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The zombie apocalypse. Be honest: You’ve thought about it. When most humans have been turned into shambling, flesh-hungry monsters, how will you fare? Whether you fancy yourself an intrepid survivor or an infected savage, Left 4 Dead is the game for you. Battling your way through the grim, desolate world is always tense and challenging, thanks to the unpredictable, relentless enemies. It’s equally thrilling to play as one of the zombies (aka the infected), coordinating deadly ambushes as you try to kill the survivors. Nevertheless, Left 4 Dead’s well-crafted gameplay simply must be experienced in multiplayer. Human teammates (or enemies) make each play-through dynamic, mitigating the game’s two hang-ups: limited map selection and uninspired friendly AI. Despite these hitches, Left 4 Dead is a remarkably fun, excitingly tense game that will make you want to revisit the apocalypse again and again.

There are four campaigns in Left 4 Dead, each spanning five levels. The first four levels end in safe houses (places to heal and rearm free of the zombie menace), and the final level ends in a desperate stand as you wait for your rescue vehicle to arrive. You’ll travel through urban, suburban, and rural areas, each one grim, desolate, and littered with evidence of the apocalyptic event. You never learn exactly what happened, but the rich environments and thoughtful graffiti set the stage expertly. One campaign on normal difficulty (the second of four tiers) takes about an hour to complete, so you’ll soon become familiar with each set of maps. Although the limited selection and grim, overcast color palette can sometimes feel a bit repetitious, the dynamic enemies, varying weapon and ammo spawns, and ever-changing human factor combine to make each play-through feel surprisingly unique.

Left 4 Dead stars four charismatic survivors whose appearances and personalities add an immersive element to the game. They each banter in appropriate, often amusing ways when healthy, and they become more subdued and anxious when injured. The character models are top-notch, and there’s nothing quite like looking at the macho biker when he is injured and seeing fear creep across his face as he begins to doubt that he’ll survive. Seeing the relief on his face when you heal him is almost as satisfying as the relief you’ll feel when your AI allies heal you. Their team spirit doesn’t stop there: they’ll shout out when the find ammo or health, and, crucially, will pick you up when you’ve been incapacitated by an enemy.

For all of their good qualities, you’ll definitely appreciate your fellow survivors more when there’s human controlling them. AI teammates are definitely competent when it comes to killing the infected, rescuing you from the enemy’s clutches, and reviving you when you’re down. However, they aren’t particularly keen on using explosives or defending strategically, so while you choose to camp out on an elevated platform to better defend against the horde, they generally won’t be inclined to join you. Though you can certainly end up with equally uncooperative human teammates, you can at least communicate your strategy to them or, in a pinch, call an on-the-fly vote to boot them from the game.

When you play with one or more competent teammates, Left 4 Dead is an absolute blast. Even if you’ve played every level many times, you’ll still find the infected are distributed in different, unpredictable patterns. They may be milling around in a parking lot, half-oblivious to your passing, or they may come screaming at you from around a corner or over a building. They look nasty, run fast, scream hideously, claw viciously, and, best of all, they die in a wide variety of superbly animated ways (often with explosive decapitations or flying limbs). You might get jumped in a hallway, stairwell, both, or neither. Each area of the level becomes a potential battleground, so you have to be constantly vigilant, ready to make a defensive stand or rescue a teammate at a moment’s notice.

The difficulty changes as you play. The game throws tougher, more numerous foes at dominant survivors and offers periods of respite or more frequent resupply to beleaguered teams. You carry one primary weapon, like a shotgun or assault rifle, as well as one (or two) pistols with unlimited ammunition. You can also pick up pipe bombs and molotov cocktails, which are each fantastically deadly in their own unique ways. These powerful explosives, along with primary weapon ammo and health boosts, are vital to your survival. However, supplies are often hidden in rooms that are slightly off the beaten path, and slowing down to explore more areas will put you at higher risk for a zombie attack. This risk-reward element adds another strategic consideration, which further ramps up the tension. There are so many ways that your journey could go awry, from human error to strategic miscalculation to flat-out zombie inundation, that you’ll have to be constantly on your toes to adapt if you hope to survive. It is this tension that keeps each campaign uniquely challenging and makes survival so fantastically rewarding.Of course, your goal isn’t always survival. When you play Versus mode, it is often the exact opposite. Two teams of up to four players each compete for points in this mode. Survivors earn points by progressing through the campaigns, though only two of the four are playable in this mode. The infected earn points by damaging and killing survivors, and the teams switch sides at the end of each level. Furthermore, the infected players spawn as zombies with special powers.

For survivors, Versus mode is a faster-paced game because the longer you take, the more opportunities the infected have to ambush you. For the infected, it’s a whole different Left 4 Dead experience. Instead of fighting your way through an endless, nebulous enemy force as you drive toward your objective, you have to plan and execute targeted strikes on a small, mobile group. The areas you once plotted to defend now become grounds for ambush. There are even certain walls that the infected can climb or break through, creating entirely new routes for moving through each level. Zombie players have to be careful because they are much weaker than survivors and can easily fall victim to bullets from any of the game’s well-tuned weapons. However, they will continue to spawn until the survivors die or reach safety, so they have multiple opportunities to spring attacks throughout the level. It’s very satisfying to vomit on your survivor friends, summoning the horde to devour them. It’s a whole different level of awesomeness to drag them out of the resulting chaos and slowly choke them to death as they desperately call for help.

Between the tense campaign and the frenetic Versus mode, Left 4 Dead offers two distinct flavors of multiplayer action that are equally delicious when enjoyed with friends. The single-player experience (and the marginally better but somewhat sluggish split-screen mode) isn’t as tasty, simply because the friendly AI can’t compare to a human teammate. Between play sessions, you may find yourself craving more maps, but once you’re in the game, you’ll be so consumed by your quest to survive that you’ll likely be grateful for your knowledge of the terrain. It’s a tricky proposition for a game to serve up such seemingly meager variety, but Left 4 Dead does so with panache, and gamers will likely be enjoying this recipe for a long time.

System Requirements:

Minimum:

• Supported OS: Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / Vista64
• Processor: Pentium 4 3.0GHz
• Memory: 1 GB
• Graphics: 128 MB, Shader model 2.0, ATI 9600, NVidia 6600 or better
• Hard Drive: At least 7.5 GB of free space
• Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card

Recommended:

• Supported OS: Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / Vista64
• Processor: Intel core 2 duo 2.4GHz
• Memory: 1 GB
• Graphics: Shader model 3.0, NVidia 7600, ATI X1600 or better

Wow, wrestling games.  It hasn’t been since the last Smackdown game in 2004 that I have delved into such a rating fiasco videogame.  I used to be completely into wrestling, backyard wrestling, watching every show, yet that slowly faded as a kid grows older.

Last night I decided to rent this game, and give it a shot.  The box is a little misleading as it states there is a co-op career mode.  That, in fact, is only one branch of the new game mode “Road to Wrestlemania” which is much like a career mode featuring only real wrestlers, and no created superstars.

My roommate and I fired it up, a quick loading screen, and I still felt like I was that 15 year old kid awaiting to play a match.  We began a quick tag team match with Triple H and Shawn Michaels.  After a fumbling 20 some minutes of control learning, we seemed to be getting it.  The controls in this game are EXTREMELY different than the previous Smackdown games I grew up with.  It relies heavily on the left and right control sticks, and at times feels a little too indepth and clumbsy to me.  As time and matches went on though, we began to familarize ourselves with the controls and play much better.

To me, the A.I. seems to be missing part of their artificial brain at times, doing stupid maneuvors, and repeating the same action over, and over again.  This made a Royal Rumble match feel a little disappointing, most of the other matches were great fun though.

From one-on-one, to Tables, Ladders, and Chairs matches, there are plenty of types of matches and unlockables to make this game completely replayable.  Some of the great features I found were things such as saving career stats to every character, and even showing them during loading times.  This reduces the tension and impatience of the waiting screens a little bit.

After figuring out the controls, you realize that there are worlds of opportunities awaiting you with move selections and ways to throw people through tables, chairs, ladders, and basically anything else you can get your hands on.  There are even multiple ways to set up ladders in the turnbuckle to bring the pain to an opponent.

Blood is a cool feature that I hadn’t seen in many previous wrestling games.  It actually stains the mat after an opponent has been bashed to it while bleeding.  There are new abilities such as a “Hot Tag” which allows you to gain momentum in a losing tag match by many ways such as after realizing your character started to bleed, or with the help of your team mate pumping you up from the turnbuckle.

One of the most impressive modes I’ve seen on the game thusfar is the Create-A-Superstar.  Being able to not only create a version of yourself for the popular TV shows, but perfecting your finishers, signature moves, entrances and more.  You can, really, change every little aspect of your character, from the position of a tattoo, what color it will be, where your piercings will be, and much more.  Not to forget that perfecting a created superstar can easily drain hours out of your day, and make a friend just as impatient to create his or just get in the ring and dish out some damage.

A feature I wish could be toggled with is the fact that you MUST play your created superstar through the career mode to get their overall rating up enough to actually wrestle other characters as opposed to just other created wrestlers.  I’m not really a big fan of this, especially if you rent the game for 5 days just to do the occasional exhibition modes with a friend while relaxing, having a beer, and pretending your opponent is the worst customer you had at work that day.

When Kane and The Undertaker come up to me and proceed to hit me with two moves, laying me out for approximately three minutes as they go to town on my room mates character, isn’t the best of times.  Especially when your characters specials will not even keep them down for more than a few moments.

All in all, there are several, several match types to keep you entertained.  From reliving past matches, to the one’s you saw on last Monday nights RAW.  The new inferno match seems to be what they are pushing for in this version, and hopefully when I get home to play it later today, it will be worth the wait.  From the countless videos I’ve seen on youtube from it, and the ability to relate to the control scheme’s and gameplay now, I can tell that it should be a very fun match.

If you want to release some anger, relax with a group of friends, or just throw somebody off of the top of a Hell in a Cell, Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 is the game for you!

System Requirements:

Operating System: Windows XP;

CPU: Pentium IV 2.8Ghz or equivalent;

RAM: 1GB.

Disc Drive: DVD-ROM;

Hard Drive: 3GB of HD free space;

Video Card: OpenGL compatible video card.

Sound Card: DirectX 8.0-compatible sound card.

In Far Cry 2’s chaotic world of mercenaries, gunrunners, and armed militias, you’ll find yourself dropped into a dizzying web of shady clients and paper-thin alliances. All manner of names and faces are introduced during the course of the storyline, but the real star isn’t anyone brandishing a smuggled weapon in search of blood diamonds; it’s the daunting and awe-inspiring 50-square kilometers of African landscape that make up the game’s open-world setting. Aside from providing the opportunity to soak up an amazing sunset, Far Cry 2’s free-roaming terrain brilliantly harmonizes with the first-person combat. The diverse landscape and myriad environmental factors work alongside a wide assortment of weaponry to give you tremendous freedom to approach each mission. Combined with solid multiplayer, Far Cry 2’s sheer breadth of action provides you with plenty of reason to stay lost in the African wilderness despite an underwhelming plot and the occasional sense of tedium in navigating from one location to another on the gargantuan map.

Far Cry 2’s story is filled with potential. You’re a mercenary working for a client who’s sent you to an unnamed African nation engulfed in civil war, and your job is to take out a notorious arms dealer known as “The Jackal.” He quickly proves to be an elusive figure, so you’ll need to begin working for various warring factions that the Jackal has armed so you can trace the supply line back to your target. The two primary organizations at the heart of all this bloodshed are the militaristic UFLL and the revolutionary APR. You’ll spend the bulk of the story working for these two groups, getting to know their power structures, and taking on all of the violent tasks they throw your way. Complicating things is the fact that your character has malaria, which means you’ll need to occasionally play nice with the more ragtag Underground, the only group with the medical connections necessary to keep your potentially life-threatening symptoms at bay.

Each story mission can be played in multiple ways. There are 12 potential buddies randomly scattered throughout the storyline who you can befriend (nine of whom are available to choose as your silent protagonist), and they’re often keen to tack on their own interests to the quests handed out by the UFLL and APR. Instead of just taking out a target, you have the option to earn extra reputation points by working alongside your buddy to first squeeze any remaining assets from the soon-to-be-deceased. This also earns you the ability to increase your level of companionship with that buddy. It’s a neat reward, but it doesn’t shed much light on their backgrounds. But that’s par for the course; the main story is delivered in such a rushed, quick-and-dirty way that you never feel very involved in the game’s overarching conflicts. The plot is less Blood Diamond than it is early Grand Theft Auto, a long roster of changing faces that scroll by far too quickly to capitalize on the politically charged setting.

Although disappointing for a single-player campaign that could easily drain more than 30 hours of your time, any shortcomings in the plot are mostly forgivable thanks to Far Cry 2’s overall structure. The game is organized in a way that provides a daunting amount of freedom to explore, earn currency, and wreak havoc on the game’s landscape and its denizens. It’s all laid out in a manner typical of sandbox action games. Pulling out your map reveals a collection of icons that signify available missions and points of interest that you can meander toward at your own leisure. Among these are dozens of side missions that you can take on, with various forms of rewards. Delivering transit papers to trapped refugees earns you malaria medication, destroying rival convoys for gun merchants unlocks new weapons for purchase, and performing assassinations for mysterious voices at the other end of your cell phone rewards you with diamonds. You can also rough up militias stationed in small camps and turn their dwellings into your own safe houses. The side missions can feel a bit repetitive when played through in rapid succession, but they offer a great change of tempo when sprinkled throughout the main narrative. But what’s most clever is how their differing rewards intermingle so wonderfully with your needs in progressing through the story: Malaria pills keep your HP and stamina up, diamonds buy you new weapons and ability upgrades, and safe houses provide temporary shelter to stock up and save your game.

Overall, Far Cry 2 is a game in which you can quite literally get lost for hours at a time. But that feeling of exploration is precisely what makes the game so much fun; your creativity never feels stifled when approaching a mission, and the game’s overall structure of side tasks, friends, rewards, and upgrades is a diverse ecosystem rivaling the landscape itself. No matter whether you’re a PC fan whose played through the similarly structured Crysis or a console owner new to the world of open-ended first-person shooters, you won’t be disappointed by Far Cry 2.

  System Requirements:

Minimum requirements

• CPU: Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz, Pentium D 2.66 Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 3500+ or better
• RAM: 1 GB
• Video card: NVidia 6800 or ATI X1650 or better (Shader Model 3 required, 256 Mb of graphic memory)

Recommended

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo Family, AMD 64 X2 5200+, AMD Phenom or better
• RAM: 2 GB
• Video card: NVidia 8600 GTS or better, ATI X1900 or better (512 Mb of graphic memory)
• Sound: 5.1 sound card recommended

Supported Video Cards:

NVidia 6800, NVidia 7000 series, 8000 series, 9000 series, 200 series. 8800M and 8700M supported for laptops. ATI X1650 – 1950 series , HD2000 series , HD3000 series , HD4000 series.

Based on what we’ve seen of the game so far, the minimum requirements look a tad optimistic but any reasonaly modern gaming PC should have no troubles.

Stepping off a boat in the shoes of illegal immigrant Niko Bellic as he arrives in Liberty City at the start of Grand Theft Auto IV, you can tell immediately that Rockstar North’s latest offering is something quite special. Yes, this is another GTA game in which you’ll likely spend the bulk of your time stealing cars and gunning down cops and criminals, but it’s also much more than that. GTAIV is a game with a compelling and nonlinear storyline, a great protagonist who you can’t help but like, and a plethora of online multiplayer features in addition to its lengthy story mode. The PC version adds a customizable radio station and a video editor to the package, and also ups the multiplayer count from 16 to 32 players. It’s not all good news, though; the game suffers from some noticeable performance issues even on rigs that far exceed the unreasonably high recommended system specifications, and you need to be signed in to Windows Live to save your progress in the single-player game. This should have been the best GTA game yet, but it’s inferior to its console counterparts.

One of the many things that set GTAIV apart from its predecessors is Liberty City, which is more convincing as a living, breathing urban environment than anything you’ve seen in a game before, and which bears little resemblance to its namesake in 2001’s GTAIII. Liberty’s diverse population believably attempts to go about its daily business, seemingly unaware that several criminal factions are at war in the city. Niko has no such luck. He’s compelled to start working for one of the factions shortly after arriving, when he learns that his cousin Roman has some potentially fatal gambling debts. Niko’s military experience makes him a useful freelancer for employers in the business of killing, and though his reluctance to carry out their orders is often apparent, he does whatever is asked of him in the hope that completing missions for other people will ultimately give him the means to complete his own.

But Niko doesn’t have to do everything that’s asked of him. On several occasions as you play through his story, you’ll be presented with decisions that afford you the option of doing what you think is right rather than blindly following instructions. You don’t necessarily have to kill a target if he or she promises to disappear, but you have to weigh the risk of your employer finding out against the possibility that the person whose life you spare might prove useful later in the game, or even have work for you in the form of bonus missions. To say anything more specific on this subject would be to risk spoiling one of GTAIV’s most interesting new features, but suffice it to say that every decision you make has consequences, and you’ll likely want to play through the game at least twice to see how the alternatives unfold.

Grand Theft Auto IV’s story mode can be beaten in less than 30 hours, and there are so many optional activities and side missions to take part in along the way that you can comfortably double that number if you’re in no hurry. The majority of the story missions task you with making deliveries and/or killing people, and play out in much the same way as those in previous games. With that said, most of the missions are a lot easier this time around, partly because Niko is a more agile and efficient killer than any of his predecessors, and partly because the LCPD seemingly has better things to do than hunt down an illegal immigrant who’s gunning down undesirables all over the city. Some of the more imaginative missions sprinkled throughout the story include a kidnapping, a bank heist, and a job interview. The cinematic cutscenes associated with story missions are superbly presented and are the sequences in which the game’s characters really shine. Without exception, the characters you encounter benefit from great animation, great voice work, and superbly expressive faces. They’re not always so impressive when they join you on a mission and refuse to do what they’re supposed to (for example, not following you on an escort mission, or failing to negotiate a doorway). Nevertheless, these problems are few and far between, and they’re made less painful by the new “replay mission” option that you’re presented with whenever you fail.

Given the amount of trouble that you get into as you play through the story mode, it’s inevitable that the police are going to get involved from time to time, even when their presence isn’t a scripted feature of your mission. Liberty City’s boys in blue are quick to respond when you get flagged with a wanted level of between one and six stars, but they’re not nearly as tough to deal with as their counterparts in previous GTA games. They don’t drive as quickly when pursuing you, they rarely bother to set up roadblocks, and you’ll need to blow up practically an entire city block before the FIB (that’s not a typo) show up. Furthermore, you’re given an unfair advantage in the form of your GPS system; when you’re not using it to plot a valid route to any waypoint of your choosing, it doubles as a kind of police scanner. Any time you have a brush with the law, the GPS shows you the exact locations of patrol cars and cops on foot in your area, and highlights the circular area (centered on your last-known whereabouts) where they’re concentrating their search. To escape, all you need to do is move outside the circle and then avoid being seen for 10 seconds or so, which is often best achieved by finding a safe spot and just sitting there. It’s not a bad system in theory, but in practice it makes dodging the law a little too easy, especially when your wanted level is low and the search area is small.

When you’re not running missions for criminals, taking part in street races, stealing cars to order, or randomly causing trouble, you’ll find that there are plenty of opportunities to unwind in Liberty City. Some of these optional activities offer tangible rewards that can prove useful in missions later on, whereas others are just a fun way to kill time and take in more of GTAIV’s superb humor. For example, you can watch television, listen to numerous radio stations, check out some genuinely funny shows (including some big-name acts) at cabaret and comedy clubs, and use a computer to surf the in-game Internet.

GTAIV’s Internet is filled with spoofs of all the kinds of Web sites that you’d only ever look at accidentally or when you know there’s no danger of getting caught. Some of them can be found only by clicking on links in spam e-mails, whereas others are advertised prominently on the search page. There’s plenty of amusing stuff to find if you spend some time in one of the “TW@” Internet cafes, but the most interesting site by far is an online dating agency through which you can meet women who, if they like your profile, will agree to go on dates with you. Dating and socializing with friends is something you can spend as much or as little of your time doing as you like, and though the people you meet can occasionally be demanding to the point that they become irritating, keeping them happy invariably benefits you in some way.

Keeping friends and dates happy means spending time with them and doing things that they enjoy, and all of them have different personalities. Some friends like to join you for minigames such as tenpin bowling, pool, or darts, whereas others prefer to go out for a meal, get drunk, or take in a show. Of course, dates are much fussier than regular friends, and their opinions of you are influenced not only by whether you pick them up on time, where you take them, and whether you try your luck when dropping them at home, but also by a number of much more subtle factors. Dates will comment on things like the car you drive, how you drive it, and the clothes you wear. They’ll even notice if you wear the same outfit two dates in a row, though not all of them will be bothered by it. The rewards that you get when another character likes you enough vary depending on who it is. Without wishing to give away specifics, befriending a lawyer can prove useful if you’re having trouble with the cops, for example, and having a nurse on your friends list can literally be a lifesaver.

You’ll keep in touch with your dates, friends, and some of your enemies using another of GTAIV’s great new features: a cell phone. It’s hard to believe that something as simple as a cell phone could add so much to a game like this, but it’s implemented so well that it’s hard to imagine leaving any of Niko’s safe houses without it. If you’ve ever used a cell phone in real life, you’ll have no problem operating this one and, given that it’s controlled using only the arrow and Enter keys or your controller’s D pad and a single button, it’s easy to call up acquaintances and take calls even while driving. There’s no unwieldy conversation system to deal with; you simply choose which friend you want to call, what you want to talk about (it could be work, a fun activity, or asking for a favor) and then, assuming that he or she answers the phone, the conversation plays out. Incoming calls are even easier, though they occasionally come at inopportune (or amusing) times; hearing your cell phone’s signal interfere with your car radio is the least of your worries when you consider the possibility of a date calling you while you’re with a prostitute or embroiled in a gunfight with the Mafia. Incidentally, new ringtones and visual themes for your phone can be purchased via the in-game Internet, which is typical of the incredible attention to detail that you’ll come to take for granted as you play.

Most of the vehicles in GTAIV, like those in previous games, have very loose handling that makes it easy for you to perform Hollywood-style U-turns, skids around corners, and the like. You can play through most of the missions without ever violating a traffic law if you really want to, but you can get away with (and will have a lot more fun) driving like a lunatic, provided that you don’t collide with any police vehicles or mow down too many pedestrians. A neat touch when driving with the default camera view is that the camera, which is positioned a few feet behind the rear bumper of the car, centers on you rather than on the vehicle, effectively offering the vehicular equivalent of an over-the-shoulder view. When you take the control of something sporty, the camera also positions itself much closer to the ground, which adds to the sensation of speed.

With an Xbox 360 controller, the vehicle handling is difficult to fault, regardless of whether you’re in a sports car, a garbage truck, a motorcycle, a speedboat, or a helicopter. The mouse-and-keyboard combo doesn’t work nearly as well as the controller when you’re at the controls of a vehicle and, while it’s still possible to win races and such, the WASD keys are no substitute for an analog stick and two analog triggers. Regardless of which control setup you opt for, you might notice one odd quirk that has been a constant ever since GTAIII: When taking the controls of certain vehicles, you’ll suddenly notice a lot more of the same vehicle on the roads. It’s not a big deal, and it isn’t detrimental to the gameplay, but it’s a little jarring if you get into one of the more unusual vehicles in the game–for example, the equivalent of either a Ferrari or a pickup truck–and suddenly find that the city is filled with them. That particular quirk is pretty common in some of the multiplayer modes as well, though you’ll likely be too busy keeping an eye out for other players to take any notice when you venture online.

Getting online in Grand Theft Auto IV couldn’t be easier, though you need to have both Windows Live and the Rockstar Social Club application running in the background to do so. You simply select the multiplayer option on your cell phone, choose which type of game you want to host or join, and then enter a lobby and wait for the game to start. The PC game supports 32 players where the console versions supported 16, but even games with as many as 16 players can be difficult to find depending on which mode you’re looking to play. There are more than a dozen different multiplayer modes to choose from, and although some of them are variations on similar themes, there’s certainly no shortage of variety. As the host of a multiplayer session, you also have the freedom to greatly customize all of the game types with variables such as friendly fire, police presence, weapons sets, traffic levels, radar functionality, and many more. You can choose where you’d like your game to take place as well, considering that many gameplay modes can be played either on a specific Liberty City island or across the entire map.

The audio in the PC version of GTAIV is every bit as impressive as that in the console games, and can take a lot of the credit for why Liberty City feels so alive. True to form, GTAIV’s soundtrack has plenty of great licensed songs and, unlike other games we could mention, it doesn’t force the artist and track information down your throat with pop-up windows that detract from gameplay. However, if you want that information, you can simply dial up a song-recognition service on your cell phone and, after a few seconds, receive it in a text message. Genius. New for the PC version is the Independence FM radio station, which, in between the usual assortment of commercials and such, will play tracks from your own music collection. The other radio stations’ playlists will be hard to beat, but the option to try is a great addition.

Another new feature for GTAIV on the PC is a Video Editor mode that, provided you’re willing to spend some time with it, is a great way to get creative with and share some of your most memorable moments in Liberty City. With it, you can edit multiple clips together as well as add custom music, camera filters, and onscreen text to your movie before uploading it to the Rockstar Social Club. Capturing raw gameplay footage is as easy as hitting a single button to start and finish recording, and when you’re ready to watch it back or start editing, the Video Editor mode can be accessed via your in-game cell phone.

Grand Theft Auto IV is a game that, in spite of its technical shortcomings on the PC, you simply have to play. The single-player game, which you can still play long after you complete the story, is the series’ best by far, and the multiplayer features are good enough that you’ll likely have no problem finding people to play with for many months to come. The minor flaws that you’ll experience are no more difficult to overlook than those in previous GTA games, and they’re greatly outnumbered by the features that will impress and surprise you anytime you think you’ve already seen everything that the game has to offer. There’s lots to see in Liberty City, so you’d best get started.

So without anymore waiting here they are:

System Requirements:

OS: Windows XP SP2
Processor: Dual core processor (Intel Pentium D or better)
RAM: 2GB
Hard Drive: 18GB free hard disk space
Video Card: 512MB Direct3D 10 compatible video card or Direct3D 9 card compatible with Shader
Drive: DVD-ROM dual-layer drive.

         When it comes to real-time strategy games, few developers have followed the philosophy that bigger is better.The battlefields never feel that large, and the focus is more on economics and tactics than it is on actual strategy. Well, Supreme Commander isn’t that kind of game. Instead, the long-awaited strategy game from Gas Powered Games is everything that was promised. This is a game that’s less concerned with the aesthetics of combat than it is with capturing a sense of awesome scale, though it does look amazing when armies clash. It’s real-time strategy supersized. Instead of raising one battle group and racing across a small battlefield, you can raise multiple air, land, and sea battle groups and toss them at the enemies, or ferry an army via air transport around their defenses and land them in the rear, or send wave after wave of bombers to cripple their strategic defenses and then unleash nuclear hellfire upon them, or do much, much more.

The single-player campaign is divided into three smaller campaigns, letting you battle from the perspective of each of the factions. Unlike those in most other RTS games, where all three campaigns would usually be tied together in a linear fashion to tell a bigger story, the campaigns in Supreme Commander all stand alone. Each faction fights for what it believes in, and hence, no side is really “evil.” It’s a nice touch, because that mentality captures the essence of war.

The game’s biggest asset is its sheer size, which is measured in virtual kilometers. Though you can battle it out on “small” maps that are a mere 5km-by-5km, the average maps are 20km-by-20km large, and the largest maps weigh in at a whopping 81km-by-81km.  Scout planes can be ordered to patrol the periphery of the maps, engineers can be given build commands to keep them busy for a long time, and armies can be sent on a zigzag path deep into enemy territory, all with a few clicks.

Often during the campaign, you’ll achieve a set of objectives only to watch the map then double in size, and then double again after you’ve achieved the next set of objectives. Each time the map grows, it unlocks more room to maneuver and more strategy. You might find a weak spot in the defenses and send bombers through it, then target antiaircraft positions to open the way for further air assaults. If you’re building nuclear missiles, you might build artillery positions to take out any strategic missile defenses, and once those are out, unleash nuclear missiles.

In most real-time strategy games, the act of building a factory on the battlefield is an act of utter contrivance, though in the fiction of Supreme Commander, it makes sense. As the game is set thousands of years in the future, humanity has figured out how to transform matter and energy in a way that’s similar to the replicators on Star Trek. That means that a single Supreme Commander can take the raw materials of a planet and quickly build factories that churn out war machines.

One of the most frightening moments in Supreme Commander is when you’ve set up a good position and think you have the upper hand on the enemy when all of a sudden an experimental unit appears and you realize that while you were building other things, the enemy was concentrating on one of those. Then it’s a desperate fight to survive.One of the really impressive things about Supreme Commander is that everything in the game is simulated. This makes combat interesting, because inadvertent things can happen.While the pathfinding gets a little confused at times, the performance of the artificial intelligence is solid, particularly as an opponent.

The single-player campaign and the skirmish modes serve as a lengthy tutorial to the concepts of the game, and you’ll really have to apply all the lessons and tactics that you learn to compete in multiplayer, which is fun, brutal, and dynamic. Supreme Commander’s gameplay lends itself well to the multiplayer realm because it’s so wide open. For every move that you can come up with, the enemy can develop a counter. For instance, create a solid defensive line, and the enemy might bypass or simply fly over it, sending gunships to raid your economic base.

At the highest detail levels, Supreme Commander is incredible to look at. Seeing dozens, if not hundreds, of air, land, and naval units battling onscreen is amazing, and large battles are littered with smoke trailers, particle effects, and explosions. Meanwhile, watching a nuclear detonation slowly expand, with the shock wave destroying everything in its path and setting off a chain reaction, is bliss. Even more impressive is the ability to pull the camera back far enough to see the entire battlefield. Limited zoom has always been one of the primary frustrations in many RTS games, because you never could feel like you were getting a grasp on the battlefield. But in Supreme Commander, you can pull the zoom back far enough and feel like you’re really sitting back in a command bunker somewhere as you watch the military icons that represent your units move and fight onscreen. If you have two monitors, you can keep one zoomed in on the action while the other gives you the strategic view, and it’s very cool, though you’ll need a fairly advanced video card to support it. The good news is that if you have just one monitor, you can do a split-screen view with one half zoomed on the action and the other giving you the strategic view.

The downside is that Supreme Commander can bring the most modern PCs to their knees. Since the game is keeping track and simulating hundreds of units over such a large area, it doesn’t take much before the frame rate will start to stutter. On our test machine with a dual core CPU and 2GB of RAM, we experienced slight pauses on the humongous 81k-by-81k map. On smaller maps with a larger set of AI opponents, the action slowed to a virtual crawl as the system strained to keep up with the action. It’s doubtful that a PC has been built yet that can run Supreme Commander’s largest map with a full set of AI opponents at high graphics detail. Thankfully, you can adjust the graphical settings quickly and without having to restart the game, so if the battle starts to chug, you can simply go to the options menu and lower the visual detail to smooth out the frame rate.

Supreme Commander’s audio seems a bit muted, though that’s probably because you’re always watching the action from a considerable distance. The units make all the futuristic whirs and machine noises that you’d expect, though the highlight of the game’s audio is the martial music that changes tempo whenever something dramatic happens onscreen.Still, despite the hardware headaches, Supreme Commander is one of the most impressive real-time strategy games in recent years. This is a game that dares to be big, and it succeeds because it understands what strategy is about. Strategy is more than overwhelming the other side with sheer numbers. Strategy is about maneuvering, it’s about applying the right weapon at the right place at the right time, and it’s about rewarding creative thinking, and that’s what Supreme Commander does.

* Publisher: THQ
* Developer: Gas Powered Games

Minimum System Requirements:

* Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, Vista
* 512 MB of System RAM
* 1.8 GHz Processor
* 8 GB Available Hard Drive Space
* 128 MB video RAM or greater
* DirectX 8 Vertex Shader / Pixel Shader 2.0 support (Nvidia 6×00 or better)
* Sound Card, speakers or headphones
* Broadband internet connection (DSL/Cable)

Recommended System Requirements:

* 3.0 GHz Intel or equivalent AMD processor or better
* 1 GB of System RAM or better
* 8 GB Available Hard Drive Space
* 256 MB video RAM, with DirectX 9 Vertex Shader / Pixel Shader 2.0 support (Nvidia 6800 or better)
* Internet connection with Cable/DSL speeds

enjoy the game…