NBA 2K14 NOW AVAILABLE

HERE IS THE SUMMARY FOR NBA 2K14 FROM IGN:

 2K Sports takes it to the hole with its 2014 edition of the blockbuster hoops franchise.

HERE IS THE REVIEW FOR NBA 2K14 FROM IGN:

When I drove the lane as LeBron, drew the defense to me, and kicked a no-look pass to the wing for an open trey by Mario Chalmers using the new Assist Pass modifier on the left trigger – after which a camera close-up showed Chalmers making the “Okay” symbol with both hands (the NBA’s current three-pointer salute), NBA 2K14 proved its worth. The worry is that without competition, a series might adopt an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy and grow apathetic. But in the time I’ve spent with it,  2K14 confidently walked the line between not enough change and too much.

First and foremost, 2K14 continues to get the core basketball systems almost dead-on right, and that’s the key to its success. Unlike hoops sims from early in this console generation, it simply has no major weaknesses. Fast breaks are fun to execute but not too common or exploitable – you can thank the tightened-up defense for that, which also stops you from charging wildly to the basket for a hoop and/or a foul every time down the floor. Play-calling is a snap via the D-pad, and the Y/Triangle-button-based post-up game again feels intuitive and allows you to pull off a bevy of moves in the paint.

Perhaps as a side-effect of that defensive upgrade, goaltending is far too prevalent on both ends of the floor. I also saw an excessive amount of players on both sides either stepping out of bounds or catching a pass out of bounds in ways the pros just don’t in real life.

Counterbalancing that are two key areas of improvement this year, both coming in the ball-handling department. The Assist Pass lets you throw no-look and cross-court passes by holding 
 want the ball to go, resulting in highlight-reel-worthyl fast-break finishes and beautiful kick-outs to wide-open spot-up shooters when you drive down the lane. If you utilize it correctly, that is; the Assist Pass is easily punished, with ill-advised attempts practically guaranteed to result in a turnover.

Also better is the Shot Stick. A wider variety of more precise dribble moves are made possible by twiddling the right thumbstick in various directions and combinations. It’s a natural evolution of the feature, and it gives you even more control in a game that already offers a wealth of it. The popular online Association mode also returns effectively unchanged, along with the same crop of online features. Regrettably, the Dream Team mode has vanished, though as a (weak) apology, Euroleague clubs have joined the NBA 2K party.

In fact, the lone major new mode this year is LeBron: Path to Greatness, a thematic opposite of 2K12’s revered Jordan Challenge. Rather than allow you to recreate and virtually relive King James’ biggest career moments the way His Airness’ mode did, it instead lets you play out LeBron’s hypothetical future, either by staying with the Heat and building a dynasty or, far more appealingly, testing free-agent waters. The latter option takes James from the Heat to the Knicks and eventually back to the Cavs, putting him in fantastical scenarios both with and against even more fantastical superteams, such as a LeBron/CP3/Howard-led Knicks roster against a Rose/Melo/Wade-fronted Bulls squad. It’s fun, but it’s nowhere near as compelling as playing out some of the greatest moments in NBA history in Jordan Challenge. Puzzlingly, this mode doesn’t allow you to save your progress mid-game and come back later the way the rest of 2K14 does, and that’s a needless annoyance.

Yet again this year, presentation matches gameplay. In addition to uncanny signature animations – Kobe’s shot looks exactly like it does in real life, as one of countless examples – the little ones are what fool casual passers-by into thinking you’re watching an actual NBA game. Guys complaining about getting fouled after making shots with contact, “Beat L-A!” crowd chants when leading late against the Lakers at home, sarcastic “Air-baaaaall” serenades by the fans when a visiting player launches up a shot that doesn’t draw iron, and many more all add flavor, personality, and texture to an already-realistic hoops sim.

The commentary is equally impressive, with the three-man Kevin Harlan-led booth not only keeping up with the on-court action, but offering specially recorded dialogue for Path to Greatness. For instance, when one scenario pitted LeBron against Kobe in the Laker legend’s final game – coincidentally when James was trying to break Bryant’s record for youngest to reach 25,000 career points – they weren’t matched up against each other on defense. But when I took control of James and chose to D up Kobe for the first time, Harlan chimed in with, “Here we go; This is the matchup we’ve all been waiting for!” He wasn’t wrong.

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The Verdict

It’s a credit to NBA 2K14 that despite not one but two new basketball sims looming on the next-gen horizon, it still managed to draw my attention squarely to the current-gen court and keep it there. Though LeBron’s new mode doesn’t manage to bottle the same magic of MJ’s from two years back, the new Assist Pass, and re-tooled ball handling have made what was already a finely tuned on-court experience even tighter. NBA 2K14 is simply the best hoops sim I’ve ever played

CLICK HERE FOR THE DIRECT DOWNLOAD FOR NBA 2K14 XBOX 360.

CLICK HERE FOR THE DIRECT DOWNLOAD FOR NBA 2K14 PS3.

BEYOND 2 SOULS NOW AVAILABLE

HERE IS THE SUMMARY FROM IGN FOR BEYOND 2 SOULS:
 From the makers of the award-winning Heavy Rain comes a unique, psychological action thriller. Featuring a brand-new game engine, a compelling, original story, and a top-notch Hollywood cast; Beyond: Two Souls offers a sophisticated, technologically advanced, immersive gaming experience on PlayStation 3.
Live the remarkable life of Jodie Holmes, a young woman who possesses supernatural powers through a psychic link to an invisible entity. Experience the most striking moments of Jodie's life as your actions and decisions determine her fate. As she traverses the globe, Jodie will face incredible challenges against a backdrop of emotionally-charged events never before seen in a video game.

 HERE IS THE REVIEW (CRAPPY BIASED XBOT FANBOY REVIEWER HOWEVER) FROM IGN FOR BEYOND 2 SOULS. 
 If you are the type who scrolls down a review to see the score before reading the text, know this first: I have never found assigning a number to a game so difficult. This is principally because Beyond: Two Souls takes the vision that writer/creative director David Cage and his team at Quantic Dream have held onto for so long - that interactive drama is the way to make gamers conditioned to meaningless violence feel something in the depths of our brittle souls - to unprecedented extremes. But Beyond is a game that made me feel too much like a passive participant, which made “playing” it a very confusing and unrewarding experience.
Indeed, if there was ever a game that suggested that Cage is a frustrated film director at heart, it’s this one. Beyond is an opus – a muddy and unfocused one, but an opus – packed with so much plot it feels like Cage has indulged his every whim and want in a single project. Unlike Heavy Rain before it, which dipped into silliness but was at least thematically consistent, Beyond’s only consistency is its focus on Jodie Holmes, the game's tragic heroine. She’s a character wonderfully realized by actress Ellen Page, who proves to be much of Beyond’s saving grace.

Jodie’s story is told in chapters out of chronological order across 15 years of her life. Beyond dances between these chapters: Jodie as a little girl, Jodie as a stubborn teen, Jodie as a young woman, Jodie as a little girl again, and so on. Her plight is driven by an unwanted tethering to a Poltergeist-like spirit she calls Aiden, whom you can also control depending on the circumstance.
This flitting back and forth across multiple eras of Jodie’s life presents a couple of problems. It gives Beyond a schizophrenic,the progression of the narrative. Next to something like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, this experiment with chronology feels unfocused; we are frequently thrust into deeply dramatic scenes that claw at our tear ducts far too early, before we’ve had the chance to fully invest in characters and their circumstances. In truth, Beyond’s plot would still feel disjointed even if it were told in order. Those familiar with Quantic’s previous works, most notably Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, should not expect anything more focused here. The story takes us from horror (where the influence of Brian de Palma and Adrian Lyne is strong) to drama, action, and sci-fi, and it’s peppered with pulp: evil government conspiracies, supernatural enemies, and cackling bad guys from distant climates abound.

Cage has said in interviews that switching between genres and tone was a conscious choice, as nobody’s life is ever one flat note. But this is not a real life. This is a story about a girl and her ghost, and there is a reason filmmakers tend to stick with one genre or another: so as to craft a cohesive narrative. It is unfortunate there is no such discipline to be found here.
Occasionally, the plot does sing, and is dotted with moments that compelled me to continue playing. Cage’s best work comes out in the quieter, more human moments in his stories. Helping a teenage Jodie agonize over which music to choose at a party is one such moment; playing guitar on the streets in the middle of a bitter winter to earn enough money to buy food is another.
In these scenes, Ellen Page has the opportunity to really make us care for Jodie. Page is an eminently likeable and capable actress and gamely takes on Cage’s crazy twists and turns, delivering her lines with nothing less than utter sincerity. The rest of the cast don’t always grant him the same favour, and frequently slip into broad theatrical strokes (“for the love of God, she’s a monster!”) because the writing grants them this luxury. Page – and yes, Willem Dafoe, although he’s simply doing his Norman Osborne routine here – knows when to downplay the crazy and put emphasis on those smaller moments. It is principally thanks to her, although Cage does deserve some credit here too, that I felt a lump in my throat at the end.

What’s missing, then, is the actual game built around this story. The system that allows us to interact with Jodie’s world has been streamlined for the better since Heavy Rain, and for the most part the action buttons - those much-maligned perpetrators of quick-time events (QTEs) - have been discarded. They’re replaced with more intuitive contextual interactions on the right thumbstick, or iPhone touchscreen if you choose to play with an even further-simplified control scheme.
Anything you can interact with in the world is indicated by a white dot; move the right stick in the direction that feels natural, and Jodie will do the predictable thing: pick up a doll, take a shower, sit down on a chair. There are the occasional instances of QTE prompts in moments of high tension, although they are relatively unobtrusive and feel natural within that context.
Navigating Aiden, too, is easy enough. You can switch to him when Jodie needs help, and a press of the triangle button will propel you into a first person view with a satisfying woosh. In his form you can pass through walls and ceilings to possess certain enemies (why some but not all is not explained), kill certain enemies (ditto), move certain items and occasionally feed Jodie flashbacks via a telepathic link so she knows how to progress. There is little coherency to the system, for Aiden’s usefulness is determined on a contextual basis by Quantic. Rarely did I feel as if I was using Aiden to progress based on my own intuition alone.
When he is required, Jodie will use one of a handful of verbal prompts: “help me Aiden,” “get rid of them, Aiden,” and so on. His goals tend to be blatantly signposted - a character to possess immediately to the left, an interactive bit of ghost dust in the room above. Further, you can’t always switch to him; it seems Aiden is a stubborn spirit. This simplistic gameplay and Aiden’s limitations are disappointing, particularly if one considers the potential for dynamic puzzle-solving interplay between Jodie and Aiden in co-op mode.

Combat is the weakest aspect of Quantic’s new control scheme. Time slows down during physical fights, and you must move the right stick in the same direction as Jodie’s body to block or punch or kick. Her body isn’t always easy to read –and you only have a couple of seconds in which to do so – so frequently I found myself ducking instead of kicking, or moving backwards instead of forwards.
It’s no matter: the outcome will be the same regardless. Jodie can get stabbed, beat up, pushed off the side of a building; she’ll always be fine on the other side. In circumstances where this invulnerability system is overtly nonsensical – when she gets shot for example – Aiden will simply heal her.
This constant push and pull between our sense that we are impacting the story and the story itself has always been at the heart of everything David Cage has created, but it’s examples like these that highlight just how passive Beyond made me feel. There are, of course, choices: on Quantic’s whim, you can choose how Jodie responds in conversation, whether she’ll dance at a party or not, or take revenge on someone who has wronged her. But unlike the critical decisions you make in Heavy Rain, Beyond’s choices feel small, and the story will storm onward no matter how they are played out, never pausing to toss you a crunchy moral quandary to change its direction in any way that feels significant. It’s disappointingly unadaptable.
I can illustrate this by comparing two scenarios. In one, Jodie is preparing for a date: you have the ability to choose her outfit, what she’ll cook for dinner, if she cleans up her apartment or not, and so on. How she completes these tasks will affect the outcome of the date. In another, Jodie is instructed to kill a man. You have no choice in this.

These restrictions are, of course, understandable from a technical perspective. Each time Quantic offers us a major decision, there is more game that must be made to accommodate, plus the developer only had so much flexibility with a solo protagonist. But it is unwise to build up our expectations of being able to choose our actions and then take that away from us where it feels most important.
It should be noted that Beyond’s linearity also extends to general exploration, but this is an understandable decision on Quantic’s behalf; opening up its world would cause chaos with Beyond’s tightly scripted story. You still can bask in the beautifully detailed trappings of suburbia Quantic has carefully created, or the glistening sterility of a research base, or the vast desert plains of the Great Southwestern Nowhere. These stunningly realized backdrops are triumphs of technical craftsmanship, but they are indeed backdrops, built for looking at rather than touching; a thought that perhaps encapsulates this game in its entirety.

The Verdict

Scene by scene, Beyond: Two Souls is compelling enough, principally thanks to a remarkable performance from Ellen Page. But never before have I felt like such a passive participant in a video game, my choices and actions merely icing on a dense, multi-layered cake. Playing Beyond is a memorable experience, yes, but a good video game it is not; and while the credits were rolling I admit to thinking I would have been happier to sit back and watch a movie version that was eight-and-a-half hours shorter.
CLICK HERE FOR THE DIRECT TORRENT DOWNLOAD FOR THE GAME BEYOND 2 SOULS. 

GRAND THEFT AUTO 5 (GTA V) NOW AVAILABLE

HERE IS THE SUMMARY FROM IGN FOR THE GAME GTA V:

Trouble taps on your window again with this next chapter in the Grand Theft Auto universe, set in the city of Los Santos and its surrounding hills, countryside and beaches. A bold new direction in open-world freedom, storytelling, mission-based gameplay and online multiplayer, Grand Theft Auto V focuses on the pursuit of the almighty dollar in a re-imagined, present-day Southern California.

Los Santos: a sprawling sun-soaked metropolis full of self-help gurus, starlets and fading celebrities, once the envy of the Western world, now struggling to stay afloat in an era of economic uncertainty and cheap reality TV.
Amidst the turmoil, three very different criminals plot their own chances of survival and success: Franklin, a street hustler looking for real opportunities and serious money; Michael, a professional ex-con whose retirement is a lot less rosy than he hoped it would be; and Trevor, a violent maniac driven by the chance of a cheap high and the next big score. Running out of options, the crew risks everything in a series of daring and dangerous heists that could set them up for life.


HERE IS THE REVIEW FROM IGN FOR THE GAME GTA V:
  
This review exclusively covers the single-player portion of Grand Theft Auto V, since it launched without any multiplayer mode.
 

For me, Grand Theft Auto V’s extraordinary scope is summed up in two favourite moments. One is from a mid-game mission in which I flew a plane into another plane, fought the crew, hijacked the thing, and then parachuted out and watched it crash into the sea to escape death at the hands of incoming military fighter jets. Another time, whilst driving around in an off-road buggy, I got distracted by something that looked like a path up one of the San Andreas mountains. Turns out it was a path, and I spent 15 minutes following to the summit, where I nearly ran over a group of hikers. “Typical!” one of them yelled at me, as if he nearly gets run over by a rogue ATV on top of a mountain every time he goes on a hike.

I could go on like this for ages. GTA V has an abundance of such moments, big and small, that make San Andreas – the city of Los Santos and

Grand Theft Auto V

September 17, 2013

its surrounding areas – feel like a living world where anything can happen. It both gives you tremendous freedom to explore an astonishingly well-realised world and tells a story that’s gripping, thrilling, and darkly comic. It is a leap forward in narrative sophistication for the series, and there’s no mechanical element of the gameplay that hasn’t been improved over Grand Theft Auto IV. It’s immediately noticeable that the cover system is more reliable and the auto-aim less touchy. The cars handle less like their tires are made of butter and stick better to the road, though their exaggerated handling still leaves plenty of room for spectacular wipeouts. And at long last, Rockstar has finally slain one of its most persistent demons, mission checkpointing, ensuring that you never have to do a long, tedious drive six times when you repeatedly fail a mission ever again.

Grand Theft Auto V is also an intelligent, wickedly comic, and bitingly relevant commentary on contemporary, post-economic crisis America. Everything about it drips satire: it rips into the Millennial generation, celebrities, the far right, the far left, the middle class, the media... Nothing is safe from Rockstar’s sharp tongue, including modern video games. One prominent supporting character spends most of his time in his room shouting sexual threats at people on a headset whilst playing a first-person shooter called Righteous Slaughter (“Rated PG – pretty much the same as the last game.”) It’s not exactly subtle – he literally has the word “Entitled” tattooed on his neck, and the in-game radio and TV’s outright piss-takes don’t leave much to the imagination – but it is often extremely funny, and sometimes provocative with it. Grand Theft Auto’s San Andreas is a fantasy, but the things it satirises – greed, corruption, hypocrisy, the abuse of power – are all very real. If GTA IV was a targeted assassination of the American dream, GTA V takes aim at the modern American reality. The attention to detail that goes into making its world feel alive and believable is also what makes its satire so biting.

Grand Theft Auto V’s plot happily operates at the boundaries of plausibility, sending you out to ride dirt bikes along the top of trains, hijack military aircraft, and engage in absurd shootouts with scores of policemen, but its three main characters are what keep it relatable even at its most extreme. The well-written and acted interplay between them provides the biggest laughs and most affecting moments, and the way that their relationships with one another developed and my opinion of them changed throughout the story gave the narrative its power. They feel like people – albeit extraordinarily f***ed-up people.

Michael is a retired con man in his 40s, filling out around the middle as he drinks beside the pool in his Vinewood mansion with a layabout son, air-headed daughter, serially unfaithful wife, and very expensive therapist – all of whom hate him. Franklin is a young man from downtown Los Santos who laments the gang-banger stereotype even as he’s reluctantly seduced by the prospect of a bigger score. And then there’s Trevor, a volatile career criminal who lives in the desert selling drugs and murdering rednecks; a psychopath whose bloodthirsty lunacy is fuelled by a combination of methamphetamine and a seriously messed-up childhood.

The missions flit between their individual stories and an overarching plotline that involves all three, and it’s a credit to GTA V’s versatility and universal quality that each character has his share of standout missions. As their arcs developed I felt very differently about each of them at different times – they’re not entirely the archetypes that they seem to be.

This three-character structure makes for excellent pacing and great variety in the storyline, but it also allows Rockstar to compartmentalise different aspects of Grand Theft Auto’s personality. In doing so, it sidesteps some of the troubling disconnect that arose when Niko Bellic abruptly alternated between anti-violent philosophising and sociopathic killing sprees in GTA IV. Here, many of Michael’s missions revolve around his family and his past, Franklin is usually on call for vehicular mayhem, and extreme murderous rampages are left to Trevor. Each has a special ability suited to his skills – Franklin can to slow time while driving, for example – which gives them a unique touch. Narratively, it’s effective – even off-mission I found myself playing in character, acting like a mid-life-crisis guy with anger issues as Michael, a thrill-seeker as Franklin, and a maniac as Trevor. The first thing I did when Franklin finally made some good money was buy him an awesome car, because I felt like that’s what he’d want.

Trevor feels a like a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card for Rockstar, providing an outlet for all the preposterous antics and murderous behaviour that otherwise might not fit in with GTA V’s narrative ambitions. I found his violent insanity a little overblown and tiresome at first. As get-out clauses go, though, it’s pretty effective, and Trevor’s over-the-top missions are some of GTA V’s action-packed highlights. It’s a successful way of solving a problem that’s prevalent in open-world games: the tension between the story that the writers are trying to tell, and the story you create yourself within its systems and its world. Grand Theft Auto V accommodates both, masterfully, allowing neither to undermine the other.

The actual act of switching between them also provides a window into their individual lives and habits, fleshing out their personalities in a way that feels natural and novel. Pick a character and the camera zooms out over the San Andreas map, closing back in on wherever they happen to be. Michael might be at home watching TV when you drop in on him, or speeding along the motorway blasting ‘80s hits, or having a cigarette at the golf club; Franklin might be walking out of a strip club, munching a bag of snacks at home, or arguing with his ex-girlfriend; there’s a good chance that Trevor could be passed out half naked on a beach surrounded by dead bodies or, on one memorable occasion, drunk in a stolen police helicopter.

It could be nearly anything, because there is a bewildering multiplicity of things to do in the new San Andreas – tennis, yoga, hiking, racing on sea and on land, flying planes, golfing, cycling, diving, hunting, and more. The missions are an able guide to both San Andreas’ locations and its activities, touring you around the map and whetting your appetite for independent exploration of it all. The way that we’re introduced to San Andreas never feels artificial – the map is completely open from the start, for example – which contributes to the impression that it’s a real place, somewhere you can get to know. If GTA IV’s Liberty City feels like a living city, San Andreas feels like a living world. I saw people walking their dogs along the beach in the country as I jet-skied past, arguing on the street outside a cinema in Los Santos, and camped – with tents and everything – overnight on Mount Chiliad, before packing up and continuing a hike in the morning. It’s astounding.

The ambience changes dramatically depending on where you are, too. Trevor’s dusty trailer out in the middle of nowhere in Blaine County feels like a different world from downtown Los Santos or Vespucci Beach. It wasn’t until the first time I flew a plane out of the city and over the mountains I was cycling around a few hours before that the full scale of it became obvious. It pushes the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 further than it has any right to, and it looks incredible. The biggest jump in quality since Grand Theft Auto IV is the character animation, but the world is also much more expansive, detailed, and populous. The price we pay for that is occasional framerate dips and texture pop-in, which I found became more prominent the longer I played, but never significantly detracted from my experience. For such a gigantic and flexible world it’s also remarkably bug-free – I encountered just three minor issues in the 35 hours I spent on my first playthrough, none of which caused me to fail a mission.

San Andreas’s extraordinary sense of place is heightened by the fact that so much of it isn’t on the map. There’s so much going on that it’s easy to find things organically, rather than spend your life following a mission marker. I once stole a passenger jet from the airport for the hell of it, then parachuted onto the top of the tallest building in Los Santos. (I then accidentally jumped off the top and fell to my death, forgetting that I’d already used the parachute, but I usually leave that bit out.) Out driving in the country, I came across a man tied to a telephone pole in womens’ underwear. I chased down criminals who randomly swipe purses on the street, and happened across gunbattles between police and other miscreants, events that add a sense that this world isn’t completely uneventful if I wasn’t here to disrupt normalcy. I bought an expensive mountain bike and cycled around in the hills, enjoying the view. These little moments can be captured on your phone camera – which, brilliantly, can also take selfies. I have several snaps of Trevor doing his unhinged version of a smile in his underpants on top of a mountain.

The story that GTA V tells through its missions takes full advantage of all this variety beyond driving and shooting (though the driving and shooting is still supremely enjoyable). It’s got so many great moments. It had me racing Michael’s lazy blob of a son across Vespucci Beach in one of many misguided attempts at father-son bonding, using a thermal scope to search for someone from a helicopter before chasing them across the city on the ground, torching a meth lab, towing cars for Franklin’s crack-addict cousin to prevent him from losing his job, infiltrating a facility from the sea in a wetsuit and flippers, piloting a submarine, impersonating a construction worker, doing yoga, escaping on jet skis, failing multiple times to land a plane loaded with drugs at a hangar out in the desert… it goes on and on. The days of a repetitive series of “drive here, find this guy, shoot this guy” are behind us. Even missions that would otherwise be formulaic are imbued with novelty and excitement by the potential to play them from three different viewpoints – in a shootout, Trevor might be firing RPGs from a rooftop as Michael and Franklin flank the enemy on the ground.

It’s the heists – multi-stage, huge-scale events that serve as the story’s climactic peaks – that show Grand Theft Auto V at its most ambitious and accomplished. Usually there’s a choice between a more involved, stealthier option that will (hopefully) attract less heat, and an all-out option that will be less tense but more explosively chaotic – and what crew to take along with you on the job. All of GTA V’s missions are replayable at any time, letting you relive favourite moments or try out another approach. They also have optional objectives in the vein of Assassin’s Creed’s synchronisation challenges, but crucially, these are invisible the first time you play a mission, and so they don’t distract you from doing things your own way.

Sometimes your own way won’t be the way that the designers expected you to do something, and though Grand Theft Auto V is usually very good at bending around you when that happens, there were one or two occasions where it wasn’t prepared for my personal brand of chaos. Overtake a car you’re not supposed to overtake and it will zip through lines of traffic as if by magic. Despite the introduction of new stealth mechanics, enemies will miraculously see you when the mission dictates that they should. Kill someone before you’re supposed to, and that’s sometimes Mission Failed. Most of the time the scripting is good enough to be invisible, but when it’s not, you really notice it – if only because most of the time it’s so seamless.

As ever, some of the wittiest writing shows up on the in-game radio that plays behind all of the exploration and mayhem. “There’s nothing more successful, more masculine, more American than a big wad of cash,” blasts one of the in-game ads. “We know times are tough, but they don’t have to be tough for you. Still got some liquidity in your house? Are you insane?” The music selection is also typically excellent, leading to many of those serendipitous moments where you’re driving along and the perfect song comes on. During a heist, when the radio isn’t blaring the background, a dynamic soundtrack seriously builds tension.

The satire is helped by integration of modern life into the game world. Every character revolves around their smartphone – it’s used to trade stocks, call up friends to meet up and send emails. There’s a great Facebook spoof, Life Invader, on the in-game Interne, with the slogan “Where Your Personal Information Becomes A Marketing Profile (That We Can Sell)”. You’ll hear adverts for preposterous parodic TV shows that you can actually watch on your TV at home, optionally whilst enjoying a toke. It might not be realistic, but it definitely feels authentic.

It’s worth mentioning that when it comes to sex, drugs, and violence, GTA V pushes boundaries much further than ever before. If the morality police were worried about Hot Coffee, there’s a lot here that will provoke moral hysteria. It’s deliciously subversive, and firmly tongue in cheek... but once or twice, it pushes the boundaries of taste, too. There’s one particular scene, a torture scene in which you have no choice but to actively participate, that I found so troubling that I had difficulty playing it; even couched in obvious criticism of the US government’s recourse to torture post 9/11, it’s a shocking moment that will attract justified controversy. It brings to mind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s No Russian mission, except worse, and without the option to skip over it. Some other stuff, like the ever-present prostitution and extensive strip-club minigames, feels like it’s there just because it can be rather than because it has anything to say.

There is nothing in San Andreas, though, that doesn’t serve Rockstar’s purpose in creating an exaggerated projection of America that’s suffused with crime, violence and sleaze. There are no good guys in GTA V. Everyone you meet is a sociopath, narcissist, criminal, lunatic, sadist, cheat, liar, layabout, or some combination of those. Even a man who pays good money to assassinate Los Santos’ worst examples of corporate greed is playing the stock market to his advantage whilst he does it. In a world like this, it’s not hard to see why violence is so often the first recourse. All the pieces fit.

The Verdict

Grand Theft Auto V is not only a preposterously enjoyable video game, but also an intelligent and sharp-tongued satire of contemporary America. It represents a refinement of everything that GTA IV brought to the table five years ago. It’s technically more accomplished in every conceivable way, but it’s also tremendously ambitious in its own right. No other world in video games comes close to this in size or scope, and there is sharp intelligence behind its sense of humour and gift for mayhem. It tells a compelling, unpredictable, and provocative story without ever letting it get in the way of your own self-directed adventures through San Andreas.
It is one of the very best video games ever made.

CLICK HERE FOR THE DIRECT TORRENT DOWNLOAD FOR THE GAME GTA V FOR THE XBOX360.

CLICK HERE FOR THE DIRECT TORRENT DOWNLOAD FOR THE GAME GTA V FOR THE PS3.

WWE 13 NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE

HERE IS THE SUMMARY FOR THE GAME WWE 13 (WWE 2K14 WILL BE AVAILABLE IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS):

Step into the ring of the '13 edition of the WWE video game. WWE '13 transforms gameplay through the introduction of WWE Live, completely changing the way players embrace the videogame's audio and presentation elements. Predator Technology returns to further to further implement critical gameplay improvements while fan favorites in WWE Universe Mode and the franchise's renowned Creation Suite are poised to offer the utmost in player freedom. Furthermore, WWE '13 introduces a groundbreaking, single-player campaign based on the highly influential Attitude-Era. Complete with a robot ruster-the largest to date in the franchise--along with a host of additional features, WWE '13 is ready to live a revolution of its own.

HERE IS THE REVIEW FROM IGN FOR THE GAME WWE 13:

 “Live the Revolution.” For months, THQ has hyped WWE ’13 as the next milestone in its long lineage of wrestling video games. Partly thematic, partly indicative of the publisher’s continued overhaul of its core wrestling sim franchise, the notion of a revolution is certainly a bold claim to make.
In truth, the revolution happened last year, as WWE ’12 made significant and sweeping alterations to THQ’s formula. This year’s entry doesn’t take as many risks as its predecessor, which is in some ways disappointing, yet perhaps inevitable for an annualized series. While WWE ’13 does set a defining, high bar for the modern, single-player wrestling experience, it stumbles in some of its efforts to evolve its audio presentation, and doesn’t address other lingering issues for the series.

THQ threw out its entire previous approach to single-player, opting for a linear, six-chapter retelling of the Attitude Era through the eyes of some of its biggest stars. A combination of excellent wrestling footage packages, in-game cutscenes and text-based descriptions help relive the spirit of the time, serving as a history lesson for new and old fans alike. Capturing this essence is critical, as wrestling is as much about theatrics as it is athletics. WWE ’13 succeeds wildly in this regard.
Just as important to its packaging of the ‘Attitude Era mode’ is the design of the campaign. A combination of primary and secondary objectives allows players to determine how they

WWE '13

October 30, 2012

Step into the ring of the '13 edition of the WWE video game.

want to play. Winning a match is almost always the basic requirement, but anyone wishing to adhere a bit more to history, and recreate those moments through specific tasks, will reap the rewards through a considerable amount of unlockable content. It’s a brilliant and flexible approach, and should serve as a blueprint for all future wrestling games. Attitude Era mode is consequently WWE ’13’s most successful element by far.

Yet not everything in WWE ’13 is as polished as its Attitude Era mode. A variety of visual and audio elements stand out for the wrong reasons, including commentator and audience samples pulled from live events and classic WWE footage, and an element of the camera system that attempts to recreate WWE’s own multi-camera aesthetic. Neither of these truly succeeds, and are often so distracting that they ruin the feel of an entire match.

The crowd noise, which for the first time incorporates samples from live audiences and WWE broadcasts, seems to have three settings - deathly quiet, noisy or extremely loud. As any true wrestling fan can tell you, the energy of a crowd can make the ordinary feel incredible, or something brilliant seem decidedly pedestrian. Eliciting that reaction, hearing that ebb and flow, is a critical part of the sport, and it’s that which WWE ’13 fails to capture. Despite the fact that the crowd in the game does more or less sound like a genuine gathering of people, strange variations fails to capture that spirit.

Commentating has long been a weakness in wrestling video games, and no matter how advanced various other elements become, little progress has been made in this area. During Attitude Era mode, THQ pulls in some sound clips straight from archival broadcasts. In these moments, the commentary suddenly springs to life, having a flow and conversational tone that the games otherwise lack. These are fleeting moments, though, and when they’re gone, the chatter is back to its repetitive self. While there are a handful of exchanges and observations that are genuinely entertaining, for the most part the commentary in WWE ’13 feels like you’re listening to a couple guys reading generic statements off of cue cards.
Televising a live drama, even an athletic one, is not the same as giving a player control of a video game, particularly when the camera system often can’t decide what perspective it wants to feature. Not only will the game jarringly shift angles, throwing your positional awareness completely off, it’ll just do this for a split second before bouncing back to its original location - and sometimes dash away less than a second later.

Disorienting is the best way to describe it. It is a small blessing that THQ allows you to switch this entire function off, but it speaks volumes that it is highly recommended you do so.

Audio and camera issues aside, the core of WWE ’13 remains intact. Gameplay is addictive, particularly against human opponents. It has the right mix of intuitive controls, depth, and a great sense of ‘escalation,’ as great matches naturally build towards epic conclusions. Subtle changes like options to automatically start with finishers, or adjust the pacing of a match are more than welcome.

If there is one complaint about the core gameplay, it’s that there are still too many loose ends, too many glitches and odd occurrences that crop up, particularly during some of the specialty matches. While normal fights feature the odd collision detection issue or spotty animation, it’s a bit too common to see more problems arise in something like a table match, where objects move when they shouldn’t, or transitions seem to go haywire. It’s not enough to ruin the experience by any means, but will certainly prove a distraction in some instances.

For many, the sturdy core gameplay and superb Attitude Era single player experience won’t be enough. A large contingent of wrestling game fans care about one thing - customization down to the smallest detail, from creating new superstars and moves to adjusting rosters, tag teams, and even the existing programming schedule in the never-ending, general manager-esque Universe Mode. Many of these creations can then be shared with peers, allowing the community’s capacity to generate content to exceed anything THQ could do.
Online play isn’t just limited to competing in ranked and unranked matches, but extends to content sharing as well. WWE ’13 now allows players to play online with their custom creations without the need to tediously upload that content first. The actual process of sharing and accessing content could use some work, however. Though speed tests raised no issues, the actual user interface is a bit dull – it’s difficult to determine what type of content (arena, superstar, etc.) you’re looking at, and there’s no progress bar or time estimate once you’ve committed to transferring data.

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The Verdict

Though WWE ’13 wisely retains the massive, necessary and fundamentally great gameplay changes of last year, it still continues to find ways to advance THQ’s franchise as a whole. Of particular note is the game’s superb single-player experience, which should serve as the foundation for all future endeavors. If anything, the smart objective design and use of archival WWE footage makes us want more – and there’s no turning back.

Still, there are flaws – some lingering from past years and some because of experimentation that doesn’t quite work. Some video, audio and animation issues appear frequently, and the Universe and Creative modes could certainly use some retooling, if only for an improved user interface. That said, THQ’s accomplishments in revamping its wrestling games are clear. Here’s hoping that continues.

CLICK HERE FOR THE DIRECT TORRENT DOWNLOAD FOR THE GAME WWE 13 ON XBOX 360.

CLICK HERE FOR THE DIRECT TORRENT DOWNLOAD FOR THE GAME WWE 13 ON PS3. 

CURSE OF CHUCKY NOW AVAILABLE

HERE IS THE SUMMARY FOR THE MOVIE CURSE OF CHUCKY:

After her mother's mysterious death, Nica begins to suspect that the talking, red-haired doll her visiting niece has been playing with may be the key to recent bloodshed and chaos.

HERE IS THE REVIEW FROM CRAVE.COM FOR THE MOVIE CURSE OF CHUCKY:

Don Mancini's Curse of Chucky, the sixth film in the notorious Child's Play series (also the first to go straight to video), now on Blu-ray, is the first Chucky movie since 2004's bonkers Seed of Chucky. To offer a brief recap of the series so far: The first movie (directed by Tom Holland) was controversial and scary, following the exploits of a hot Christmas toy that became possessed by the soul of a dangerous serial killer named Charles Lee “Chucky” Ray. The second film (also very good) continued the story and upped the body count. The third film had Chucky stalking his now teenaged owner at a military academy. Child's Play 3 is easily the worst in the series.
The fourth film, 1998's Bride of Chucky, was made in the post-Scream era, and shifted the series toward a more comedic and self-aware tone, featuring Jennifer Tilly as Chucky's babe-turned-doll bride, and a lot of snarky jokes and references to other horror movies. The fifth film, Seed of Chucky, pushed the comedy and self-awareness to a near absurdist level as Chucky and his bride Tiffany began to stalk the real-life Jennifer Tilly (?!) and impregnate her with the soul of their androgynous child Glen/da (Billy Boyd).

While Bride of Chucky is hugely enjoyable and funny, I think most audiences kind of winced at the broad Hollywood satire on display in Seed of Chucky, lamenting that a once-scary conceit had devolved into a parody of a parody of itself. There are things to admire about Seed of Chucky, but one thing can be said for sure: It's not scary.

Curse of Chucky, however, made 13 years since the last film, shifts back to the original intent of the series: actual horror. It's scary to think that a living doll may be stalking around your house trying to kill you, and Don Mancini tries to reclaim the fright mantle with a small amount of success. Perhaps largely through financial necessity, Curse of Chucky takes place almost entirely in one location – a spooky remote house – where the doll Chucky arrives inexplicably by mail one day. His face and outfit are not the stitched-up mess that they had been in the last two movies, so this is either a prequel, or Chucky somehow got plastic surgery in the interim. That question is answered over the course of the film, but I won't tell you exactly what it is, as not to spoil a good plot reveal.

The main character of the film is Nica (Fiona Dourif, Brad's daughter) a wheelchair-bound agoraphobe who has just lost her mother. Her money-minded and opportunistic older sister (Danielle Bisutti) wants to sell the house, and has a few dark secrets of her own. Also on site are the brother-in-law (Brennan Elliott) a kindly priest (A Martinez), a young niece (Summer Howell), and a sexy nanny (Maitland McConnell). Over the course of the film many of these people will be stalked and/or killed by Chucky. Eventually, it will be revealed why Chucky was sent to this particular house, and what his ultimate plan is in killing the inhabitants. There are several flashbacks as well, incorporating footage of Brad Dourif (traditionally Chucky's voice), who hasn't been seen on screen in this series since 1988.



The film is somewhat hampered by its low budget. The seams do show, so to speak, in several scenes, and throughout you can tell that the filmmakers may be stalling for time. In an early scene, for instance, wherein the family sits down for a (gross looking) chilli dinner, we linger on their mouths waiting to see which one may have been recently poisoned, and the scene just stretches on and on, beyond fright and into dullness. There is also a character who vanishes from the plot partway through, and is never found again. One suspects this would have to be due to some sort of last-minute re-write.

Despite the occasional shabbiness, though, it at least tries to be edgy and scary and at least somewhat slick. The practical effects on the Chucky doll are still a delight to watch, and seeing his little doll hands wiggle around knives, and seeing his creepy doll face moving to the voice of Brad Dourif is still unnerving. There are also a few creative kills beyond the usual stabbings and slashings. One involves a small camera that is hidden on Chucky's body, perhaps a first in the horror movie world. Mancini is clearly trying to make the best film he can, attempting in the process to claim the Chucky legacy back into the horror fold.


In terms of horror myth, Curse of Chucky feels more important than even some of its more well-moneyed big-screen brethren (like I said, Child's Play 3 is pretty bad). Indeed, the multiple endings tie Curse of Chucky back into the series in an unexpected way, involving a cameo you may or may not expect. In terms of actual scares, some of them are actually effective. In terms of its overall impact, though, the low budget does make it feel much smaller and more trifling than perhaps it ought to.
Be sure to watch through the credits, however, and be sure to watch the Blu-ray's “director's cut,” otherwise you'll miss the biggest post-credits stinger in years, and also another cameo by someone even more unexpected than the last. Mancini is good about paying attention to where his series has been, careful not to ignore its history, which is more than I can say for something like, say, Friday the 13^th. 

CLICK HERE FOR THE DIRECT DOWNLOAD FOR THE MOVIE CURSE OF CHUCKY  BLU-RAY RIP.