The Impossible Game Review

The Impossible Game Logo

The Impossible Game is a Xbox Indie Game and a App for the iPhone that was released November 23, 2009 for Xbox, couldn't find out when iPhone version was released. The game was developed by FlukeDuke and is an Indie Game, meaning that it wasn't published by a company, just made by a single person. The iPhone version was remade into a small compact version by cocos2d which is my favorite app of all time. Gameplay is really simple and straightforward it just consists of an automatically fast moving square through a level and while you make your square jump over smashing objects the game becomes more and more exciting and interesting. As the name already tells you, the game is really impossible and when you fail, and believe me you will undoubtedly fail, you will be more excited to start over and over again. There is a practice mode, so starting this mode you can place flags down as you progress through the level so you could restart from your last dropped flag. Although, the thing that makes this game really impossible is that if you do not play in a practice mode but you must beat all the levels from start to finish only with one life. It takes a lot of practice and motivation to accomplish. Impossible Game is known as the “Insanely Addictive” – the music consists of techno beats and it increases your focus as well as the tension. The soundtrack is synced with the game to make it ever more suspenseful  Each time you start the game you will experience something new and harder. However, if you are a person who is capable of beating the Impossible Game levels, then you are definitely an exceptional one. l You will feel you have beaten something amazingly difficult that only a few could do globally (just kidding, but it really is hard to beat the game). The Impossible Game is available on the Xbox Market Place for only 80 Microsoft points and $.99 on the Apple App Store. Hope you enjoy it and I'll see you next week. This has been Jacob Arnold, signing off.

Lot harder than it looks, trust me

                                                      

Half-Life Review & Storyline

Half-Life box art

I think PC gaming really got going when Half-Life came out. A Valve game released for Microsoft Windows November 19, 1998 in America. Published and developed by Sierra Entertainment. As of 14 July 2006, the Half-Life franchise has sold over 20 million units. Half-Life was followed by the 2004 sequel Half-Life 2, which also received critical acclaim and praise. Half-Life has had a notable cultural impact with its community mods and sequels spawning a large fanbase and other praising communities. Half-Life is a first-person shooter that requires the player to perform combat tasks and puzzle solving to advance through the game. Unlike its peers at the time, Half-Life used scripted sequences, such as a Bullsquid ramming down a door, to advance major plot points. Compared to most first-person shooters of the time, which relied on cut-scenes to detail their plotlines, Half-Life's story is told entirely by means of scripted sequences, keeping the player in control of the first-person viewpoint. In line with this, the game has no cut-scenes, and the player rarely loses the ability to control Gordon, who never speaks and is never actually seen in the game; the player sees "through his eyes" for the entire length of the game. Half-Life has no "levels"; it instead divides the game by chapters, whose titles flash on the screen as the player moves through the game, I do miss cutscenes though. Progress through the world is continuous, except for breaks for loading and when the game has to save. The game regularly integrates puzzles, such as navigating a maze of conveyor belts, (which is a pain) or using nearby boxes to build a small staircase to the next area the player must travel to, also annoying. Some puzzles involve using the environment to kill an enemy, like turning on a steam valve to spray hot steam at their enemies. There are few "bosses" in the conventional sense, where the player defeats a superior opponent by direct confrontation. Instead, such organisms occasionally define chapters, and the player is generally expected to use the terrain, rather than firepower, to kill the "boss". Late in the game, the player receives a "long jump module" for the HEV suit, which allows the player to increase the horizontal distance and speed of jumps by crouching before jumping. The player must rely on this ability to navigate various platformer-stylejumping puzzles in Xen toward the end of the game. The game is entirely campaign with no multiplayer, which is fine cause this is a really long game. Most of the game's setting takes place in a remote desert area of New Mexico in the Black Mesa Research Facility, a fictional complex that bears many similarities to both the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Area 51, at some point between the years 2000 and 2009. The game's protagonist is the theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman, an MIT graduate. While I personally think is cool, that you get to be someone that hasn't had years of combat experience or handled a gun before, its a new experience Freeman becomes one of the survivors of an experiment at Black Mesa that goes horribly wrong, when an unexpected "resonance cascade"—a fictitious phenomenon —rips dimensional seams, devastating the facility. Aliens from another dimension known as Xen subsequently enter the facility through these dimensional seams (an event known as the "Black Mesa incident"). As Freeman tries to make his way out of the ruined facility, he soon discovers that he is caught between two sides: the hostile aliens and the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit, a U.S. Marine Corps special operations unit dispatched to cover up the incident by eliminating the organisms, as well as Dr. Freeman and the other surviving Black Mesa personnel. Throughout the game, a mysterious figure known (but not actually referred to in-game) as the "G-Man" regularly appears, and seems to be monitoring Freeman's progress. Ultimately, Freeman uses the cooperation of surviving scientists and security officers to work his way towards the mysterious "Lambda Complex" of Black Mesa (signified with the Greek "λ" character), where a team of survivors teleport him to the alien world Xen to kill the Nihilanth, the semi-physical entity keeping Xen's side of the dimensional rift open, really complicated to explain.  The rest is history, which you can find out for yourself, you can get the game on Steam for $9.99 or get the Playstation 2 version, which I haven't played personally. Hope you've enjoyed and I will see you Thursday. This has been Jacob Arnold, signing off. 

Official 1998 Gamespot Trailer 

Halo: Combat Evolved Review & Storyline

Halo 4 came out today and I'm looking forward to it.  Even though it looks awesome I am still bent on the fact that 343 Industries is making it instead of my beloved Bungie, who I still miss. For those of you who do not know the last six Halo games have been made by Bungie; and they did an awesome job at making every single one.  So in memory of their awesome games, I decided to begin where it all started; Halo: Combat Evolved.  The first installment in the Halo franchise caught the world by surprise, but was quickly welcomed with open arms. Selling a record-breaking high of over five million copies worldwide by November 9, 2005, the highest sold video game of its time.  Developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Studios. Bungie is responsible for the last six game Halo games, but for an unknown reason handed over the reigns of the series to 343 Industries about a year ago, and if your a die-hard-Halo-fan like me, I was saddened by this.  343 looks likes it shows some promise, but I don't think their ever going to be able to fit into Bungie's shoes all the way.  They are more than likely making Halo 4 because they want to make a name for themselves, but its gonna be pretty damn hard to make it better than Halo: Reach.  But I gotta give them credit for going all or nothing like this, they are either going to receive love or hate from the long time fans of the series, including me.  Anyway about the game.  Halo is set in the twenty-sixth century, with the gamer assuming the role of the Master Chief, a cybernetically enhanced supersoldier part of the Spartan II program, he is also supposedly the last Spartan alive.  The player is accompanied by Cortana, an artificial intelligence who occupies the Chief's neural interface.  Players battle various aliens of the Covenant as you attempt to uncover the secrets of the mysterious Halo, a ring-shaped artificial world.  The game has an awesome story, award-winning mutiplayer and never gets old.  Beginning immediately after the events of Halo:  Reach, the game opens up as the Pillar of Autumn exits slipspace near a mysterious ring-shaped artificial world, called "Halo" by the enemy of the game, the Covenant.  Also in-lies the title of the game and why its named Halo.  A Covenant fleet attacks and heavily damages the Autumn.  Captain Keyes initiates "The Cole Protocol", a procedure designed to keep the Covenant from finding Earth, in which could find out by capturing Cortana.  Thus, to prevent this he orders Master Chief to escape with Cortana and protect her at all costs.  While Keyes prepares to land the ship on Halo, Chief and Cortana escape via escape pod, which then crash lands on the ring. Cortana and Master Chief are the only ones who survive the impact of the escape pod crash.  Keyes survives the  Autumn's crash landing. but is captured by the Covenant.  In the second and third level of the game, the Chief and Cortana gather human survivors and rescue Captain Keyes, who is imprisoned aboard the Covenant ship Truth and Reconciliation.  Once rescued, Keyes orders the Chief to beat the Covenant to Halo's control center and to discover what the Covenant want with Halo.  Chief and Cortana travel to a map room called the Silent Cartographer, which leads them to the control room.  There, Cortana enters the systems and, discovering something urgent, suddenly sends the Master Chief to find Captain Keyes while she stays behind.  While searching for his commander, the Chief learns that the Covenant have accidentally released the Flood, a parasitic alien race capable of spreading itself by overwhelming and infesting other sentient life-forms. Keyes falls victim to them while looking for a cache of weapons.  The release of the Flood prompts Halo's AI monitor, 343 Guilty Spark, to recruit Master Chief in retrieving the Index, a device that will active Halo and prevent the Flood from spreading beyond the facility.  After the Chief retrieves and prepares to use the Index, Cortana re-appear and warns him against the activation.  She has discovered that Halo's defense system is a weapon designed to kill all sentient life in the galaxy, which the Flood requires to spread, a revelation which Guilty Spark confirms.  Faced with this information, the Master Chief and Cortana decide to destroy Halo to prevent its activation.  While fighting the Flood, the Covenant, and Guilty Spark's Sentinels , Cortana discovers that the best way to prevent its activation is to cause the crashed Pillar of Autumn to self-destruct.  However, Captain Keyes' authorization is required to destroy the Autumn, forcing the Chief and Cortana to return to the now-Flood-infested Truth and Reconciliation to search for him.  By the time that they reach Keyes, however, he has been infected beyond the piont of no return by the Flood.  The Master Chief retrieves Keyes' neural implants directly from his brain and retreats to the Autumn, where Cortana activates the ships self-destruct sequence.  However, 343 Guilty Spark reappears and deactivates the countdown, discovering the record of human history in the process.  The manually destabilizes the Pillar of Autumn's fusion reactors, and he and Cortana narrowly escape the destruction of Halo via a long sword.  Outside the campaign you could team up with friends, although considering that Xbox Live did not exist, you had to team up with friends on a LAN party.  Overall the game is awesome and is still available as an Original on the Xbox Live Marketplace.  I'd also like to say thanks to Bungie for making these last ten years of Halo awesome all the way and I'm gonna miss you guys.  So get the game, start where it all began, remember all the good times, and hopefully look forward to more good memories.  Heirs to the next ten years of Halo.  Farewell and see you Thursday.  This has been Jacob Arnold, signing off.    

Halo Combat Evolved: E3 2000 Trailer

Star Wars: Battlefront II Review

If you haven't heard already, a new Star Wars movie is coming out, which I completely mortified about.  I know most of you are all exited about this announcement, but I'm not.  This is just like the Call of Duty Black Ops II and Halo 4 situation: they just don't want to let it die when they should.  We can all agree that Star Wars had one hell of a run and it's time to just look back and smile at the past, not frown at the future.   All the actors are older or have passed, which will not allow them to build off the original plot cause Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford are too old to resume their former characters.  It also means that they might try to make a new story line with a new hero and on top of all this crap Disney's making it!  Disney!  Look when I was six I loved The Lion King and Aladdin, but come on, it wont be the same as when Lucas Films was making it, which also means George Lucas isn't even writing the script anymore, which means its not Star Wars, which means its going suck, which also means that there will be no more Star Wars games cause they sold their trademark to Disney.  Anyway, in memory of the good times I decided to do a review on the best Star Wars game of all: Star Wars Battlefront II.  Even though the game is pretty old, its the best, fun for all ages, and probably was one of the best games ever when it was still on Xbox Live.  The game came out in October 31, 2005 in Europe and  November 1, 2005 in North America.  The games platform is on the original Xbox.  It was published by LucasArts and developed by Pandemic Studios. Battlefront II is fundamentally similar to its predecessor, albeit with the new gameplay mechanics.  The general objective in most missions of the game is to eliminate the enemy with lethal force.  Like the first game, Battlefront II, the game is split into two eras, the Clone Wars and the Galactic Civil War.  Players have the ability to choose between six classes during gameplay, each with their own different abilities.  Four of these classes are common to all factions; infantry , heavy weapon  sniper, and engineer.  In addition to the four standard classes, each faction has two unique classes which are unlocked by scoring a certain number of points   For the Rebellion faction, the Bothan Spy and the Wookie; for the Empire, The Officer and The Dark Trooper; for the Republic, the Commander anf the Jet Trooper and for the CIS, the Magnagaurd and the Droideka.  You can also play as heroes, such as Luke Skywalker, Mace Windo, Bobo Fet, Darth Vader, and other such characters.   This game is just awesome and is fun to play with friends, local or system link.  It deeply saddens me to inform you that the game is no longer online via Xbox Online, and I miss it almost as much as Halo 2 online.  They don't sell the game new anymore, but you can probably get it on Amazon or eBay, I have my copy from when the game first came out.  So find the game, get it, and love it.  Hope you've enjoyed and I will see you next week.  This has been Jacob Arnold, signing off.