One minute we are storming the airfield. I use my recoilless rifle to blow a lookout post and the Scout in it to kingdom come. Unfortunately, it was too late. The enemy called in an air strike that was baring down on our location. We captured the airfield and then perished in a series of explosions that shook the Earth. Five seconds later, we respawned in the village to find that the airfield has been recaptured. Welcome to Battlefield 1943.

Battlefield 1943 is a multiplayer only game offered though the Playstation Network for $14.99 or on Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 points. And it is worth every penny.

Join as either the U.S. Marines or the Japanese to battle on three islands in the Pacific Ocean. The game feels balanced and fun. Each weapon and vehicle fires and reacts like it should. However, if you are used to playing Halo or Call of Duty, Battlefield 1943 is a different animal.

The maps are huge and open with hills, trees, villages and fortified bunkers providing cover and ambush points. You can run from point A to B, but you will want to hop in a jeep, tank, plane or boat to make travel faster. Your team has to capture five flags on the map while killing the enemy team. The more flags your team controls, the more spawn points and vehicles are available. The flags also dictate how fast you team looses tickets. A match is won by killing an enemy player which removes a ticket from their team. When the tickets reach zero, it game over man!

The three classes are all useful and needed to be successful. Scouts can shoot at long range and have explosives that can be detonated by remote. Rifleman are mid-range shooters and have rifle grenades which are great for dealing with enemies hiding in buildings. Infantry have a sub-machine gun for close range combat and a recoilless rifle to destroy vehicles. You have unlimited also for your main weapon, but you still have to reload when the clip is empty. Special weapons and grenades have a limited amount and have a cool down timer before you can use them again.

Battlefield 1943 has moved into the arena of modern shooter with recharging health instead of a health bar. This seemed weird at first, since prior Battlefield games have some sort of medic. However, the system feels great and works well. Health seems to recharge slower than Halo or Call of Duty 4. This means fire fights still feel intense since you can win a confrontation and then get taken down by someone around the corner.

The game supports up to 24 players and voice chat. You can also form squads. When in a squad, you can spawn next to a squad member instead of next to a flag you control. The squad leader can also assign objectives by looking at a flag and pressing Select on the Playstation 3 or Back on the Xbox 360.

One downside to Battlefield 1943 is two of the maps have an aircraft carrier as your starting position. If other team members run off with the planes and boats, you either have to wait for a vehicle to respawn or swim. Swimming can take a while and leaves you in plain sight for the enemy to snipe you without a way for you to shoot back. Also, if the enemy team controls all of the flags, it can be difficult to take back a position without planning.

Battlefield 1943 looks amazing. It uses the Frost Engine, which powered Battlefield Bad Company. The main feature of the engine is destructible environments. You can destroy trees, fences, sand bags and walls of buildings. D.I.C.E. was also nice enough to place explosive barrels next to buildings and fortifications. The explosions are large, loud and satisfying.

Though it’s more than you average downloadable game, the amount of gameplay and fun you will get from Battlefield 1943 is well worth the price of admission.

Verdict: Buy It

er910 is the son of a gamer who was introduced to arcade games before Atari was a household word who has now married a gamer and fathered a gamer of their own.

Cross enjoys games, building servers and long walks in the park with his wife and twins.

Before I get to deep into this post allow me to mention that I was and always shall be a fan of the Ghostbusters films. That being said, on to the review.

To start off the character that you play is a rookie in the company, the fifth Ghostbuster. All the actors reprise their roles for this game and the dialog is great. The only real issue I had with the voice over work was Bill Murray’s lines being delivered in a fashion that didn’t quite fit. Having that voice talent really helped with the immersion. I found myself waiting around the firehouse listening in on Janine’s phone conversations and talking to the giant painting of Vigo. Now to be honest the character models are perfect examples of life in ‘Uncanny Valley’, I found them to look like ventriloquist dummies more than people.

“Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back.”

Strapping on the proton pack honestly took me right back to being a kid again. It’s pure joy to throw that stream; it’s look, it’s sound… perfect. The proton pack has changed a little in that there are more functions built into it (4 total primary weapon types), you’ll have to unlock them as you play. On top of that each firing mode has a secondary fire so there’s no lack of options. Of course you have the proton stream and they have added a slime blower to the pack. There are also two new primary firing modes; a shock blast and a meson collider. Of course you have the traps as well though they aren’t needed for every kind of specter you’ll run into. You also have a PKE meter and your para-goggles which allows you to have a glimpse into the ghost-world. The PKE meter will alert you when you are getting closer to paranormal activity along with allowing you to scan ghosts and other objects. When you scan these things they get added to your copy of ‘Tobin’s Spirit Guide’ which will tell you the best weapon to use against that particular ghost.

The story is decent enough to keep me involved centering again around Ivo Shandor and his cult of Gozerians. You revisit a number of sites that had been seen in the films. Which I don’t mind because there are new things discovered about them. The game is pretty much straight forward in its go-do-this type of missions. I was hoping that the developers would have made New York an open sandbox employing GTA or Spider-Man style missions. This is mainly because the only thing missing from this game is me driving the Ecto-1.

If you are a fan of the Ghostbusters, as I am, then this is a buy. If not, I would really suggest renting this one as it is a fun game and imagine that someone with more game-time on their hands may finish the game quickly.

Bottom Line: Rent it.

Riding in the machine gunner’s seat of a Japanese tank, my driver spots a U.S. tank and fires at it. The Marine driver fires back and severely damages our tank. Another shot will destroy us and the Airfield will fall into U.S. control. I hop out of the gunner’s seat and ready my bazooka. As the U.S. tank destroys our tank, I fire a rocket to blow the Marine to kingdom come. I hope my driver jumped out or else we just lost another ticket. Welcome to Battlefield 1943.

After spending 41 minutes with the 30 trial for PS3 version of Battlefield 1943, I am going to say this is a must buy. The gameplay has been streamlined, but D.I.C.E. did not dumb it down. The game offers 3 classes, each with 2 unique weapons. The Rifleman has a rifle and rifle grenades, Infantry has a sub-machine gun and a bazooka and the Scout has a sniper rifle and a pistol. The Rifleman and Infantry also have grenade while the Scout has explosives with a detonator. If you get close enough to see the color of your opponent’s eyes, Rifleman and Scouts can stab with a bayonet and Infantry can clobber foes with a wrench. Infantry can also repair vehicles with his wrench.

I played four matches on Iwo Jima. The games were fast and fluid. Each team has to capture five flags on the map while eliminating the enemy team. Captured flags gives your team an additional place to spawn and more vehicles to drive. The map has jeeps, tanks, airplanes and boats that you can take from the aircraft carrier to the island. Anti-aircraft guns are dotted across the map. And the airfield has a station where a player can call in bombers to devastate the landscape.

Speaking of devastation, everything besides the ground and steel is destructible. Fences, trees and buildings explode, break and fall beautifully. Sand bags send plumes of dust into the air with a well placed grenade. The only odd addition to the game is exploding barrels…until you use them to flush out infantry hunkering down in a building.

D.I.C.E. has done a great job with reinventing a classic. Battlefield 1943 will become my new playground.

Download it here.

If I could get away with a short review, I’d say do not play this game…period. But for those of you like myself who enjoyed the films, here’s the low down. Pirates of the Caribbean At World’s End loosely follows the events of Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Man’s Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean At World’s End. I say loosely because if you did not watch the films, you would not have any idea what was going on.

Who is this pirate I am playing as? Why are the soldiers after him? Why should I even care about what is happening? I actually watched the movies and had a hard time following the events in this game.

After a couple of levels, Will Turner showed up to help Jack Sparrow. Now I have some back up to fight the endless horde of soldiers and… wait? What’s this? Game over? If you do not keep your team mate alive, you lose and reload at the checkpoint. The game did not explain how to switch characters or that you need to. I spent way too much time juggling characters just to make them pick up health potions, which they do not do on their own.

After 10 hours of using the same three hit combo and participating in horrible fencing battles with bosses, I wanted my time and money back.

Verdict: Skip It

Uncharted 2 Among Thieves is going to consume my life. I am as giddy as Link armed with the Master Sword waiting to jump back into the world of Nathen Drake. Climbing, shooting and solving Indiana Jones inspired puzzles in the search for lost treasure of Marco Polo. The new locales and cast members are enough to make me happy.

But wait, there’s more…

Multiplayer! That’s right. A third person action platformer with multiplayer. Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and a Capture the Flag variant has been announced. I am a multiplayer junky and Uncharted 2 may replace Warhawk and Killzone 2 (just started) as my go to frag fest.

Naughty Dog must love me as well adding all these goodies to my most anticipated game of 2009.

Enter Dragon Age, I attempted to get into the beta for the toolset and as yet haven’t been accepted and that could very well be due to the severe age of my PC. I happen to be building a new computer, slowly (only have the case and power supply so far), in order to be able to run this game nice and smoothly. As I understand Bioware is not making this game to be multiplayer, which I consider a bit of a mistake and will note that the on-line element is what kept NWN around for so long. With that in mind I’ve been thinking more about the single player experience as opposed to the multiplayer that I concentrated on during my NWN time. I really should have made modules that were meant to be played through considering most of my work was a solo effort and probably would have been better employed in classic adventure modules.

I’m still not thoroughly up to date on the game but what I have seen and read really has me excited to get creative and has me stepping up effort on building upon my campaign setting/world.

You can find the article at the Guardian. The research was conducted at the department of psychiatry at the University of Oxford. What they say is basically this; When the mind is involved in an activity that requires the use of it’s visual-spatial abilities there is a decrease in the brains ability to produce flashback imagery.

I would go further to say that similar games such as Dr. Mario could have the same effects. This kind of research causes me to grin a little bit, I always knew games were good for more than entertainment. Years ago my brother had tracking problems with his eyes (hand-eye coordination) and he and his doctor at the time applauded how well he was able to re-adjust his eyes by playing games along with doing a few other exercises.