Review: Motorola Atrix 2 with lapdock

The Atrix 2 appears to be Motorola’s attempt to converge the tablet, PC and smartphone. After all, smartphones are like mini-PCs in many ways — especially now phones include dual-core processors, multi-core graphics, and enough RAM to run a desktop OS like Windows XP. The Atrix 2 is supposed to be a powerful phone that can be used with other devices to create something resembling a PC experience.

04/12/2012 — Filed under: Mobile
Tags: Motorola Atrix 2, Review

Dell Latitude E6420 ATG review

The Dell Latitude E6420 ATG is described as a ‘business-rugged’ laptop and although we wouldn’t recommend that you throw it around the boardroom you can be fairly confident that it’ll withstand a bit of rough treatment.

04/10/2012 — Filed under: Hardware
Tags: Dell Latitude, E6420 ATG, Review

Samsung Series 9 laptop review

Samsung’s new laptop is the most beautiful ultrabook on the market — users pay for it in cash and battery life, but many will still want to says Matt Warman

04/9/2012 — Filed under: Hardware
Tags: Review, Samsung Series 9

Inazuma Eleven 2: Firestorm

Inazuma Eleven 2 offers a new story and a couple of gameplay tweaks but is ultimately more of the same.
The Good

Fun, involved story.

The Bad

Tutorials are slowly drip-fed
Plot is far too reliant on you having played the original
Doesn’t address the first game’s glaring issues.

UK REVIEW-The lads of the Raimon football team are back, fresh from winning the Football Frontier in Inazuma Eleven. The action in Firestorm/Blizzard picks up just seven days after the conclusion of the first game, beginning with an epilogue to that tale, resolving some of the former’s outstanding plotlines. The celebrations don’t last for long, however. Plucky goalkeeper Mark Evans doesn’t even have time to return to training before football-mad aliens from Alius Academy decide to invade, on a crusade to destroy the world’s schools through football.

If you played the first Inazuma Eleven, the sequel is immediately familiar. If you didn’t, well, this game isn’t aimed at you. Despite a number of tutorials, slowly drip-fed over the opening hours, Inazuma Eleven 2 is hugely reliant on your having gone through the first. The plot makes little sense if you aren’t already familiar with Mark, Axel, and crew. Mechanically, Inazuma Eleven 2 is also pretty much the same game.

Inazuma Eleven 2 has two primary elements. The first has you and your team wandering around regions, chatting to non-player characters, buying up football kits and healing items, and generally advancing the plot. The kids now have access to a tour bus, so the whole of Japan is fair game. There’s nothing really surprising to be found elsewhere-each areas has streets, parks, and schools with football pitches-but the concept of touring around the country allows the areas to look more varied at least. The overworld contains restore points that let you pay PP (points earned through playing football) to heal your characters, as well as training points that let you pay to increase a character’s stats, such as power and speed.

The other element is actual football. On the pitch, you control characters with the stylus, drawing lines to direct them around and tapping to shoot or pass. It’s exactly the same system as in the first game, and once again there’s no immediacy to the controls, something usually required for an exciting game of football. Unlike in the first game, however, you no longer need to be able to see the goal onscreen to take a shot, since a shot button has been included in the top right-hand corner.

Each player has a bunch of special moves, either their starting moves, ones they learn throughout the course of the narrative, or moves you can teach them from books. These moves are key to winning, with the majority of shots going saved unless powered by a fire-breathing dragon, or turned into a spinning ball of ice. Defensive and offensive possession moves are also once again present, and the success of these depends on how your relevant stats compare to your opponent’s.

As in the first game, matches take the form of four-a-side random battles or 11-a-side football matches against rival schools. In the former, you must either score first or retrieve the ball. Retrieving the ball takes seconds and is basically impossible to fail. The battles in which you have to score start off a little unbalanced, and you frequently find yourself unable to do so in the time limit. Once your characters start leveling up a bit, though, the battles become a breeze, and the difficulty curve is once again entirely misjudged.

Full matches are a little more involved and crop up a couple of times per chapter, with the option to play friendly games versus any team you’ve already faced. Here, you control a full team of 11 players and go all out to beat your rivals. At least, that’s what happens later. At the beginning of the game, there are far too many matches entirely scripted; for narrative purposes, you can’t win them. While the first game often required you to pull off a specific move at a specific time, the sequel simply prevents your shots, blocks, and tackles from having any effect. Once this stops happening and you can play properly, things are a little more fun, but it takes far too long to get to this point. Anyone not already familiar with how Inazuma Eleven works is going to be left confused and frustrated.

There are a few new additions to the way the game works, but nothing which has much impact. Most notable are the block moves and long shots. Block moves let you block shots going towards goal. For example, a striker may have a shoot move that also functions as a block move. In practice, this simply means you have slightly more special moves to use in defense. Long shots allow you to take a shot at goal from anywhere on the pitch by tapping an onscreen icon and then selecting a special move marked with an L. The long shots are few and far between and add surprisingly little to the overall match flow, given how the shots are nearly always saved.

The other main addition is the inclusion of alter egos, which let you switch between a player’s personas, allowing each player to play two positions at different times. For instance, a character could be playing as a striker in the first half, and then you can switch to the alter ego and place the player in defense, with a different move set, in the second half. As you can imagine, given the vast number of players on offer, this is little more than an amusing curio, having no meaningful effect on the way the game plays out. It basically exists to explain away a certain character’s backstory involving dead siblings and souls and never comes close to being anything like a game changer.

Inazuma Eleven 2 features female players, and you can recruit different (non-story) footballers depending on whether you own the Firestorm or Blizzard version. There’s also a narrative subplot involving a budding romance between Mark and one of two girls depending on the version. Other than this, the version differences are minor. There are a huge number of incidental players to recruit (well over a thousand), but there’s little collect-’em-all incentive when you can have only 100 players in your roster at once.

Other than these few minor changes, Inazuma Eleven 2 is pretty much the same game you played six months ago, only with a new story. It’s the same gameplay, the same visuals, and the same frustrations. The plot is slightly more involved this time, and there’s a lot more of it. For the first four or five hours in particular, the action is broken up by reams and reams of dialogue, cutscenes, scripted matches, and tutorials for a system the narrative assumes you already know.

Inazuma Eleven 2 is unlikely to win over critics of the previous game, and it’s a fairly impenetrable starting point given its assumption that you know the previous game’s story. For those who loved the original and are craving more of the same, it’s a worthy follow-up because it keeps every system in place, largely untouched. For those who aren’t already on Team Raimon, however, there’s little here to celebrate.

04/8/2012 — Filed under: Games
Tags: Inazuma Eleven 2, Review

Motorstorm RC Review

MotorStorm RC isn’t a MotorStorm game. Well, of course it is — there’s a big MotorStorm logo on the front of the box — but it’s nothing like any of the games that have appeared in the series before. True, many of the hallmarks of previous games are present and correct — a generous smattering of mud and dirt, an abundance of race-tuned off-road cars and a bass-heavy soundtrack that’ll test your ability to keep your bowels in check if you crank the volume up to maximum. But as a racing experience it has more in common with ancient top-down racer Micro Machines than it does with its predecessors.

04/7/2012 — Filed under: Games
Tags: Motorstorm RC, Review

The Last Story Review

The Good

Rich narrative with characters you actually care about
Innovative and fast-paced battle system
Beautiful visuals push the Wii to its limits
Heaps of side quests
Great localization.

The Bad

Minor frame rate issues.

The Last Story is a brilliant role-playing game that’s as rich and emotionally affecting as the best in the genre.

As you begin your journey in The Last Story, you get the feeling you’ve seen this all before; the maniacal dictator seeking ungodly powers, the crisis that threatens the survival of the world, and the band of shockingly youthful renegades, with even shockingly bigger swords, whose job it is to put it all right again. It’s a familiar tale, but The Last Story is far from a familiar game. It’s a deep, fast-paced JRPG, that evolves the genre in ways that enhance its existing tropes, without stripping away at its soul.

The best of the West is blended with the best of the East, resulting in a fantastically unique, exciting battle-system, beautifully rich visuals, and a story that-while familiar-has you feeling the deepest of care for the characters that live it. It’s not just a fantastic JRPG, but a fantastic game in its own right, delivering moments of touching romance, disparaging betrayal, and eruptive action, all with a poignancy that makes those moments feel like they’ve come straight from the heart.

A lot of that comes down to the cast of characters; a ragtag group of mercenaries for hire who never know where their next paycheck is coming from and live from one job to the next. It is their various drives and wants that propel you through the story. Lead character Zael has fairytale dreams of knights and princesses; the group’s leader Dagran craves the respect of the people, which is something he can never hope to achieve as a mercenary; and others, like Syrenne, simply enjoy a stiff drink and regular fisticuffs. Sometimes those desires collide with one another, creating tensions and conflicts that make their journey together all the more compelling.

These tensions come to a head when Lisa joins the group. Her mysterious past piques the interest of spiky-haired protagonist Zael-whom you spend the vast majority of the game playing as-with their blossoming relationship and its resulting ups and downs adding a hefty dose of melodrama to the proceedings. Sure, in true JRPG style, it can get a little saccharine, but it’s balanced out by an overarching plot that introduces warring nations, corrupt governments, and the very survival of the land itself. There’s even a sprinkling of religious iconography that gives you plenty to read into if you’re eager to further immerse yourself in the richness of the narrative.

While the story is a sprawling epic, the world you explore is less so, at least at face value. Events take place on Lazulis Island, on which a single city serves as the main hub for your adventures. Its cobbled streets, seedy taverns, and stonewalled castles are filled with all manner of citizens-some eager to strike up a conversation, others to sell you some of their wares-that create a lively and atmospheric environment that touches on aspects of the Middle Ages, without being too heavy handed with its themes.

Despite being set in a single city, there are still a wide variety of quests. One moment, you’re fighting off hordes of enemies in Lazulis castle; the next, you’re enjoying a quiet drink in Ariela’s Tavern before being whisked away to explore musty underground caverns deep beneath the surface. Between quests, you’re given the freedom to explore the city-to talk to its citizens, to go shopping, to soak up the medieval ambiance. There are many side quests to complete too. Some are your typical fetch quest, but others go further, asking you to rescue lost children, learn how to swim, or go on dates with various singletons from the city. Such freedoms do wonders to distract you from the fact that the main story quests are largely linear in nature, with the excellent narrative just willing you to push onward.

Most quests you undertake involve action of some sort, and fortunately, The Last Story has a combat system worthy of the narrative that drives it. The combat system combines elements of the Western and Japanese RPG to create something that is wholly unique and thrilling. The action takes place in real time in the environment you’re exploring, with enemies visible before you fight them; there are no random encounters or swishy battle screens here. Your melee attacks and those of your compatriots are largely automated, each of them hacking, slashing, or casting magic at nearby enemies.

Not everything is automated, though, particularly character movement, so you need to make the most of Zael’s dodge and cover abilities to avoid enemy projectiles like arrows and magic attacks. Conveniently placed rocks, pillars, and walls give you plenty of places to take cover behind, and are the ideal place for letting fly a few shots of Zael’s non-automated weapon, a crossbow. Different arrows have different effects, with some causing status changes, such as poison or sleep, and landing a well-placed headshot fells an enemy with a single shot. From cover, you can also seek out destructible areas of the environment, such as bridges that house archers or towering columns of rock that are just begging to be dropped onto an gang of unruly monsters.

Those areas can be destroyed by issuing commands to others in your party, with all manner of fire, ice, and nature spells at your disposal. As each spell lands, it creates an elemental circle, which, when walked through, adds that elemental ability to subsequent melee attacks. By using Zael’s gale ability you can «diffuse» those circles, which cast further status effects, such as silence. Or in the case of healing circles, they instantly heal your entire party. And if that weren’t enough to be getting on with, there’s Zael’s gathering ability, which draws the attention of enemies onto Zael, leaving your teammates free to cast spells or land a few blows with their swords.

It’s a strategic system that works brilliantly, not least because it takes place in real time, which makes fights dynamic, action-packed affairs. The pace at which new abilities are handed out is also spot-on, giving you time to master them, without ever feeling underpowered during battles. Customization fiends may lament the lack of options when it comes to each character’s spells and abilities, but weapon and armor upgrades give you plenty to tinker with, each affecting your characters' various statistics, such as stamina, attack power, or defensive abilities. More superficially, there a range of dyes you can buy that let you go colour crazy with clothing options.

Such enhancements make it over into New Game Plus, which unlocks once you’ve beaten the game, giving you the opportunity to take on all those small side quests and secret areas you might have missed the first time round, with a powered-up posse. Further attempts to extend the game’s longevity come in the form of multiplayer deathmatch and cooperative horde-style modes. They’re not something you frequent often and feel a bit tacked on, but given the wealth of content on offer in the single-player campaign, it’s no big loss.

The Last Story is a fantastic game; one that pushes the JRPG genre forward in ways that are innovative yet still complementary to the tradition of the genre. Its rich narrative straddles the line between emotionally affecting and breathtakingly action packed; its thrilling battle system is a unique, modern take on everything that has come before. And its visuals are some of the best ever seen on the Wii, pushing the system to its limits with its beautifully detailed environments and dazzling special effects (even if there’s a little frame rate stutter during more complex scenes).

And that’s not to mention the music from legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu, with its majestic melodies complementing the action in a way that is truly sublime. But its biggest success lies with the characters themselves, their diverse personalities and formidable ambitions forever pushing you along their journey from rags to riches. You want to be there with them; to guide them through their darkest of hours; to share in their happiest of moments. You will care. That alone makes The Last Story worth the price of admission and a captivating experience that everyone should play, JRPG fan or not.

03/1/2012 — Filed under: Games
Tags: Review, The Last Story