Download Street Fighter IV
It's obvious that each iteration of the long-running Street Fighter series has been carefully tuned and tweaked to the finest degree, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Street Fighter IV. The lessons learned in the franchise's 20-plus years have been used to prune back the core fighting experience to create something truly special.Street Fighter IV is a resounding success not only because it's one of the most technically complex 2D fighters ever made, but also because it's also wrapped inside a layer of absolute accessibility. Never has the old "A minute to learn, a lifetime to master" adage been truer than it is here.
The Street Fighter fundamentals have remained consistent over the years; your job is to knock out the other guy or gal. All 12 of the classic world warriors--Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Blanka, E. Honda, Zangief, Guile, Dhalsim, Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M. Bison--are back and playable from the outset, and they're joined by six brand-new and diverse characters. Abel, a mixed martial arts grapple-style character; Crimson Viper a female fighter with sweeping, airborne fire attacks; Rufus, a rotund fighter whose body makes him a bit of a sight gag despite his deceptive speed; and El Fuerte, a pro wrestler whose rushes and air throws make him a slippery foe. Ryu and Ken's sensei, Gouken, also makes his playable-character debut in Street Fighter IV. Naturally, he didn't teach the boys everything he knows, so when they meet again he has a few tricks up his sleeves, including a horizontal and vertical fireball EX move. The game's new end boss, Seth, fills the last spot and joins the list once you've unlocked everyone else. Character balance is spot-on across the roster, and as a result, you should never feel that you can't compete simply because you've chosen one character over another.
You'll need to finish the game multiple times and in special ways to unlock the complete character list. Doing so will make fan favourites Cammy, Sakura, Akuma, Fei Long, Rose, Gen, and Dan playable. Like previous games in the series, Street Fighter IV lets you perform powerful super combos, but it has removed air blocking and parrying completely. Developers Capcom and Dimps have added a completely new gameplay system: focus attacks, a new multipurpose offensive and defensive ability that can be charged to one of three levels by pressing and holding the medium punch and kick buttons simultaneously. There's no onscreen bar to show how charged your attack is, so you'll need to rely on the progressively darkening ink splashes surrounding your character model. Each character features a unique focus animation, so you shouldn't have any trouble working it out after a few rounds with each. Focus attacks make you vulnerable to damage because you need to be standing still to charge them (though you can dash forward or backward to cancel them), but the trade-off is that you'll absorb the first hit without the penalty of an animation reset, allowing for an instant counterattack if you land it. They can also act as armour-breaking moves, shutting down more-powerful attacks. Successfully landing a fully charged focus attack will deal damage and crumple your opponent to the ground, giving you the chance to follow up with an unblockable hit as he or she falls.
The new mechanic also lets you use part of your EX power-meter charge to exit animations early and chain bigger combos together. They take a little getting used to and some serious thumb dexterity, but once they're mastered, you can perform moves such as dragon-punch stalls directly into super moves or use them to juggle players in midair with multiple hits. Your revenge meter builds as you take damage, whereas the EX meter fills as you dish it out. EX power rolls over to the next round, but revenge must be built from scratch each time. This becomes a crucial risk-versus-reward mechanic. Do you take hits to build revenge and power up an ultra attack, or do you deal damage to burn your EX on improved moves, cancels, or save it for a super finisher? The flexibility of this system means that you're free to play according to your strengths and style. But just like reversals, EX power-ups, and ultra combo attacks, focus attacks serve to mix up the experience only for veteran players; such is the game's balance that they have never been required to win a match, and they act more as an additional weapon in the arsenal of a skilled player. They're waiting for you when you want to take a step up and learn how they work, but well-timed basic punches and kicks are just as effective.
The single-player mode is robust and has a lot to offer across several components. Arcade mode pits you against a set number of fighters from your unlocked-character roster and culminates in a showdown with Seth. Along the way to your goal, you'll always encounter a rival fight. These are regular fights accompanied by an in-engine exchange with your opponent. They're a welcome mix-up but often add nothing to the character's storyline because some fighters clearly don't even know why they hate one another. Each character's adventure is bookended by an anime-style cinematic movie that explains his or her motivations for attending the tournament. They're quite short and keep story to an absolute minimum, but they get the message across and do a reasonable-enough job of filling in the gaps. Given the amount of additional content shoehorned into this game, we were slightly disappointed to find that no bonus levels have been included, especially since we had high hopes of reliving our car and barrel smashing from Street Fighter II.
Regardless of whether you're down with busting out a tatsumaki senpukyaku at will or think it's some kind of egg-noodle dish, there's a difficulty mode here for you. Eight levels ranging from very easy to hardest are available, so you're sure to find one appropriate for your skill level. That said, even at the gentler difficulties, Street Fighter IV is no cakewalk because your opponents will occasionally mix things up with surprise super and ultra combos. First-timers will have no trouble picking up, playing, and learning as they go. Playing on the medium or above difficulty will also enable score tracking, letting you submit and compare to other players on the game's online leaderboards.
Street Fighter IV's training mode will challenge even experienced brawlers to improve. Given that SFIV straddles the line between classic SFII and SFIII gameplay, there's bound to be some confusion about which of your old mainstay combos work and the timing that you'll need to pull them off. The training mode is an excellent resource and is one of the biggest jewels in the SFIV crown. Once you've chosen your character and your sparring partner, you'll be able to pose them in various positions, toggle CPU control (and adjust its intensity), or give player two control of the action. There's even the ability to switch to your opponent's character, record up to 10 seconds of custom moves, and loop their replay. It's a great way to practice your evasion, attack timing, and counters without requiring another player or needing to search for online games. There are plenty of switches to fiddle with here, including changing your target's block mode, stun frequency, ultra and super power-bar start, and regeneration levels. Live attack data can be enabled to show how much damage your moves are dealing, whereas input display can show you which way you're pushing the sticks and mashing the buttons.
Training mode aside, one of the single best features of Street Fighter IV is the Challenge mode, which is made up of several sub-modes. Old faithfuls such as Time Attack and Survival mode make an appearance and see you completing fight after fight to best your rival before the timer runs out or you empty your vitality bar. The new addition to Challenge mode is Trial mode, a multitiered training tool that will teach you not only how to perform moves, but also how to string them together to best deal damage. Although the Training mode gives you the full arsenal and space to try it out, in Trial mode you'll need to perform a specific manoeuvre or combo to continue. The five normal difficulty levels cover basic character-specific moves such as dragon punches, charge moves, and throws, but they get significantly tougher as you progress to cover specials, cancelling attacks with focus, and stringing multipart combinations together. If you can get through these and feel up to the challenge, there are an extra five levels of bone-crushing general-purpose moves designed to help you improve your competitive play.
Street Fighter IV supports both online and offline multiplayer modes, though cross-platform play with consoles is not available. In offline play, you'll be able to go head-to-head with a second player using your unlocked characters. Online is handled through the Games For Windows LIVE service and registers and runs without a hitch. For matches you'll be given the choice between friendly player matches, ranked games, or Championship mode. Winning ranked matches awards you battle points, which are used to both show off your prowess and help with the matchmaking process. Patched in after the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Street Fighter IV shipped (and also available on those platforms), Championship mode adds online play with a tournament-style knockout system. The ranking system means you'll only fight against players of roughly the same skill level as you accrue points and progress through a mock round system on the way to a final showdown.
If you're after the true arcade experience, you can toggle online competitive challenge mode on and off to work with single-player. Just as you would expect in an arcade, if you're battling the CPU and someone issues a challenge, your game will pause and you'll automatically accept the invitation. Once the game has finished and you leave the multiplayer lobby, you'll restart your offline game where you were. You can set it to Player, Ranked or Championship matches as per your preference. We played online against opponents with both strong and weak connections, and even at slightly less than full connection strength, you'll receive an offline-like, seamless fighting experience. Poorer connections are more akin to a slide show, although we did manage to find games with supposedly poor connections that played quite well.
Street Fighter IV's visual presentation is outstanding. The art style appears a lot more adult this time around, swapping the bright Saturday-morning kids' cartoon looks of previous games for large, menacing characters with bulging muscles and environments with more muted colour palettes. The game's pseudo-cel-shaded character-art style uses thick black borders and splattered ink to great effect, while fast, fluid animation sees your favourite fighters dance across the screen with grace. Long hair flows and trails, facial expressions contort and grimace as you deal blows, and eyes bulge as opponents see an ultra attack successfully executed. We observed a few minor character-model clipping errors during play, such as legs passing through each other and the odd missed sweep when we were sure that we should have landed a hit, but these are small quibbles because they appeared few and far between. Battle environments are a mix of old and new, reinventing favourites such as Guile's airbase tarmac (complete with destructible plane wings), Blanka's jungle walkways, and Chun-Li's marketplace alleyway. New environments include a secret science laboratory, a highway underpass, a classic martial-arts dojo, and the rim of an active volcano.
The PC version of SFIV manages to ratchet up the already-gorgeous visuals a couple of notches over its console counterparts by offering resolutions up to 1920x1200, as well as selectable shader and antialiasing options to suit your PC's capabilities. Three new "extra touch" visuals--ink, watercolour, and posterization--add visual effects to your character and the environment. This includes the ability to add thicker borders, though it's purely cosmetic and doesn't alter gameplay. These settings aside, the visuals are almost indistinguishable from those on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, and the frame rate is solid even during the most frenetic battles.
Audio is a particular high point in SFIV, and though the J-pop soundtrack and cheesy intro theme will be driven into your head within minutes, it's also worth mentioning the subtle environmental effects that go otherwise unheard in the heat of battle. The cheers of crowds, the rattle of old trains, and the barking of dogs in alleys all help create a genuine sense of immersion. Purists are even given the option to choose between Japanese and English voice-overs during cutscenes and as characters enter the ring.
Unsurprisingly, the PC game includes support for Microsoft's Xbox 360 controllers and handles identically to its console brethren. The analog sticks are easy to use for performing ultra moves, though the Microsoft controller's D pad leaves plenty to be desired. Keyboard play or a mixture of keyboard and pad are supported, and while serviceable in a pinch, it's certainly not our preference for serious play. Button layouts for pad and keyboard can both be mapped to your tastes. Your best bet, of course, is to invest in a good arcade stick or one of the controllers designed specifically for this game. While not available in all territories, bundles with gamepads and a copy of the game are available from many retailers.
Street Fighter IV will welcome you with open arms, whether you're a lapsed fan concerned that you've been out of the loop for too long or you're dipping your toes for the first time. Amazing presentation, intricate and enjoyable fighting gameplay, and long-term appeal with online play make this a must-have. Street Fighter IV is undoubtedly one of the finest examples of the fighting genre in this generation.
Download Guitar Hero World Tour
Background
Guitar Hero IV is the next installment of Guitar Hero which comes packed with new songs and features and will for the first time, introduces drums and vocals.Gameplay
In this latest installmentof Guitar Hero, World Tourtransforms music gaming by expanding the signature guitar gameplay into a cooperative band experience combining the most advanced wireless instruments with new revolutionary online and offline gameplay modes, including online Band Career and eight player "Battle of the Bands," which allows two full bands to compete head-to-head online for the first time ever. The game features a slick newly redesigned guitar, an authentic electronic drum kit and a microphone, as well as an innovative Music Studio music creator that lets players compose, record, edit, and share their original rock 'n' roll anthems.Features
- All new instruments: Play state of the art wireless instruments including a slick newly redesigned guitar controller, authentic drum kit and microphone.
- Innovative Music Studio: This revolutionary new feature incorporates a full complement of tools to create digital music from scratch utilizing the drum kit and guitar controller while offering the opportunity to play compositions in game.
- Battle of the Bands Mode: Rock out in solo career mode or battle against other full bands head to head online for the first time ever.
- Create a Rocker: Customize your own rocker, select one of your favorite Guitar Hero characters or choose one of the guest artists appearing in game.
- The rock 'n' roll experience: It's the most expansive and diverse on disc track selection in a music game with over 85 master tracks!
Despite launching with hefty system requirements and less-than-stellar hardware optimization, the PC port of Guitar Hero III managed to do okay for itself when it was released last year. While the game's sales were not necessarily groundbreaking, it did well enough on the platform to earn itself a forthcoming sequel in the form of Guitar Hero World Tour.
In an attempt to make the beloved plastic-shredding sequel more accessible to the desktop audience, publisher Aspyr has retuned the game's engine to ensure that the World Tour performs better on lower-end PCs and Macs. From the build we played, we can say that the game looks, sounds, and performs just as well as it does on its fun console counterparts. The game's biggest addition this time around is the support of drum peripherals and mics. You can play each instrument individually, or all of them at the same time, provided you have enough friends and/or limbs
Already released for the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii, the PC version of World Tour will include the 86 songs that debuted on the consoles. Some of the game's notable hits come in the form of "Everlong" by the Foo Fighters, "Beat It" by Michael Jackson, and my personal favorite Ozzy Osbourne song, "Crazy Train." If players aren't satisfied with the lengthy set list, they might be glad to know that World Tour introduces a simple music creation tool that allows the musician in all of us to create unique beats.
However, unlike its console counterparts, World Tour PC will not allow players to upload and share their songs online (publisher Aspyr is a little worried about copyright infringements)..
Shipping at $89.99, World Tour will be the first Guitar Hero game for the PC that will include a wireless guitar. However, this doesn’t mean that the included wired guitar from the PC version of Guitar Hero III won't be supported; so if you have that axe, make sure you don't smash it (unless you're performing in front of a stoked rock crowd). In addition, acquiring the drums and a mic are also made easy. The game supports virtually any USB mic and the drum kit is the same one used for Sony's PlayStation 3.
PC and Mac users will be able to rock out on their respective platforms when Guitar Hero World Tour launches later this June.
Download Sims City 4 Deluxe
Long before game designer Will Wright created the best-selling computer game of all time, The Sims, he created SimCity, an innovative game with a clear, compelling premise: You're the mayor, and your goal is to plan a city from the ground up (and from a godlike vantage point) and then nurture it, eventually turning what starts as a sleepy little town into a bustling metropolis. SimCity was challenging and plausibly realistic and even had a surprising amount of humor, especially for a game with a seemingly mundane subject. About 15 years have passed since the original SimCity was first released, and while the classic SimCity series is still well known among PC gamers, it has only reached its fourth full installment. And SimCity 4 for the most part isn't a huge departure from its predecessors, either, not that it really needs to be. The game does have a number of new features and a few additional layers of depth on top of the preceding SimCity 3000, and its visuals have been impressively overhauled. However, due to the presence of some stability and performance issues, as well as a few noticeably lacking features, SimCity 4 doesn't seem as polished as it could have been. On the other hand, it's still a complex and detailed strategy game that can entertain you for hours on end and even teach you a thing or two.
One of the biggest changes to the gameplay of SimCity 4 is evident from the start. Immediately as you begin the game, you're presented with a view of SimNation, though it's not much of a nation at first. SimNation is divided up into numerous smaller square segments, yet each of these in fact can hold an entire city of your making. These cities can even interact to some extent, exchanging surplus energy, water, and such for cash. At any rate, getting started is as easy as clicking on any SimNation square, naming your city, and appointing yourself as mayor, and you're off. But before you begin, you may wish to take the step-by-step tutorials of the game's mayor mode—the heart of SimCity 4—and the god mode, where you can terraform the land to your heart's content, making the terrain as flat, as hilly, as undulating, or as improbably strange as you like. It's easy to use the terrain-morphing tools found in this mode, and while it's perfectly viable to just pick one of the ready-made territories to start your city in, it's tempting and straightforward to custom-tailor your own.
Once you decide it's time to get started with your city, you may find the early going to be very familiar if you've played any of the previous SimCity games. You'll start by plopping down a power plant, preferably one that doesn't create too much pollution, and then laying down some residential, industrial, and commercial zones, then giving them some time to incubate. Laying out zones is as easy as dragging rectangles using your mouse, but SimCity 4 tries to make things even easier on you by automatically inserting streets, giving larger zones a gridlike pattern. This is a mixed blessing, since these auto-built streets often don't line up as you try to construct adjacent zones, leaving your city with bits of wasted space here and there, at least until you get used to dealing with this feature. And since city maps in SimCity 4 are smaller overall than in previous SimCity games—probably a necessary limitation due to the fine level of detail you'll see down to individual houses and sims—that wasted space could be a big missed opportunity for your city. Plus all the extra roads can really hose your budget early on. The auto-roads feature really should have been optional.
As in SimCity 3000, the three zone types each have several different density options, so light-density residential zones are likely to sprout small houses or low-income apartments, while high-density residential zones could turn into tall, fancy condominiums. Denser zones are costlier to put in place but pack in more people, which means more tax dollars. But in SimCity 4, it pays to start slow. The early going can be very challenging at first (and there are no difficulty options available to ameliorate this), as you'll naturally wish to immediately add all the amenities you'd want in a city: running water, schools, hospitals, police stations, or a football field. At any rate, a fledgling town needs only the basics, and a continuously updating news ticker that's part of the interface will keep you informed about whether your sim population needs anything you're not already providing. You'll eventually get a feel for how to get people coming into your town without driving your budget too far into the red. The goal, of course, is to make your newly established city profitable as soon as possible, since that's when you can start expanding in earnest and finally afford that hospital or police station you've always wanted next to your football field.
Having to contend with the constantly shifting demand for the three zone types while continuously adding better services and transportation options for your population and while also keeping an eagle eye on your monthly budget adds up to some involving gameplay. SimCity 4, like its predecessors, succeeds at being an active, hands-on game where there's usually something interesting you can be doing. Even if you're waiting to rake in a certain amount of funds, you can use that time as an opportunity to scrutinize the many different statistics and charts available to you or to correspond with your various advisors on how to proceed. Or you can use the handy query tool to click around your city, gleaning all kinds of information, including a few amusingly pointless statistics. You can even just sit back and observe your city at the closest zoom level. See those crime-scene-style chalk outlines near your football field? Those mean you probably should spring for a new police station thereabouts. All this is not to say SimCity 4 is a fast-paced game, because you can play it at the rate you want. It's possible to pause the action outright and build as much as necessary before starting the clock back up, and you can freely switch between three different game-speed settings.
SimCity 4 has a sleek, attractive interface that's highly reminiscent of the one found in The Sims. Though all the different buttons are unlabeled and not necessarily intuitive, detailed pop-up tooltips appear when you float your mouse cursor over any of the options, and it won't be long before you figure out where everything is. Just as the interface effectively lays out all the information and building options you need to be the best mayor, the game itself now grants you a much finer level of control over some aspects of your city. As in previous SimCity games, you can raise and lower the tax rate to bring in more money or increase demand. However, taxes now are broken down first by the three zone types and then by economic class, meaning you can opt to heavily tax your arrogant high-tech industries while giving your humble farmers a break, and so on. Additionally, as in previous SimCity games, you can adjust the budgets for your police and fire departments and such, but now you're able to do this locally as well as globally. Does that inner-city precinct have a lot more on its hands than that suburban one? Then you can probably afford to cut the latter's budget, but maybe not the former's. To some extent, the game now forces you to micromanage your city in such a fashion, though it isn't strictly necessary.
SimCity 4 also lets you spring up a volcano in the middle of your downtown, for all it cares. Like previous games in the series, disasters are very much a part of SimCity 4 and are liable to strike at any time, especially some of the more plausible ones like fires and riots. Unfortunately there's no option to disable random disasters from happening, so expect your big cities to catch fire often, even if you have lots of fire departments in place. Instigating these terrible events yourself is also possible via a handy disaster menu. The game's rather brief manual suggests that you can opt to play the game as sort of a cruel dictator, raining down fire and brimstone whenever your sims displease you, but really the only right way to play SimCity 4 is to play it straight and do what's right. Sure, you can get yourself into serious debt and then take up an offer to build a toxic waste dump in your town to help foot the bill, but you'll just end up paying a bigger price later on. Goofing around with disasters or blowing all your money on a Hollywood sign can be a fun diversion, but it isn't really the point of the game.
Neither is the new MySim mode, which lets you import your characters from The Sims into the bigger world of this game. It's true that you can gain a lot of useful information about your city by transplanting one or more sims into homes of your choosing, as they'll frequently provide constructive criticism through the news ticker, but why follow one little person around when you've got 50,000 of them that need taking care of? As such, the MySim mode seems like an afterthought. The game also promises cooperative multiplayer support, but this isn't actually ready yet. Experienced SimCity players might also go in expecting to have numerous prebuilt cities available from the get-go, as well as stand-alone scenario options, but none of this is present in the game. The game does include regions modeled after real-world locations like San Francisco, New York, and Berlin, yet these are almost entirely barren landscapes--you'll need to build the actual cities yourself. Previous SimCity games also included challenging scenarios, such as having to deal with the aftermath of San Francisco's devastating 1906 earthquake. However, SimCity 4 offers only the standard free-form game mode. You'll of course be able to download plenty of player-created cities, but it's somewhat disappointing that the game itself seems rather bare-bones.
It also seems rather rushed, in that you'll likely run into obvious performance issues during play. At worst, the game might not even boot up--incompatibility with the anti-aliasing features of certain video cards can cause this to happen. Crashes to desktop also aren't entirely uncommon, and graphical glitches crop up from time to time. Plus the game just runs sluggishly as you start to really build up, penalizing you rather than rewarding you for managing to build a big city. Though you'll witness some incredibly detailed graphics at the closest zoom level, transitions between zoom levels are ungainly, and you'll see a mosaic effect gradually wash over the screen. The game's camera can also be unusually unresponsive while you scroll around your city.
SimCity 4 really does look impressive otherwise, and there's a lot of variety and a lot of funny little details to be seen. This is the first SimCity game that lets you see your city at night as well as during daylight hours, though you still won't get any seasonal effects, unless you count tornados. The game also sports a lot of really great audio that gets more and more detailed the closer you zoom in to street level, while a surprisingly good soundtrack consisting of a variety of jazz-inspired tunes plays in the background.
SimCity 4 has one of the highest pedigrees of any PC game and does a fine job overall of living up to its name. It's too bad that some players will invariably get soured on the experience due to some of the bugs and the missing or underdeveloped features and options. But most will find in SimCity 4 a deep and enjoyable strategy game that's flexible enough to be played at any pace and entertaining enough for all audiences.
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