The different class of cars are actually an increase of difficulty setting, faster the cars, more possibility to crash and more time for the opponents to catch up or to increase the advance that might already have.

A different section of the championship is the one in which you have to make the more damage possible, usually at a crossroad or in an usually crowded area. The feeling it gives you is strange. It quenches your thirst to see a total mayhem on the road and it is actually some kind of puzzle or at least let’s say tricky. You have only one shot and usually more explosion - don’t remember the term because Star Wars: Renegade squadron is on the list now, if I like it I will review, naturally.

Actually the thing that gets you is the pace of the action, sometimes you simply pass to the limit near a bus, miss a higway sustaining pole by a milimeter, cross through a terrace trashing everything in your path just to stopp in an wall with 150 mph :). Believe me, you can only feel this, it’s very entertaining. The fact that a lot of stages are under 3 minutes makes the game perfect for the console purpose. Although I must say one of my colleagues wanted to buy a PSP after playing this game more than half of the shift continuously. Not to be missed, a legend indeed as the name says. I didn’t even mention the wonderful sound in the classic style of an EA game. 9 out of 10, add half of point if you like car games and arcades. Simply superb, I love it :).

What can I say? This is one of the games that make a console sell, it’s a good combination between tactics, action, some puzzles and various missions. The series follow the agent Gabe Logan and his partner (although she appears briefly in some of the games including this one. Speaking of secondary character the Chinese agent and the French one - both girls a la Bond - add some spice to the story.

Let me think what this game has to offer: as landscape there is a ship - inside and outside, a misty forest with a military base, an underwater mission, a dam and a desert. In terms of scenery there are a lot of twists and scripted pieces of action that add a plus to the feeling - the continuous escape of the Chinese agent or the 2-way escape from the prison are really enjoyable.

Speaking of which, there are some kind of puzzles that require your attention, keeping you from getting bored of shooting and walking around the stage. I’ve given the example with the escape from the prison, during which you’re given the chance to press a sequence of buttons in the right order and as quickly as possible. In the example given, if you don’t manage to do this then you’ll be thrown into jail, but if you do it properly then you’ll be able to kick the officer’s ass and even throw him in the electric chair and electrocute him. Really nice :).

Even there are some minuses like the AI which is very weak and the hard level of difficulty means that it has more firepower not that it is more clever, it is a great game, and an experience not to be missed, the secrets and the interesting bonus level that has no action but gives you an insight on the game make up for it. 8.5 out of ten in my opinion. If you have a PSP, a playstation 1 or 2 you should not miss the series, I totally recommend it.

After launching the game first you have music. Lots of it, it won’t stop at all until you exit the game. And you won’t :D. You have the option to turn it off, but it makes almost the entire atmosphere, making you want to send hundreds of enemies to heaven - or hell? You’ll get this change, don’t worry. If your idea of fun is to beat hundreds of enemies using hand-held weapons like a spear or a hammer? You’ve found the perfect game then, a lot of combos and special moves which require some kind of mana (I don’t remember how it’s called in the game) should do the trick. I said hundreds of enemies. I meant it literally, I’ve slayed in a stage over 500 enemies, so is not a joke.

But this is no pointless hack and slash game. There are only 3 main character types each with a particular fight style (technical, speed and strength), but you’ll unlock a lot of characters during the campaign and you’ll also have access to some features (you can call them upgrades if you like) - RPG style. I mean stats, bonuses and weapon improvements. After each battle you’ll have some points to spend for the improvements I’ve just mentioned or simply to boost character’s experience and thus character’s level.

Another interesting thing is the tactical aspect of this game, consisting in various objectives changing sometimes during the battle, you’ll have new allies when least expecting, and killing the officers - you can call them bosses if you want, because that’s what they are in fact - to put the enemy army on the run.

There are 4 different campaigns each containing about 10 stages each and also bonus secondary missions that will keep you playing for hours and hours in the quest for liberating the world from the Orochi. The story is not great and not that important but ads a little to the overall atmosphere. Not to be missed, 8.5 out of ten. Really nice!

One of the best things about Treasure Towers is that it’s free - completely free - for Sony Ericsson mobile phones, that is. In order to download it onto your phone, all you have to do is - to go, using your mobile phone browser, to www.sonyericsson.com/fun, select the Games category and… well.. look for it. Since it’s free, you’ll only pay for the data transfer to your mobile network operator.

So, back to Treasure Towers now.

You’re an Indiana Jones-like lizard jumping on a pogo-stick on the inside of a cylindric 3D tower. The view is gorgeous and you could have fun just jumping around, but you actually have to hurry and find your way to the top, ’cause the tower is slowly filling with water - and you wouldn’t want to drown, right?

The controls are very easy to master - left, right, up will allow high jumps(but can’t be combined with horizontal ones), down will let you duck and roll through small gates, and down in mid-air will trigger a hard-fall that can break the breakable stone blocks. On your way to the top you’ll have to be careful to special blocks - yellow ones are extended/contracted by special “key” blocks(marked with an exclamation sign), green ones are moving periodically, red blocks retract when touched. You’re likely to meet various enemies as well - spiders or spiked turtles - they won’t kill you but will leave you unconscious for a while - which makes you lose time, which increases the chances you eventually drown.

The fun part about the game is that, although levels are very easy to complete, you’ll never be satisfied with their mere completion - you’ll always want more, namely a better score. So besides climbing the tower, you’ll also want to find all the hidden treasure gems, and do so in the best time possible.

Levels get more and more difficult, the towers turning into 3d labyrinths with your “life” on the edge. It’s exciting, fast paced and a perfect 5-minutes play while taking the subway or waiting for the bus. It’s extremely fun, addictive even, easy to master and tough to let go of - Of all the mobile games I played, only Tower Bloxx and Diamond Rush were comparable(or better) than Treasure Tower.
This is probably the best free games available on the Sony Ericsson portal.

How come? Well, I’ve heard about Dungeon Siege before. It was about a friend asking me to try to help her to pass a quest because she heard of my gaming reputation. The game didn’t rise much interest from me at that time because I had other games in mind, I was playing World of Warcraft, Heroes 5… so there was not that much time left for that game. Two weeks ago though I bought the PSP version of the game and I was not sorry. At all.

What about it? Well, there are so many things to say and I don’t know exactly from where to begin. Let’s see… to have an idea imagine Diablo on PSP, you’ll get a pretty good picture of how this game feels and looks. And it is great. You have 3 main classes and their followers to choose, so you have several gameplay possibilities. The story is the same - not the video cut scenes though - but the items you receive and the skills you have to develop give the game a welcomed diversity.

Another fact that should be mentioned is the world who is pretty large and you have teleporters to reach various areas but you will still have enough places to discover. The world of the game is pretty vast, and the fact that you have a lot of locations to visit when you do the quests needed to advance the level of the character and to unlock different areas adds to the feeling this is a very large world. Here I should mention the fact that after discovering the most of the main continent where the journey begins you will start to wonder if you are close to the end of the game and you become a little disappointed feeling almost sorry for this you will discover the opportunity to travel by sea, increasing not only the enjoyment but also the vastness of the world.

There a lot of things to discover in this game, and although sometimes the environment seems to be a bit static - not more than Diablo game I mentioned above though - and the word that best describes this game is “variety”.

I simply love this game, 9.5 out of 10. Great experience, not to be missed.

Yes, I love this game. From the end of the tutorial things are developing fas, you loose almost everything and your life changes completely. And not only once during the game, you cannot trust anyone and everything it seemed right becomes wrong and vice versa. Yeah, this sentence makes no sense if you don’t play this game.

Plainly, what this game offers? I’ve played two thirds of it according to the statistics and I have it for about two weeks, playing almost an hour per day, almost anytime I get the chance, even in the overcrowded tube. Well, you have an excellent scenario, revealing itself during the game. What options do you have? Well, you can go hunt outlaws for a bounty, you can make deliveries riding as hard as you can (oh, yeah, the game involves a lot of riding, the fastest way to cover not - so long distances in the game - “Hi-yo Silver!” ). You can also do various missions for the lazy sheriffs. Care for a game of poker old west style? Can do that in the local saloons, tournaments are to be unlocked. You also have the possibility to hunt wild animals later on, but you have to do it by sneaking and shooting them with an arrow, so you have a new challenge in those missions. The story missions are far more interesting, from escorting the stage coach to using dynamite for creating a stone wall in order to stop and rob a train.

Another thing that that I think contributes to the depth of the game is the skills system - so this is an extra reason to do the side missions - they will give you extra skills and money. What are the money good for? To purchase upgrades, extra ammo slots, quick reflexes and firepower. Speaking of which you have a “quick draw” mode, meaning the time is slowed Matrix - like and you can shoot very fast a large number of enemies. This can be a life saver sometimes or depending on your skill, this might decrease the difficulty level of the stage.

No matter how much things I would say in this article, nothing can describe the feeling of “being there”, the feeling of freedom when riding through the plains or the badlands, the narrow canyon, the unexpected shortcuts, mines or bandits hideout. You never know what will happen when you reach the site of the mission, so this ads to the general impression.

I am a gamer, so there are not many games that impress me, but this one is great in my opinion. Not perfect, but I love it, nine out of ten from me. It’s been long since I had so much fun, an experience not to be missed.

As I said in a previous article, the game is from what I understand very much like the PS2 version, so it has everything you’d expect from any game in GTA series: a lot of missions, a lot of violence, you can enjoy the complete freedom this series offers. If killing pedestrians by running them down is your way of having fun, you can do it. Would you prefer to run them down? That’s possible, too. You can ride a lot of cars, bikes, bicycles, an ATV, speedboats and even a hovercraft. Not to mention helicopters. As you probably know the city seems to have it’s own life, sometimes you can see police vehicles chasing gang members, planes in the night sky and more things like that.

Actually, even if the graphics are very good, not to mention the sounds - some radios have very good music in terms of quality and I think they suit all tastes - I like most in this game the fact that even if sometimes you have a difficult mission and you cannot pass it very easy you play this game just for fun, I sometimes go for a ride in a fast car, or I play the firefighter missions, or the police missions, sometimes I take patients with the helicopter from their location to the hospital. If you do these side missions you obtain several advantages, like being fire-proof, having more health or being able to swim for a longer time without drowning. Care for an adrenaline rush? You can participate to the illegal races in some tracks in several areas situated on both islands. I even found some races involving an ATV and an all-terain bike.

The single player campaign has only a very poor sketched scenario. You are in the army, working hard for taking care of the sick little brother. But how you get to have an empire based on illegal businesses like prostitution, drugs, robberies and more is a very strange twist. Especially that during the briefings main character says several times that he doesn’t want to do this, although during the missions you get to do quite some damage if you know what I mean :).

There are some bugs I’ve noticed during play - maybe because of my old job - but they are more funny than annoying, the car who is occasionally stuck wheels upwards in the bridge to the south or some strange behavior.

But no one plays GTA for the scenario. If you like this series on the PC and you own a PSP then playing this game on this device is a must. I never miss the chance to have a game in the subway, and neither should you. I can’t tell anything about the multiplayer option because I don’t have much friends who own a PSP but as I experienced in other games is a great experience too. Happy shooting, killing, car crushing or whatever you like. Welcome to Vice City!

According to Techcrunch, today was the day a new website that calls itself “youtube for mobile games” went live.

Playoo offers free games for mobile phones, user-generated content, social interaction and personal expression.

Mobile phone users can find games of interest, personalized recommendations based on each user’s preferences and those of their friends. Playoo also offers game creation tools that will allow users with no experience to design their own games.

While the resulting games are likely to be lame, such free mobile games are welcome in a world where good mobile games are, unfortunately, extremely rare. I’m very curious to beta test Playoo and, hopefully, build a couple of free mobile games created specially for our readers. Only time will tell if Playoo is gonna be a hit or a miss.

Back to the PSP now - why would u need it, and does it boil eggs?

Why did I buy it?

I spend much time on the road  - for example in the big city when I go to work, commuting takes long of time (about an hour in my particular case). So.. what are the mobile entertainment options you have? You can listen music. For that you have mp3 players. You could maybe see a movie - you can buy a mp4 or a portable DVD player. If you like to play then you have the mobile as a possibility.

But the PSP offers all these options. You can listen mp3 files - it is no iPod but it has presets, shuffle function, it can read folders and sound quality makes up for the brand, so you can imagine the experience will be satisfying. You can see movies with the mp4 player - using converters for all types of video files is easy. Besides UMD movies have very good quality, you’ll be surprised. Not to mention the screen who provides a very good movie experience with its wide screen The games? A few words later in this article - and in some future reviews -  but using the mobile phone for 2 gaming hours or more exhausts the battery life and you wouldn’t want that, since not being able to be reached or be able to make important calls is not very pleasant.

How powerful is it?

To be honest I don’t even know the technical specs of it’s direct competition like Nintendo DS or Gameboy Advance. Go read a real review if you want to learn the actual GPU speed, BUS bandwidth or RAM capacity. But, trust a gamer on this, it doesn’t really matter because, after all, it’s the good software that sells a console(although from what I’ve read PSP is comparable to the power of Ps2 when comparing raw power and scaling the screen resolution). Look at the PS3, the hardware is very good but because of the lack of a mature software who would be able to take full advantage of the hardware capacity the sales won’t to be reaching the sky. It is a very advanced piece of hardware but in a market shared by the mature Xbox 360 and the user-friendly Wii I don’t know if we could say it is a hit.

Is it worth it?

The main reason I’m writing this is because I’ve met very often the question “Should I buy a PSP or a Playstation 2?” and I find it useless. There are indeed some PSP titles who can compare with the PS2 version - for instance GTA PSP versions who are great games and can be easily compared to the Ps2 version (actually from what I understand they are almost the same, but I cannot bet on it). The Tomb raider PSP editions are also very good. If you want a good home gaming system then there is no way you will choose the PSP over any other TV console. If the most important for you is the mobility and you are always on the run (this applies especially for the big cities) then PSP is a good choice. There are also games who cannot be compared at all with the PC or console version. One of them is is Test Drive Unlimited. The road textures who made the game look great on the PC don’t look good on the PSP version. I’m not saying it is not a great game, my point is that it is not the same, those versions cannot be compared.

Whether you are a casual or hardcore gamer the PSP is a nice gizmo to have, the only thing I regret is that I haven’t bought it earlier :). I think PSP is the best choice for entertainment and gaming “on the go”.

Today’s game is “Kane and Lynch” from Eidos, a surprisingly good game in my humble opinion.

I mentioned in a previous review that Eidos sent us a bulk of mobile games: not only Tomb Raider: Anniversary but 2 extra games also, of which K&L is one.
One of my friends told me he’s been playing this game on PC, so apparently this is the mobile edition of this franchise. Is the story of two criminals who are bound one to another in a more than unusual way going to be successful? I couldn’t say, but the novelty of the idea is a plus in my opinion. Only the lack of time prevented me from playing this game on PC, because the mobile version raised my curiosity. Briefly, this is a classical type of shooter/platformer, you have to shoot everybody, jump over laser traps, climb ladders and any movement you usually would expect to do in this kind of game.

The good part is that you have a lot of various weapons - anyone knows how to use the grenade launcher? An interesting addition is the use of the second character, he plays a passive role except for the moments when some sharpshooting is involved and that is because he is a sniper. And the moments won’t be seldom, you will have to shoot enemies lurking at the windows, security cameras to stop the reinforcements and thus making your life easier in this game. If you want a little extra than pure action some dialogs help to develop some character personality and a story, but they can be very fast skipped. You’ll do it for sure because you’ll be wanting to deal with next stage fast.

Stages are different, but because of the genre of the game - 2D on my ancient k700 - they seem repetitive after a while. The thing I like best in at this game is that you’ll be coming for more, the number of stages is pretty large - I must confess I haven’t finished this game and I’ve played for about 2 hours at least - and a stage of this game goes very well when in the subway or at the doctor’s, or maybe even during classes.

Not a wonderful game, but ok. 8 out of ten, add half a point if you like this genre a lot.