NEED FOR SPEED: SHIFT

GAME DETAILS :-

Developer : Slightly Mad Studios

Publisher : Electronic Arts

Engine : Not Revealed

Genre : GT / Street Racing

Release Date : September 15 , 2009

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS :-

Operating System : Windows XP / Windows Vista

CPU : Intel Core 2 Duo / AMD Phenom II Processor

Memory (RAM) : 2 GB

Graphics Hardware : DirectX 9.0c Compliant Card with 256 MB Ram

[NVIDIA : GeForce 7800 Series
ATI : Radeon X 1800 Series]

Hard Disk Space : 6 GB

GAME FEATURES :-

Need for Speed: Shift is a racing game that tries to do a lot of things, and the good news is that it does most of them well. The racing, the car and track selections, the vehicle customization and damage modeling, the career mode, the online play, the opponent AI--all of these things are good, but none of them are great. Like a simulation game, Shift encourages you to brake early for corners, punishes you for straying too far from the racing line, and, at least by default, presents you with a steering setup that's extremely sensitive. But, like an arcade racer, Shift rewards you for sliding around corners, for "trading paint" with opponents, and even for forcing those same opponents into a spin or off the track. It's an awkward middle ground that you might never feel comfortable with. The Career mode amounts to little more than 150-plus of these events, set up as themed competitions between cars of certain classes or from certain countries and then arranged into a tier system that matches the one used for cars. You start out as a tier 1 driver with a tier 1 car, and as you progress you move into tiers 2 through 4 before unlocking the anticlimactic 10-race World Tour, which marks the pinnacle of your career. Getting involved in a big crash or straying too far from the track toward the end of an event can be disastrous, and feeling the need to restart a 10-lap endurance race because an overzealous opponent forced you into a tire wall is no fun. However, if the race still has plenty of laps left to run, you shouldn't be too quick to give up. Online options include a Driver Duel tournament mode, in which a series of head-to-head races pit you and an opponent against each other in randomly selected identical cars, and ranked and unranked races for up to eight players. The variables that you can play around with when setting up an online race are the same as those that you get in the single-player Quick Race mode. Once you're with a group of players in a lobby, you have plenty of time to see what the next race is going to be and to choose a car either from your own Career mode garage or from a selection of stock vehicles.

In addition to races, this jack-of-all-trades game incorporates drift events into both its Career and online modes. Only 11 of the cars that appear in the game can be used for drifting, and finding one that you feel comfortable with is even more difficult than finding one for racing. These cars are automatically tuned to slide so easily that pressing down on the accelerator even a fraction more than you absolutely need to can send your car straight into a donut. With practice it's certainly possible to perform some satisfying drifts around corners, and because the events aren't timed, you can win them by employing some cheap tactics and just swinging from side to side on the straights. Another of Shift's features that doesn't realize its full potential is car customization. There are around 55 cars to collect in Shift, though you never have enough spots in your garage for even half of that number. These cars can be painted, you can apply a handful of different racing liveries to them, and some of the performance upgrades you can purchase for them include cool-looking bodykits, but the custom livery designer is awful. Vinyls at your disposal include the usual assortment of primitive shapes, logos, flames, and tribal designs, as well as plenty of creative groups that you unlock as your career progresses--including badges that show off some of your accomplishments. On some tracks, those same corners can be made even trickier by opponents who make a mess of them in front of you, because they kick up great-looking clouds of sand and dust in the process that partially obscure your vision. Shopping for cars should be fun in a game like Shift, but it's actually a bit of a chore because the models take a second or two to appear as you scroll through the list, and for some reason you don't get to move the camera around them yourself. You also don't get control of the camera when you come to put new bodykits on your cars, so you have to wait for them to do a full rotation before you can check out both the new front and rear wings. Shift's audio fares better on the track than it does off it. Some of the cars' engine noises are a real treat, and they change as you upgrade your cars with new exhausts, turbo systems, and the like. The sequences of sound effects and radio chatter that play while you're navigating menus are bizarre, though, and anytime you think they're going to transition into something resembling a tune, you're wrong. Shift is neither an arcade racer nor a simulation; it's stuck somewhere between the two, and while there's plenty of good racing to be had here, it's unlikely to completely satisfy fans of either.

GAME REVIEW :-

8/10

Need For Speed: Shift Trailer :-

TROPICO

GAME DETAILS :-

Developer : PopTop Software

Publisher : Gathering Of Developers

Engine : S3D

Genre : Real-Time Strategy

Release Date : April 23 , 2001

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS :-

Operating System : Windows 98 / Windows 2000

CPU : AMD Athlon Classic K7 / Intel Pentium II Processor

Memory (RAM) : 32 MB

Graphics Hardware : DirectX 7.0 Compliant Card with 4 MB Ram

[NVIDIA : GeForce 2 MX Series
ATI : Radeon 7500 Series]

Hard Disk Space : 820 MB

GAME FEATURES :-

Tropico is just another city-building simulation that's reminiscent of many others before it. But the political wrapper that PopTop has built around the core of the game is sophisticated enough to appeal to all types of strategy game players. The game also has enough heart, soul, humor, and humanity to make it unique. Most games of Tropico start with a few people scratching out a living on a small Caribbean island. You step in as their new presidente, with the background of your choice to give you a set of game-twisting traits. For instance, if you come from a moneyed background, you'll have an advantage in industry. Armed with your distinctive set of traits and your new bank account, you drop buildings onto the island: housing, farms, cattle ranches, churches, medical clinics, pubs, police stations, bauxite mines, fishing wharves, and cigar factories. Later on, there are power plants, casinos, cathedrals, and TV stations. And there are always the little landscaping touches, such as flower beds, trees, fountains, and the occasional statue to remind everyone who's in charge. You might be the presidente, but there are a hundred or more folks who drive the action on the island. For instance, to make money from rum, you just drop a sugar farm and a rum distillery. Your construction crews show up and erect the actual structures. Then immigrants or citizens are hired as farmers and factory workers. The farmers plant sugar cane, which grows over the course of the year and is eventually harvested. Teamsters pick up the sugar and carry it to the distillery, where the factory workers convert it into rum. Then the teamsters carry it to the docks, where the dockworkers load it onto freighters. Only then do you finally get paid. When amenities aren't available, they're unhappy and less likely to support you. Different people have different priorities. Some people are concerned with crime, others with liberty. Some just want a nice house or a high-paying job. If they get upset enough, they'll vote against you in elections, publicly protest, flee to join the rebels, or maybe even take part in an uprising against your palace. In Tropico, money ultimately takes a backseat to people.

Tropico also has a broad range of appeal, thanks in part to its various difficulty levels, which range from a sandbox mode to sadistic realism. You can select different victory conditions for different styles of games. Tropico can also be played at any number of speeds, and you can interact completely with the game while it's paused. Casual players can crank down the political and economic factors and just doodle around with impunity, dropping buildings and watching the island grow. Although the game's random-scenario generator has a lot of flexibility, the eight scenarios that ship with Tropico are particularly disappointing for their lack of interesting scripting. Also, since there's no included scenario or map editor, Tropico's longevity relies exclusively on its random scenarios. However, the random scenarios would have been more satisfying had they given a better sense of accomplishment after playing. As it is, you get a verbal briefing of your performance and a high score on a list. There's no record of what sort of scenario it was, who your dictator was, or how your people felt about you when it was all over. All the information available in Tropico about your economy, your citizens, and your society as a whole is a welcome change from games that insist on running things under the hood. The thorough documentation leaves very few questions unanswered. The political wrapper that PopTop has built around the core of the game is sophisticated enough to appeal to all types of strategy game players.

GAME REVIEW :-

8.5/10

Tropico Trailer :-

TRAINZ

GAME DETAILS :-

Developer : Auran

Publisher : Strategy First

Engine : Not Revealed

Genre : Simulation

Release Date : February 10 , 2002

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS :-

Operating System : Windows 2000 / Windows XP

CPU : AMD Athlon T-Bird B-models / Intel Pentium III Processor

Memory (RAM) : 128 MB

Graphics Hardware : DirectX 9.0 Compliant Card with 16 MB Ram

[NVIDIA : GeForce 2 MX Series
ATI : Radeon 8500 Series]

Hard Disk Space : 500 MB

GAME FEATURES :-

Trainz is a modular system that ships with three components: My Collection, Surveyor, and Driver. These modules let you examine your collected engines and rolling stock (railroad cars), create railroad layouts, and drive trains across them. Trainz developer Auran (the Australian developer responsible for the great 1997 real-time strategy game Dark Reign) plans to release expansion modules that will let you simulate complex switching and dispatching operations or handle the financial end of running your railroad. Auran also plans to release various locomotive and rolling stock packs to add to your collection. You can already download a number of free engines and structures created by either Auran or fans using 3D modeling programs, one of which is included with Trainz. You can sort them by country of origin or railroad company, as well as view real-world background information on each engine or car. For rolling stock, you'll get boxcars, refrigerator cars, hoppers, a variety of passenger cars, and more. Engines include the F7 and SD40-2 diesels of North America, the Class 340 of Spain's Renfe line, and Sweden's Rc4 electric, among others. Sadly, you don't get any steam engines, which will surely disappoint the countless rail fans who love the "golden age of steam." First, you'll assemble your train by simply dragging and dropping engines and cars from a list to a little window at the bottom of the screen in the order you like. Then you choose the weather (cloudy, rainy, snowy, and so on) and how often it can change. You can also set the time of day and choose a time compression factor, if any. You can also decide whether or not trains can derail. Then you choose starting positions for your trains from a number of preset locations on the game's three sample layouts set in North America, Britain, and Australia. All the layouts are interesting, but it would have been better if the game had included more.

Navigating the layouts is fairly trouble-free thanks to a track map and easily changed track switches. Coupling and uncoupling cars is a simple point-and-click affair, but since the game doesn't offer any scenarios, you'll have to rely wholly on your imagination in planning your operations. You can watch the action from multiple camera views, including one inside the engine cab. The camera is very easy to zoom and pan, though it's unfortunate that you can't position it anywhere you want--you have to rely on preset layout-specific positions or follow the train directly. It would have been nice to get a truly free bird's-eye view. Trainz's graphics beautifully bring the layouts to life. The engines are nicely detailed, with working headlights and exhaust billowing in the breeze, though not all of the cab interiors properly match the exteriors. The trackside scenery is also impressive, with varied buildings, working track signals, and moving automobiles. Laying track is equally simple, though you're currently limited to standard gauge track. Between that and the lack of steam engines, there's presently no way to create, say, a classic Colorado or Maine narrow-gauge line out of the box. You're also currently limited to textures and objects geared toward layouts set in Australia, Britain, and North America. That's really a fairly minor quibble, considering Trainz's many great strengths. By letting you so easily create so much, Trainz is one of those programs you can return to again and again. Since it's currently more a construction program than a simulator or game, imagination is required, but that's a good thing. If you're already an ardent model railroader or rail fan, you owe it to yourself to give Trainz a try.

GAME REVIEW :-

8.5/10

Trainz Trailer :-

MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR 2004: A CENTURY OF FLIGHT

GAME DETAILS :-

Developer : Microsoft Game Studios

Publisher : Microsoft Game Studios

Engine : Not Revealed

Genre : Flight Simulation

Release Date : July 29 , 2003

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS :-

Operating System : Windows 2000 / Windows XP

CPU : AMD Athlon T-Bird B-models / Intel Pentium III Processor

Memory (RAM) : 128 MB

Graphics Hardware : DirectX 9.0 Compliant Card with 16 MB Ram

[NVIDIA : GeForce 3 Ti Series
ATI : Radeon 8500 Series]

Hard Disk Space : 1.8 GB

GAME FEATURES :-

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight commemorates double anniversary by offering more planes, better graphics, and more options than ever before right out of the box, but the game will likely reach its full potential only if it receives great support from its player community. It's easier to access game options, and each option is actually explained by the game. There's also an excellent interactive flight school hosted by aviation veteran Rod Machado that serves as a surprisingly deep training tool. There is enough written material included about the planes, the history of flight, and flying tips to fill an encyclopedia. As such, Flight Simulator 2004 represents one of the rare instances in which online documentation is wholly superior to a printed manual. The documentation includes articles that are supplemented with Web-page-style hyperlinks, which lead to more detailed information about a particular topic. Some even whisk you directly into the cockpit so you can actually re-create the particular flight discussed in the article. If you plan to fly any of the vintage aircraft, be sure to invest in some good controller peripherals, specifically rudder pedals or a joystick with a twist handle. It's impossible to take off and land in taildraggers like the Piper J3 Cub and Curtiss Jenny without a lot of dancing on the rudders. And once they're airborne, ponderous antiques like the Vickers Vimy biplane can barely turn unless you stomp on the pedals. Rudder controls also are a must for flying the two helicopters modeled in the game, which include the familiar Bell JetRanger and the new Robison R22 Beta. Aside from the historical aircraft, Flight Simulator 2004's big news this time around is its weather effects. You can set up in-flight weather any way you like or go for the ultimate in realism by having the game automatically download real-world weather reports from the Jeppesen database every 15 minutes. Even if you don't choose to use the real-world weather option, the game can dynamically change its weather conditions so that a flight that begins in clear blue skies might end up in pure instrument conditions as you try to feel your way down to the runway in a violent thunderstorm. The addition of true 3D clouds that drift through the sky and merge into one another as weather conditions change adds a realistic touch to the game that static screenshots simply can't convey.

The game's interactive virtual cockpits are a great new feature, since the ability to control most switches, knobs, and dials with the mouse when the 3D cockpit is enabled adds some much-needed functionality to that view. Unfortunately, the textures used in the virtual cockpits are low resolution and very ugly--hopefully this is something that inventive computer artists among the Flight Simulator fan community will address. Almost a thousand new airports have been added to the game's world database, providing more than 24,000 places to land ranging from quaint grass strips to bustling international airports complete with signage. The game also features an improved air traffic control (ATC) that works well for the most part. At controlled airports, ground control provides taxi clearances and instructions, and it is possible to follow the taxiway signs to your destination or turn on a handy overlay that visually displays your assigned route. Another new feature in the game is the use of modeled Garmin GPS products--these can be helpful when interacting with ATC and planning approaches. They aren't easy for beginners to grasp, because they use the same buttons and knobs as their real-world counterparts, but a training video is included, and once you get the hang of it, the GPS becomes an indispensable tool for finding your way around Flight Simulator's vast world. The core flight model and terrain graphics engine remain more or less untouched, and on the whole, the new game seems very similar to its predecessor. The new game's multiplayer is still rudimentary and allows only for basic formation flights and air races, though you can't expect much more from a noncombat sim. You could say that Flight Simulator 2004 is still a straightforward simulation, but if you have even a passing interest in flying, you'll definitely get your money's worth from it.

GAME REVIEW :-

8.5/10

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century Of Flight Trailer :-

GTR FIA RACING

GAME DETAILS :-

Developer : SimBin

Publisher : 10tacle, Atari And THQ

Engine : Customized ISI Engine

Genre : GT / Street Racing

Release Date : May 3 , 2005

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS :-

Operating System : Windows 2000 / Windows XP

CPU : Intel Pentium 4 Processor / AMD Athlon XP 1800+

Memory (RAM) : 384 MB

Graphics Hardware : DirectX 9.0c Compliant Card with 64 MB Ram

[NVIDIA : GeForce FX 5500 Series
ATI : Radeon X600 Series]

Hard Disk Space : 1 GB

GAME FEATURES :-

GTR keys on the FIA GT Championship, a European-based series featuring high-end, high-level sports cars adapted for racing conditions. One of the many nifty perks of this approach is the inherent variety. The game sports nearly 20 unique drivable racecars, including a wide assortment of Porsches, Vipers, Ferraris, and Lotuses. Some are considerably faster than others, and that's why both the real-life series and its fully licensed digital peer offer different classes. Players that select "arcade" from the main menu are presented with a stripped-down and simplified version of the game that abolishes nuisances, such as garage modifications, qualification runs, race lengths, and other event parameter decisions. Arcade mode is further subcategorized into four distinct classes, each of which delivers a slightly more authentic experience than the one before it. The racing is a bit faster and far more forgiving than you'll find in the game's semipro and simulation modes, though even at its most simplistic, arcade still manages to showcase 10tacle's glorious, road-clawing physics model. 10tacle does, however, enforce an engine limiter throughout arcade mode that keeps you from running away from the field. The only way to rid yourself of that limiter is to leave the arcade appetizer behind and begin sampling GTR's meat and potatoes. Rough pavement, wet-weather handling, braking, accelerating--it's all infused with so much intricate physics that most drivers will have a tough time even coming to grips. Indeed, the GTR physics model is so good that many may feel they need to experience the actual tactile sensations of g-forces just to be successful. This can't happen of course, so the best approach is a smooth, unerring driving style, along with total and complete concentration, particularly during the first few opening laps when your tires are cold. The game's multiplayer mode permits up to 56 drivers to compete via LAN or Internet, theoretically anyway. In practice, we found stuttering and other frame rate problems when a dozen or more cars were on the track simultaneously, particularly when grouped together.

If you create an accident or merely come to a stop anywhere on an oval (or a road course, for that matter), you can clearly see a gaggle of confused competitors slow to a crawl or stop right along with you, waiting patiently for you to extricate yourself, even though there's plenty of room to squeeze by. On a more positive note, oval racing in the Semi-Pro or Simulation levels with driver aids off can deliver some addictive bumper-to-bumper action. GTR audio is far from pretty. And in a game that professes to be "the most realistic racing simulation ever," it's a very good thing. Road noise is particularly extraordinary, barking and rumbling and effectively translating the struggle of rubber as it fights to hold your car to the track. Tire scrub is deadly authentic--varying from moment to moment and always keeping you informed. Engine notes and gearshifts are both exclusive to the type of car you're currently driving, and they're utterly convincing. Downshifts in particular have a wonderfully grating, mechanical sound, especially in some of the more esoteric vehicles. In a graphical sense, the game delivers a mix of goodies and is generally not a quantum leap forward from other recent top-level sims. That's not necessarily a condemnation, because other recent top-level sims have been pretty darn credible, but one of GTR's most conspicuous troubles is its hunger for computing horsepower. Watching day turn into night and night turn into day is an equally striking event, particularly as 10tacle has effectively captured all the associated nuances. One moment you're heading west facing the gorgeous orangey hues of a setting sun, and the next you're driving into a considerably darker eastern sky. The subtle variations along the way are simply beautiful. Drivers who appreciate racing's inherent violence will enjoy the game's approach to breakable cars. GTR cars shed parts, and those parts then bounce about the track and react with other automobiles. This is a rarity in racing games, where detached hunks of car generally lose their physical properties or harmlessly disappear. Granted, those parts break off along predetermined seams, but that's a petty complaint. Otherwise, crashes produce enough view-obscuring thick, black smoke and bright orange flames to be truly frightening. Despite its blemishes, GTR is the breath of fresh air this genre so badly needed.

GAME REVIEW :-

8.5/10

GTR FIA Racing Trailer :-