If you can get past the absolute trials of Christ it takes to get this game running on modern hardware, you'll find a pretty good, but way too long shooter.

The OST also loops too much, I'm sick of those 4 Star Wars tracks. The story is nothing special, but the live action cutscenes are charming.

But yeah, be prepared for how fucking horrible it is to get this game running and don't spend your own money on it.

I played and completed System Shock out of curiosity a few years back, and thought I'd forget about it soon after. After all, I was off to System Shock 2. But there's always been something creeping into the back of my mind with this game. It's like an itch you can't get rid of, and it just kept clawing its way back into my subconscious.

I felt strange feelings when I played this way back when that I don't from a lot of games. Why is that? Best I can say is, it is just one of those GAME games. The "real" video games, the kind like you remember how games felt when you were a kid. Some strange game that you saw from across the room in the dark of the night, when the room was only lit by the computer screen, maybe you were peeking across your brother's shoulder. It is meant to be interacted with and immersed in fully with no distraction, to lose yourself in the game world and be absorbed by its thick techno-horror atmosphere.

It's a fucking BITCH to play though. You're gonna have to work out some frustrations with it, I won't bullshit. But that's the fun for me. You have to learn the game, and learn to work within the rules of the game in order to reach the finish line. And that just makes it all the more satisfying when you finally do.

Going backwards-ish through the Elder Scrolls library the way I did, you really start to get a feel for how dumbed down current RPG's are for truly creating and role-playing a character that you have complete control of. For every iteration, we gain playability and accessibility, which can be a good thing, but we also lose the ability to really be able to immerse ourselves in a character that is built from the ground up to be the way we want them to be.

I'm not someone who doesn't appreciate how wide of an appeal RPG's have in the current market and god knows I don't want every game I play to be this archaic. But this game made me feel like I was in the middle of an epic DnD session, and for someone who has played through a lot of different games, that's not something I can say for every RPG I've played.

If you go into this game expecting to get a really primitive Skyrim, you're going to be disappointed. If you're trying to get into this game because you really love Morrowind, you're probably going to come away disappointed. Yeah, you can see traces of what's to come in the Elder Scrolls series, but at times Arena almost feels one or two steps away from being played on a pen and paper. Just follow along to a guide so you don't get too lost, embrace your imagination and try to have fun with it.

When the levels are populated by reasonable enemies and reasonable amounts of them, you start to appreciate the level design of Evilution, so do yourself a favor and turn down the difficulty to the lowest it can go to get rid of all the chaingunner spam, which seems to be the only way to create difficulty that the developers could think of.

Levels are expansive, creative and sometimes confusing, but what is really neat is seeing all the little visual tricks they do to spice things up. They really tried to push to the brink what was possible in a Doom level, at the time anyway.

If you can swallow your pride and drop to I'm Too Young to Die, you'll come away with an additional 30 enjoyable Doom levels, rather than 30 that just piss the living shit out of you.

A gauntlet of spammy enemy encounters is all The Plutonia Experiment is, and it gets old REALLY quick. I turned the difficulty all the way down as I did in TNT Evilution, and while that helped me get through the game, it did not improve many of the problems with enemy placements and traps. Like Doom 2s worst levels, Plutonia is filled with a barrage of traps and doors that close behind you and rooms that suddenly spawn 40 archviles and 6000 chaingunners when you take the key.

Apparently the guys who made Plutonia designed the levels with the idea that previous Doom entries were not hard enough, and so they just tweaked it until the levels were tough for them to get through. Well I hope they had fun because they made easily the worst 32 levels out of either Doom game or expansion. So congrats on that.

My thoughts on the individual expansions exist on the pages of those expansions. For Final Doom as a whole, I am unimpressed. Evilution offered interesting puzzles and level layouts, but bad enemy encounters, and Plutonia is nothing but a series of 32 annoying gauntlets by people who for some reason have a huge crush on the Archvile. I feel this game exists so iD could one more time put Doom on store shelves and milk it for all it was worth at that point. This game should not exist. If there is one positive from playing through Final Doom, it is that I will never feel the need to play through it again.

[Any similarities to George Romero's Dawn of the Dead are purely coincidental.]

When I played this game as a kid, it literally felt like going into a mall and playing with everything you find. The fact that zombies are in it hardly mattered to me. What mattered was that you could go into all these shops, that all had their own quirks and things to pick up. It felt real, it felt like fantasy fulfillment, it was fun. It is crazy how modern games just do not satisfy this urge anymore. The maps get larger and larger to the point that they take 2 real life hours to drive full speed from one side of the map to the other, but none of those games feel like real interactable places. But this game beats out all those other game worlds by being truly memorable, detailed and interactable.

Dead Rising is unfortunately one of those series that gets worse the further you go, but if you stick to DR1 and DR2, you wont get burned.

"It's no big surprise that Eidos is moving up the video game food chain considering last years mega hit Tomb Raider. The sequel uses the same formula to great success, with minor control changes for side-stepping, and of course all new worlds and vehicles.

The game starts off with a peek at ancient China. A dragon attacks the great wall and a soldier notices a dagger embedded in his chest. Oddly, removing the dagger results in the dragons death. WEIRD.

You play Lara Croft, complete with front-loaded anvils searching for the dagger centuries later. Your path to the dagger will take you just about everywhere. And that snow speeder kicks some major you-know-what!

Tomb Raider has slightly more action than exploration this time around. But you may not notice the difference. This is good, because that way everybody's happy.

Obviously, we're giving Tomb Raider 2 a good review. We fully expected to do so. We knew the game would be great, and it is. And we've only just scratched the surface. An answer to Lara's giant earrings however, we have a challenge to Eidos:

In Tomb Raider 3 create a storyline in which Lara gets breast cancer. Imagine the drama of a vulnerable Lara Croft still persisting in her worldly adventures despite her illness. It needs fleshing out (no pun intended) but we guarantee the gaming world would be shocked, stunned, and moved at the effort to make Lara's character more meaningful. We love Lara, but its about time the industry had a big shock for a change.

Its no shock that Tomb Raider 2 IS excellent. Everyone should buy it. Period. The end."

Very fun and well written and atmospheric, but man that shooting feels so heavy and sluggish, and maps are not fun to slowly walk through back and forth as you complete your objectives. The imps were almost completely useless for me, they either got killed immediately when I needed help, or blocked the way, or in the case of the gunner, shot me in the back or just shot the wall next to me.

The good though, the Darkness and Jackie are performed brilliantly, and the story is genuinely pretty good for a shooter. The game has a lot of surprises I did not expect. I am always a fan of an actual dial-able phone in games (like Silent Hill Shattered Memories) and I thought the little things they did with the subway and taking the train and asking for directions, and following signs made the world feel more alive. Shame that when you get above ground, there is not really much to interact with.

I know some of my issues with shooting and general combat get improved in the 2nd game, but I think I remember that the city is not as interesting to interact with and unfortunately I do remember that the game is very short. A shame we will probably never have the third game to cap off the story of Jackie. Jackie and Adam Jensen are peas in a pod that way, I suppose.

Finally, yes I did watch all of To Kill a Mockingbird in Jenny's apartment. She fell asleep before the opening credits even ended. Talk about a terrible film-watching partner.

It was neat to be able to re-experience one of my favorite games for the first time again. Everyone knows that this game is less like Dead Rising and more like RE4. The stuff in here that is in-tact from Dead Rising mostly feels alright, as in there are lots of melee weapons, and special moves, mixing drinks, costumes, but everything is ...off. Plenty of stores are cut, bosses, endings, are all cut, and photography, FRANKS MAIN FUCKING POINT AS A CHARACTER, is cut entirely.

Controls are obviously worse since instead of having full control over Franks direction, you are given the tank-style control from RE4, and the camera is similarly way too close to Frank and it makes this giant open mall feel really claustrophobic. Aiming is done the same as RE4 Wii but that also doesn't feel right, Frank aims way too sensitively and it does not feel as finely tuned as it does to play RE4 on Wii.

In the original you were given free reign of the entire mall to explore (with a few minor story exceptions that pretty much become open by the end of Day 1 or middle of Day 2), but in this version some of the mall is blocked off until certain survivor missions or boss battles become available. The movie theater for example is completely blocked until the final part of the game, where you go fight the cult leader.

On top of that traversing the mall is really tedious in this version. Most of the floor layout of the mall has been blocked off, meaning the mall really is a set of corridors you have to run through. Now I understand, they could not have everything in the game, as they needed to save space, but some of the things they do to achieve this are just baffling. For example in the very beginning you have to run up the stairs to escape the intruding zombie horde and there are two flights of stairs up to the walkway you use to escape, but unknown to me, I had taken the wrong flight of stairs. For some reason, one of the staircases is blocked, even though it just leads up to the very same walkway. And there are so many instances of an area being blocked off by a small ribbon or barrier that has been put up, and even though the area on the other side is accessible, you are not allowed to run through because of an inch-wide barrier. It really does not serve much purpose other than to make running back through these areas with survivors a chore, and to get survivors hung up on those very same barriers the developers have placed down.

A lot of the fun in the 360 version of Dead Rising is being able to play around in the mall to your hearts content. You can start the game and do nothing but fight zombies until the timer finally runs down and you get an ending. In this version however, since there is no timer, the plot is pushed forward by you continuing in the story. You accept missions from Otis, which are the same missions from original where you escort survivors, and upon completion of a couple of these missions leads to unlocking more of the main story, meaning you are pretty much forced to complete every survivor escort mission in order to beat the game. And it gets SUPER repetitive.

Its crazy to think the A.I. for allies is even worse in this game than in the original version. They get hung up on doorways and environment objects, they are even slower, some of them limp, if you have multiple survivors they will sometimes block each other, they will outright stop for seemingly no reason, and cannot push past zombies effectively like they used to. Many frustrating moments in my playthrough upon getting to the exit, turning around and realizing the survivors had not followed me even one centimeter past them joining the party, meaning I had to travel ALL the way back to get them again.

There are new types of zombies and wow they are really fucking annoying. Poodles will follow you relentlessly and parrots will dive-bomb you and drop grenades in your way, huge charging zombies are repeatedly spawning around you as you run through and just annoy you and block progress during survivor runs. It was an interesting idea to try and expand the enemies in this version, but I think this was a misstep as they are all just so irritating. A lot of the new zombies are bosses that have been cut from the game, and there are unfortunately quite a few of them. There are still a chunk of bosses that made it in, but the convicts have been butchered into a hilariously bad QTE running sequence.

One of the only things that is outright better in this version of the game is Overtime mode. In the original, Overtime mode is made up of a lot of waiting for the time to run out so you can go to the next objective, while you battle overpowered soldiers with more firepower than you ever have on hand. In this version, missions do not progress by in-game time, which means they go faster, and the full arsenal of RE4 weapons means those soldiers are now not a problem at all. And overtime mode can be completed in a matter of a little over half an hour. Which is a big plus.

It was an interesting play, I really do miss when games were like this, when a port to a different or weaker console meant it was basically a totally different game (like Splinter Cell on Original Xbox vs Xbox 360). But I will never return to it again, this version of the game just is not fun enough with its differences and new mechanics to warrant anything more than checking it out once. Only play it if you love the Original so much you just cannot get enough.