Age of Conan: Hyborean Adventures Preview
Age of Conan: Hyborean Adventures is not a game for the faint-hearted. Violence, suspense and a lot of blood are all involved in playing Funcom’s upcoming MMORPG. Thousands of people are eagerly waiting to see if Funcom was able to recreate the Age of Conan world, and stay true to it’s storyline and characters. The screen shots we’ve seen so far are impressive, and we are curious whether they will be able to optimize the frame rate enough to make it run decently on the average computer. What worries us slightly is the PvP action. In a title like Age of Conan you can’t have World Of Warcraft style PvP combat, it needs to be more direct to immerse the player. And although the combat system does include some new features it isn’t revolutionary from what we’ve gathered.
On our first foray into the Hyborean wilderness, we encountered the very same prostitute we’d met in earlier previews. We opted to rescue her in exchange for the promise of some future “reward,” which, from what we could gather, was going to somehow involve some lasciviousness. Immediately apparent was the distinctly mature flavor of our initial activities, because Age of Conan doesn’t sugarcoat anything: combat is bloody and brutal, sex workers are brazen and lascivious and men are covered with densely matted hair and look like they smell as bad as the other animals we encountered in the jungles surrounding Tortage.
The jungle environment makes World of Warcraft’s Stranglethorn Vale look like a kiddie pool lined with fern fronds. The wilds rimming Tortage are packed with marauders and vicious predators that attack at the slightest provocation. The tangled vines and dense foliage create an ominous atmosphere and we could almost feel the soft loam beneath our feet sink just a bit with each step. In terms of graphical fidelity, the jungle encasing Tortage was simply stellar — totally capturing the feral fauna and overgrown flora and presenting them as though both were locked in constant combat with Tortage, threatening to devour the small but fiercely defended community of brigands and wildmen.
Go to GAMESPY for the full preview!
SimCity Societies Review
With The Sims series being the best selling PC game ever, it’s not surprising Electronic Arts keeps trying to milk their profitable product with expansions and spin-offs. Simcity Societies is the latest game based on The Sims, offering you the possibility to “run” an entire city. A mix of The Sims and Simcity is a pretty good description. If you are looking for an in-depth complex city builder then perhaps you should ignore this game. It’s quite simple in structure, and will only offer casual city building options. Disappointingly it’s so easy to win in this game that it offers almost no challenge. The game does look pretty good and there are a lot of buildings you can build, though the engine could have been optimized more for smoother gameplay.
The idea sounds good in theory: Each building you place has a positive or negative effect on a particular social energy. There are six of these energies, from creativity to spirituality, and each building uses or provides them in different amounts. As your city grows, you unlock newer buildings and décor, each of which is separated into various themes, such as “romantic” or “cyberpunk.” You don’t have to theme your city, so feel free to mix and match. The categorizations are actually rather helpful because you can create themed neighborhoods without having to scroll through full lists of buildings.
Your Sims need to have places to work, hang out, and live, but you’ll rarely need to worry about it. To succeed in SimCity Societies, all you have to do is treat your social energies as currency and keep them relatively evened out. Doing that makes everything from Sim happiness to your coffers fall nicely into place. Need authority? Build a town hall. Have too much? Build a police station. Just don’t ask why it is a police station spends authority–like many of the categorizations, the connection between a building and its social energies is mighty unclear. Why would a service station spend productivity, while a butcher shop creates it? All you can do is look beyond it and realize that it’s not a connection at all–just a random abstraction created to balance out what is in effect six different currencies running simultaneously.
Click here for the full review at GameSpot.
