Grifter Online and Console Games Hints,Tips,Reviews and In-game Footages.

Square Enix's DKS3713 Private Party is only in its first day, but already there's tons of news! The three most exciting Final Fantasy announcements (at least for me) are the following: 1) Final Fantasy XIII CONFIRMED for 2009 2) Final Fantasy Agito XIII has been announced for the PSP 3) Final Fantasy Dissidia will include Kefka Why is Hamasaki Ayumi in Final Fantasy XIII? Is she a FF summon? All signs point to "probably." In addition to all of this, a playable demo of FF XIII will be available with the Japanese release of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children on Blu-Ray next March. Sweet! And although they did show a new trailer for Versus, it doesn't seem to reveal a whole lot more information. But Final Fantasy games aren't the only ones I'm looking forward to. Sigma Harmonics looks interesting, with its blend of RPG, card-battle and puzzle. I'm digging the new direction S/E is going with their DS games. I love the mix of youthful gameplay with more adu

July 8, 2008 - Portugal's leading video games investor and developer, GameInvest, is bringing hospital drama to multiple platforms this summer with Sarah's Emergency Room. Currently in development for Nintendo DS, Wii, PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade and PC platforms, Sarah's Emergency Room is a time management and hospital simulation game where players take on the role of a young nurse, caring for patients in fast-paced hospital environments. GameInvest is currently looking for qualified distribution and publishing partners for Sarah's Emergency Room on the various platforms. "Sarah's Emergency Room revives the time management genre with fun, challenging levels and a frenetic pace with simulation management skills," said GameInvest founder and CEO Paulo Gomes. "Our commitment to quality and accessibility shines with beautiful graphics and a pick-up-and-play interface." Sarah's Emergency Room casts players as Sarah, a young nurse who ha

July 8, 2008 - Midway just announced that it would be publishing Mechanic Master, a game designed by Most Wanted Entertainment that went by "Contraptions" before it was picked up by the publisher. Perusing the developer's website, we found that the company is working on another Nintendo DS title: "The Expendables." Here's the breakdown of this work-in-progress game, right from the developer's site: They are deadly, they are confident, they are dumb... and they finally got an assignment. The fate of the world's lamest international private army is in your hands. Can you help them to overcome their weaknesses and accomplish various missions in different parts of the world or their very first job will be the last one, too...? 'The Expendables' is a humorous, squad-based shooter with cartoonish graphics in which the player assumes control over a small private army whose "soldiers" were hired from all over the world. While the game'

July 8, 2008 - Ever since the Nintendo DS hit the scene, many gamers have been begging for a rendition of that classic PC title The Incredible Machine. While Sierra rests on its laurels, Midway's ready to pounce with its own take on the game design: the company has announced it will be publishing the Most Wanted Entertainment-develeoped Mechanic Master for the portable system, due out this October. Mechanic Master – once known as Contraption – is a puzzle game where players solve more than a hundred physics-based puzzles by utilizing simple and complex machines. Use gravity to make a ball roll down a plank to activate a motor that'll spin gears and raise platforms to keep the mechanism going. The game will be entirely touch-screen driven, so dragging and dropping as well as drawing solutions will be a snap using the stylus. On top of the 100 different in-cartridge levels, there will also be the ability to customize and create puzzles, and send them to other DS owners to try o

May 28, 2008 - In less than a month, Activision will release Guitar Hero: On Tour , a Nintendo DS-exclusive spin-off of the Red Octane rhythm franchise. For more than a year, development studio Vicarious Visions has been on the task of bringing the series to the dual-screen handheld, a tricky project considering Guitar Hero has always been about wailing on a full-size guitar to the tune of guitar-heavy rock tunes. Activision let us get a deep hands-on with the near final project, and I have to say, for a version of the game that doesn't have an actual guitar to play, the Nintendo DS version nails the gameplay. Guitar Hero: On Tour isn't some quick-hacked, "tap the screen to the beat" touch-screen port. No, it's as true a Guitar Hero game as you're going to get on the handheld, complete with its own peripheral attachment. Each copy of Guitar Hero: On Tour comes packaged with a Guitar Grip. This attachment plugs into the Game Boy Advance cartridge port of the N

UK, May 30, 2008 - In return for letting us play Metal Gear Solid 4 before its release, Konami issued us with a list of things that we're not allowed to discuss. This list of prohibited topics is pretty long, and even extends as far as several facts that the company itself has already made public. Regardless of Konami's list of prohibited topics though, this review was always going to be a spoiler-free zone, because part of the pleasure of playing Guns of the Patriots lies in discovering everything it has to offer. MGS 4 is simply a game that you have to experience for yourself. Because the one thing that can certainly be said, prohibited topics or not, is that Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is, without question, the ultimate Metal Gear game. It represents the pinnacle of Hideo Kojima's achievement, and it's undoubtedly one of the games of the year. Metal Gear... It can't be. Surprisingly, it gets off to a pretty slow start. Oh sure, there is something

April 28, 2008 - Never double-cross Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson. This is the lesson the criminal underworld is set to learn in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand . A sequel to 2005's Bulletproof, Blood on the Sand puts 50 in a very different hood. Mr. Cent and his G-Unit crew have traveled to an unnamed "war-torn" desert country to put on a show. Fitty is paid with a high-priced jewel, but that gem is stolen by some thugs. Bad move. Described as a cross between Three Kings and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Blood on the Sand is a tongue-in-cheek fast-paced shooter. Though 50 Cent is always on the scene with gun cocked, he is joined by one member of G-Unit controlled either by a friend online or by the AI. Before the start of each mission, you choose your sidekick to be Tony Yayo, Lloyd Banks or DJ Whoo Kid. Each has his own bag of quips and a unique weapon. The action is fairly constant as players shoot their way through more than 20 missions. You can play a straigh

April 28, 2008 - Shoot-'em-ups are all about action, and Sierra's Assault Heroes was packed full of it. A throwback to the top-down scrolling action shooters of old, the slick 2006 release set a new standard for the genre on Xbox Live Arcade. The development studio behind the first title, Wanako Games, is working on a sequel to Assault Heroes, and we had an opportunity to play a bit of it at Sierra's recent Gamer's Day event in San Francisco. We're happy to report that Assault Heroes 2 appears to have even more action, wrapped in the same glossy package that made its predecessor so easy on the eyes. We've covered the basics of Assault Heroes 2 already, so we won't re-hash it all here. Essentially, all the things you loved about the first game are back (co-op, vehicles, boss battles, power-ups, etc.) but some new twists are on the way.In our hands-on with Assault Heroes 2, we noticed that vehicles re-spawn a lot faster than they did in the last game. If you

We've already announced new modes, the rating, pricing, and some of the music in the game. So what could be left? For those of you not familiar with the original game, there were actually no difficulty settings. Granted, the arm's unique control scheme made the game harder than most, but certainly an "Easy" option would have helped. Or would it? For those how do know the original, you probably remember that the enemies and bosses themselves were not that hard. It was literally all about the swinging (area 11, anyone?). When updating the game for Rearmed we didn't want to go with the standard, "lazy" approach to difficulty tweaking -- i.e., we didn't want to make the game artificially more difficult by just giving the enemies a longer life bar and the ability to do more damage. Additionally, rather than making the game harder, we needed to find a way to make it easier without totally redesigning the classic level design that fans would demand. Fortun

Not too much to review here as "Renewal" serves to mostly recap Death Note 's major plot points so that it can move into its third and final act. We start on L's case files, every clue that has lead him to believe that Light Yagami is "Kira". It also serves as a reminder that we as an audience have just lost arguably the best character on the show. When the case file ends, we catch a glimpse of Light salting our wounds and deleting the data. Worse, the investigation force appoints Light as the new L. In just a short time, Light moves in with Misa, becomes the new L, and tells Ryuk he will now create the brave new world he promised to. We are then treated to a very cool montage that spans five years. Light kills off every member of the Yotsuba group, L's American allies, and countless criminals. He's entered the police force and risen to power. Entire nations have declared themselves in support of Kira. Light has won the battle… for now. The final min

April 16, 2008 - Most gamers out there would probably agree that the world of role-playing games has been stuck in a specific rut for quite a while. We're not talking down on games like Fire Emblem and Advance Wars on DS (RPG-like tactical games), or the still-remarkable Final Fantasy series, but rather the hundreds upon hundreds of RPGs out there that don't dare to be different. We can understand a few "period piece" role-playing games, but does every story-heavy adventure out there need to revolve around swords, bows, magic, castles, and hoards of monsters emerging from some sort of ultimate evil? It's fine in moderation – and when done extremely well, games go beyond any preconceptions – but the RPG world could use a little kick in the pants to get it moving, and that's exactly what The World Ends With You is. Square Enix – more specifically Team Jupiter, the creators of Kingdom Hearts – has challenged every facet of the RPG genre, and the result is one o

April 22, 2008 - The Mystery Dungeon series is a franchise that's been going on since the days of the Super NES – just recently Sega released a remake of one of the original Mystery Dungeon games: Shiren the Wanderer. The latest version in the series is the second one Chunsoft has made for Nintendo, titled Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness . The team created two versions of the same game, and more doesn't necessarily mean better. This sequel isn't much of a step up from the first game in the series, which wasn't all that great to begin with. Mystery Dungeon features a distinct gaming style: it's all about randomly generated dungeons in a turn-based, real-time RPG hybrid design. The whole idea of Mystery Dungeon revolves around working your way through a series of multi-level dungeons, with each floor being generated on the fly when you get there. What this means is, potentially, you'll never see the sa

April 18, 2008 - The Metal Gear experience has always been a solitary experience. It's been great and we've embraced it for the awesome single-player gameplay that it has brought to the table, but there comes a point in a series' lifespan when it's time to expand. Time to break the former boundaries of one's youth, spread those wings and fly into the world of online gaming. Beta keys are currently making their way into some lucky gamers' hands, but at this year's New York Comic-Con Metal Gear Online was on display for anyone to come up and play for themselves. The setup was simple. Eight LCD screens, four facing one side, four on the other. It was red vs. blue in a classic team deathmatch scenario on Blood Bath, one of the five maps that will ship with the game. The introduction to the game was very simple. Being someone that has never played Metal Gear Solid 4's single-player game, I had absolutely no problems jumping in, setting up my primary, secondar

April 18, 2008 - Since July, we've been breaking arms, shooting foes in the chest and running around embassies in the Bourne Conspiracy, but in those nine months, we've never had a chance to really sit down and play the game until our eyes bled. Or at least we hadn't until Sierra rolled into San Francisco last week. Our time with High Moon Studios, the folks who brought us Darkwatch and are in the middle of bringing us Bourne, was twofold. To begin with, we got to sit in on an Xbox 360 demo of a handful of new levels -- Bourne vs. an APC, Bourne vs. some European cops, Bourne vs. the Professor in a burning barn, Bourne vs. every inanimate object in a European library -- but when the developers were done beating on foreigners, they handed us a PlayStation 3 preview build of the game's first four missions. Our hands-on time actually covered a few parts we've seen in previous previews, but that only helped showcase the changes High Moon has made and gave us context to

Australia, March 16, 2008 - Cam: So Naz, in the last 24 hours we've done some pretty freaky stuff. We've bounced from gigantic mushroom to gigantic mushroom, we've bumped down a mogul run, we've launched ourselves up mountains and we've fired red shells at those who oppose us. Yes, we've finally gone hands-on with Mario Kart for the Wii. What did you think? Naz: I've got to say I was far happier with the graphics than I expected to be. I think the whole package sparkled with that trademark Nintendo polish. Each track had a completely different flavour. From the gently swaying trees and difficult to dodge cows in the meadow course to the conveyor belts and crane-carried platforms in the Toad's factory course, each track brought back a fond new memory of a Nintendo title from yesteryear but presented them with fresh style. With twelve racers on track there was also always constant chaos erupting with turtle shells, bananas and other insane weapons lob

April 11, 2008 - Ah, Dragon Ball Z. One of the most influential and commercially successful anime franchises ever created. Frenetic action scenes, likable characters, and great humor – a great formula for shonen franchise success. Everyone knows the good side of DBZ; the merits of the franchise are discussed in many areas. But not everyone seriously talks about the faults of the franchise, and the bad habits that it has encouraged in both the industry and the fan base. We're not really interested in bashing DBZ just for the sake of bashing DBZ. That would be pointless – and honestly you can go to any anime forum and find plenty of that already. No, what we'd like to do here is something a bit more…academic. One of the interesting things about the DBZ series is that for every DBZ lovin' fanatic you'll find an equally passionate DBZ hater that feels the series ruined anime for them completely. Unfortunately there is very little intelligent debate between the two factions