a lot of things go for the xbox.If you want something oriented on gaming, cheaper and with a simpler interface go for the PS4.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag Review

 It’s the best Assassin’s Creed yet! Which is 90% because Black Flag,  a third-person action adventure about pirates in the Caribbean, isn’t really an Assassin’s Creed game in the traditional sense, and 10% because the lead character is from Swansea.

The main character of the game is Edward Kenway a British privateer-turned-pirate and eventual member of the Assassin Order; father of Haytham Kenway, and grandfather of Ratonhnhaké: the two playable characters of Assassins Creed 3.

Sailing across the massive expanse of The Caribbean, exploring gorgeous and unique islands, and getting yourself into all sorts of  trouble provide some of the most rewarding and memorable gameplay I’ve experienced all year.

No matter which console you decide to play Black Flag on, you can rest easy knowing that it’s one of the best looking games of 2013.

The way the camera zooms out when your ship reaches its maximum speed, the speakers bombard you with the sounds of the wind, and the sunset turns blood-orange, is simply amazing. The PS4 and Xbox One versions are nearly identical, and both deliver the same gorgeous adventure. When you ignore the main mission prompt and simply set out in search of your own fun, Black Flag is at its best. It treats you like an adult, and allows you to explore its gorgeous and activity-filled world. You want to buy a small fishing boat and hunt for all manner of deadly sea creatures, using your spoils to upgrade your character?

Maybe you just want to sail to a remote island, climb to the top of a mountain, and gaze in awe at the world around you. Black Flag is all about embracing freedom and carving your own path through the world. Death animations are relatively short and sweet, with a surprising lack of blood for a game centered around stabbing people. It’s mighty annoying that I had to spend 10 minutes listening to rarely memorable dialogue before I could make the kill. Simply sailing wherever the wind takes me and seeing what sort of trouble I can get into is a complete joy.

So in this game you can do almost anything, from sailing and hunting sharks and wild animals to killing and finding treasures.

The game requirements are:

Minimum System Requirements:

Recommended System Requirements:

CPU: Intel Core2Quad Q8400 @ 2.6 GHz or AMD Athlon II X4 620 @ 2.6 GHz			CPU: Intel Core i5 2400S @ 2.5 GHz or better or AMD Phenom II x4 940 @ 3.0 GHz
RAM: 2 GB RAM			RAM: 4 GB RAM
VGA: Nvidia Geforce GTX 260 or AMD Radeon HD 4870 (512MB VRAM with shader Model 4.0 or higher)			VGA: Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 or AMD Radeon HD 5850 (1024MB VRAM with Shader Model 5.0) or better
DX: DirectX 10			DX: DirectX 11
OS: Windows Vista SP or Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8 (both 32/64bit versions)			OS: Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8 (both 32/64bit versions)

http://gamesystemrequirements.com/

HDD: 30 GB available space		HDD: 30 GB available space
Sound: DirectX Compatible Sound Card with latest drivers		Sound: DirectX Compatible Sound Card with latest drivers

Here you can see a short video review:

Xbox one sells over 1 million consoles in 24 hours!Do you prefer XBox One or Playstation 4?The war has started on Black Friday!
South Park released an episode with this topic.

Call of Duty:Ghosts review

Call of Duty Ghosts is the tenth video game in Call of Duty
series.Developed by Infinity Ward,Neversoft and Raven Software was released on November 5 for Xbox360,PlayStation 3,Wii U and will appear on November 22 for Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Call of Duty: Ghosts is a third-person shooter that features a completely new setting, characters, and system, though it is in the same universe.

The game's main protagonists are the Ghosts, a force of U.S. Special Operations personnel trained to conduct clandestine missions behind enemy lines.

The single player mode is played through the protagonist Logan Walker.Players assume the role of Logan for most of the game, with several other playable characters, including an astronaut specialist named Baker, and Logan's father, Elias Walker.

In Call of Duty: Ghosts you don't just create a class, you create a soldier. Choose the head, body type, head-gear and equipment, and you can even create a female soldier for the first time. With over 20,000 possible combinations, you can create the soldier you've always wanted. And each soldier you create will also have his or her own load outs.
The action takes place in Mexico,San Diego,Caribbean Sea,Antarctica,Brazil,Low Earth's orbit,Atlantic Ocean

You can also play in multiplayer mode.Here,you have 7 new game types:Search and rescue,Cranked,Search and destroy,Kill Confirmed,Free for all,Blitz,Domination,Team Deathmatch.

In Call of Duty: Ghosts, for the first time, the player will be able to alter their experience on each map, with Dynamic Maps coming into play for the first time. Examples given include knocking down a stack of logs, destroying a map with the new KEM Strike killstreak reward, collapsing a gas Station and blowing up doors. There are limits to these factors though, and they are only available on preset spots.
You can choose from a variety of maps:chasm,flooded,prison break,siege,tremor a.s.

COD Ghosts introduces a new game type named squads.Squads introduces a whole new level of competition to Call of Duty. The best parts of the Multiplayer experience are combined  with a vastly improved AI and the new mechanic of creating your own squad-mates. All the hard work you've put into customizing, playing, and prestiging your squad can now be put to use on a brand new playing field.You can play squad vs squad,wargame or safeguard.

There are over 20 NEW Kill Streaks in Call of Duty: Ghosts — such as Juggernaut Maniac, Helo-Scout, Vulture and the ODIN Strike. You can even bring in Riley, from the single-player campaign, as your guard dog to warn you when enemies are near, and to attack enemies if they get too close.
Extinction mode is a new game mode featured in the Call of Duty: Ghosts; its existence first proven through achievements.

Achievements

• No Man left: Escape with all four players
• Sprinter: Reach the exfil chopper with 1 minute and 30 seconds on the clock.
• Made it Out Alive: Escape 1st time
• Completionist: Complete all Extinction challenges and escape.
• Cabin Fever: Make it to the cabin.
• City Dweller: Make it to the city.
• Any Means Necessary: Get 50 kills with the electric fence and fire traps in a single game.
• Trash Picker: Scavenge 40 items in a single game.
• Throttled Escape: Escape using a relic.

The new Perks system has more perks than ever before. Every perk has a value from 1 to 5, and you have 8 points to allocate. So for example, choose 4 perks each valued at 2 points a piece, or even 8 perks, each valued at 1. You could also choose to get rid of your secondary weapon and get up to 11 perks.

About the movement mechanics,you can:lean around obstacles without adding button combinations,move fluidly over objects, while not losing momentum.The knee slide allows you to naturally transition from sprinting to crouch to prone.

Weapon selection is intensely personal. The way the guns are balanced within a given category, there is rarely one vastly superior weapon for an SMG or an Assault Rifle. Instead, it comes down to what you find most comfortable. Choosing the right type of weapon for the map and mode is generally more important than choosing one specific gun within a particular weapon class.

The weapons you use determine your role on the battlefield, from fast-moving SMG assault to long-range Sniper support. Mastery of all weapon types is essential to the flexible combatant. Whether the mission is urban search and destroy or open-field battle, having the skill and confidence to choose the correct weapon and utilize it effectively is a vital talent.And don't forget,bullets deal 20 % more damage!

Your life tank has 25% more health!

About the vehicles mechanics,they can either take the form of civilian cars or trucks . Cars are littered across the maps (usually on the streets) and can easily be destroyed with explosives, light machine guns, etc. When cars sustain enough damage, they will catch on fire. Cars on fire will sustain constant damage until it explodes. This puts the player at great risk whenever they decide to hide behind a vehicle and can cause great frustration, especially if they were killed in either the multiplayer or single player levels due to this.

Fueling this all new Call of Duty universe, the franchise's ambitious new next-gen engine delivers stunning levels of immersion and performance all while maintaining the speed and fluidity of 60 frames-per-second across all platforms.
A completely revamped audio design featuring an ADSR-based reverb system, reactive emitters and locational battle chatter gives you a more immersive experience.
Stephen Lang voices Elias Walker, Brandon Routh voices David "Hesh" Walker and Kevin Gage voices Gabriel Rorke in the game. David Buckley scored the game's original soundtrack.Eminem's track "Survival" is featured as the game's credit song.
From an exuberant campaign full of spectacle and variety to the way Extinction's unpredictable aliens force you to use those targeting skills in entirely new ways, Ghosts strikes an excellent balance between the familiar and the novel. This is a game that's keenly aware of the series' strengths, but doesn't find itself beholden to them. No matter what standard you apply, Call of Duty: Ghosts is a terrific first-person shooter.
Here's a video with the gameplay:

Grand theft Auto V Review

       The most anticipated video game of 2013, GTA V was created by the company Rockstar North and definitely lives up to the name Grand Theft Auto.When you wouldn’t believe it can surpass the success of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, this game has exceeded players expectations, we can even say that is the best in the entire series.

It was released on September 17, 2013 for the Xbox and PlayStation 3.

Grand Theft Auto V is an action-adventure video game played from a third-person perspective in an open world environment. You have to opportunity to experience single-player mode, as well as  online multiplayer mode .Grand Theft Auto Online was conceived as a separate experience, which would be played in a continually evolving world.

     GTA 5 has a lot of new features in comparation with the other games of the series. It evolves nearly every mechanic that was in the previous Grand Theft Auto games

The single-player mode of Grand Theft Auto V is played through three player-controlled protagonists: Michael, Trevor, and Franklin, criminals whose stories interconnect as they complete missions.  GTA 5 does a remarkable job of providing each with their own motivations, their own missions, and their own personas you'll come to love as you swap between them. 

Swapping characters feature happens in a Google Earth styled manner and was displayed during a Game Informer demo, which it showed to have ran smoothly and without lag.

   

    The action takes place in Los Santos.

Michael is a retired professional bank robber, who after making a sweetheart deal with FBI, returned to the life of crime. Trevor is the loose cannon in this story, who is also a long time best friend of Michael's and a hot-head psychopath as well. Last but certainly not least, we have Franklin, a young and grim repo agent who has a large amount of experience behind the wheel, but no real experience to crime until he meets Michael while he was trying to get a hustle.

Weapon selection has now also been changed. Instead of the old way of selecting through all the weapons, there is now a weapon wheel,

Each time the player fires the gun, the radar will show a red circle as weapon's noise. If any threat is within the red circle, they will be alerted by the player, and if a cop is within the noise range, the player may gain a wanted level.

The player can use melee attacks, firearms, weapons, and explosives to fight enemies.

A perpetual objective for the player is to complete missions to progress through the story. These missions can be completed at the player's leisure.You can practice hobbies while you complete a mission like hunting,parachuting,yoga,different sports.

Your character  can run, jump, swim, or use vehicles to navigate the game's world.

The missions are frequently incredible, which makes it a bit easier to overlook the occasional contradictions in character behavior, if not the mixed political messages. The high points of the game are the heists, big jobs planned by Michael and the gang. These jobs usually give you a few different options for how you want to approach a situation, and your choice completely changes how the heist plays out.

   

If your dream is to drive an expensive car,this game fulfills your wishes:you can drive sports,vintage cars,SUVs,motorcycles,vans.You even can drive trains,planes.

You can invest your money in the stock market,and then take your gains and put it in Los Santos real estate market.

Exactly like in the last games,cops can bust you.If you do something illegal like bad driving or shooting,if the cops are in your range you will gain a wanted level.

     GTA 5, one of the best-looking games currently available on consoles. But this improved fidelity comes at a cost. The game's massive, sprawling, detailed San Andreas is obviously pushing the hardware to its limits, so don't be surprised to see framerate drops or objects popping into existence as you speed down a highway. Other changes have only positive impacts to the game--gunplay is extremely strong thanks to improvements to the aiming, and while the driving controls are looser than they are in some other open-world games, they make for some thrilling chases.

     For those stuck in traffic,tune in to the Los Santos radio station for a wide range of music styles to choose from.

    The game generated significant controversy because in some missions you have to torture people.Some might even  declare that the game is misogynistic and has no respect towards women.

    With a strong story, well-written dialogue, extraordinary expressed voices, impressive graphics, sound, and a gameplay extremely fun and varied, Grand Theft Auto V is an amazing game, exciting  and must not be missed.
Here's the official video with the gameplay:

I will be back soon with new posts detailing all the mechanics of this game!