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The ultimate punishment for miscreants …

When it comes to personal qualities, stubbornness can be a double-edged sword. While it’s obviously a useful attribute to possess during some of life’s trickier challenges, there are times when common sense dictates that you should just turn it off and admit defeat. Unfortunately, while I do have stubbornness in spades, I’m sorely lacking in common sense, as this belated review of Far Cry: Vengeance (FC:V) will testify to.
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After our less than stellar opinion of UbiSoft’s Red Steel, we give the first person shooter genre another chance with our detailed look at the latest release in the Call of Duty franchise.

Those of you familiar with the standard game-play formula of any Call of Duty first-person shooter will not be surprised by Treyarch’s latest creation. Once again, you will take on the roles of key characters in the Allied army as they participate in over a dozen cinematic squad level battles across the French countryside in 1944. The game focuses on the pivotal operations around the Falaise Gap as Polish, British, Canadian and U.S. forces attempt to cut-off the retreat of a large German Army defending the Normandy coast. As the campaign progresses, your controlled character will switch between a handful of individuals in each army as they advance relentlessly upon the key town of Chambois.
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We take a look at one of the debut titles for the Wii console. Read on for the full review.

At its heart, Red Steel is your average first-person shooter set in the current day world of the Japanese Yakuza. You play the role of Scott-san, the presumably All-American boyfriend of a Japanese Yakuza boss’s daughter who gets kidnapped within the first five minutes of the game. In a fit of predictability, your mission is to track down your girl, whilst filling the streets and seedy buildings of Los Angeles and Tokyo with piles of corpses (sans blood) and shell casings. In addition, you also get to wield a Katana in some set-piece battles which gives you the opportunity to indulge in some casual sword play. There are roughly a dozen hours of intense combat within the story arc and there are some multi-screen death-match options as well, if you have a spare set of controllers.
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We conclude our coverage of F.E.A.R., Quake 4, Serious Sam 2 and Call of Duty 2 first person shooters.

Game play – Serious Sam 2
In the beginning, the FPS microcosm of the gaming universe consisted of the adventures of a solitary hero. Bearing weapons of immense power, he was charged with the smiting of chaotic daemons, the termination of malevolent and fantastical beasts or the vanquishment of jackboot clad, fascists. And when gamers saw what had been developed, they saw that it was good. As years passed, the genre evolved. Scripting introduced predictable events that designers would lavish upon an unsuspecting player. Plots became more intricate and convoluted, causing brows to furrow in concentration. Interactive items and puzzles were introduced to slow down the frenetic action. And Croteam looked down upon what had transpired and said, “Bugger this for a joke! Let’s get back to our gaming roots.”
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We take a good hard look at four of the latest first-person shooters for 2005 as F.E.A.R., Quake 4, Serious Sam 2 and Call of Duty 2 face each other off!

Gaming aficionados have recently been blessed with a handful of highly anticipated first-person shooters. Within six weeks of each other, F.E.A.R., Quake 4, Serious Sam 2 and Call of Duty 2 have managed to appear o­n store shelves ready for the Christmas buying frenzy. Each title has a distinguished pedigree to work from; Monolith Productions acts as the progenitor of F.E.A.R., with a long history of excellent first person shooter (FPS) titles under its belt (the No o­ne Lives Forever series, TRON 2.0 etc.) while each of the other three contenders possess equally impressive creators and are sequels to highly rated games in their own right.
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We take a look at Classic Doom 3, the Doom 3 mod that recreates Episode 1 of the original game from the early 90’s that propelled iD Software into mainstream PC gaming.

In today’s FPS marketplace, the ability to create your own content or “mod” a game is just as important to developers as the game itself. Fans spend an exorbitant amount of time, adding new content, levels and assets to their favourite title and some of the work available is of an incredibly high standard, matching commercial software in quality. Stepping into the ring today is Classic Doom 3, a faithfully accurate recreation of the original shareware Episode from iD Software’s 1993 release of Doom. Unsurprisingly, the development team chose iD Software’s 2004 Doom 3 shooter (which is itself a reimagining of the original game) as the platform upon which to render their vision.
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