Good things can come for free Part 3

As well as various commercial free games, open source provides a large range of free games of all genres. All though these games vary in quality and support, many enjoyable and commercial grade games a released open source. Some of the most popular open source FPS include Alien Arena, America's Army, Cube, Cube 2, Assault Cube, Nexuiz, Open Frag and many more. There is also a great deal of Free or Open source MMORPG's and a few RTS.

http://www.economicalgamer.com/ has a list of recommended games which it claims is of retail quality. I don't really need to say much more, however if you still need help I recommend that you click here.

Medal of Honor: Heroes 2

I was quite excited when I got this for my 13^th birthday after playing Medal of Honor: Heroes. Even though it had fewer levels, I was looking forward to using it for multiplayer usage, and it didn’t fail to disappoint. For about three days.

Comparing the two MOH:H games, I was slightly disappointed with the interface, taking on a rather 1950’s style look, but that is definitely not the biggest of my worries (read on). Actually playing the game, I was also disappointed with the reduction of more than half of the levels compared to the first MOH:H (15 down to 7 levels), but the length of these levels almost makes up for up, with the player having to go through up to four sections on the same level. While it was slightly lengthy, it helped to bring the value up slightly. The controls were extremely similar as well, with you moving with the analogue stick and shooting with the right shoulder button, and a myriad of other controls.

The same as MOH:H, the game has an easy difficulty, medium difficulty and a hard difficulty, and again you play as an OSS operative. The wide array of stage designs included everything from a beach to a train station to an underground sewer, which made the game a lot more interesting. Playing the game was also exciting most of the time, and I particularly liked looking for all the hidden secondary objectives, as well as using the wide array of weapons at your disposal (they kept the Bazooka and Panzerschreck- yes!) For the stage difficulties, the stages themselves start off easy then get brutally hard, particularly the final level, which requires you to, near the end, open up a series of gates to escape the nuke bomb factory which, as you have planted bombs, is about to collapse. The 5-minute time limit is certainly quite small, and the floods of Nazis coming to try and kill you all 300 seconds of this stage actually caused me to nearly break out in a sweat (I made it with 5 seconds left). And that was on Easy difficulty. I can’t imagine what Hard would be like (I didn’t play Medium or Hard- read on…).

After completing Easy difficulty in just four days, I decided to try out multiplayer when I went to my cousin’s place- and I was actually shocked (not kidding) when I found out quite possibly a conspiracy (!). While the game certainly had ad-hoc multiplayer, because I had an Australian version, there was no infrastructure multiplayer!!! I later found out that only games from Europe could use infrastructure, so apparently, even the USA misses out as well! What a rip-off. In fact, the game didn’t even have a Skirmish mode, which pits you up against up to 16 ‘bots’ in a level of your choice. What a super-rip-off. I actually got rid of it (it was recently on EBay).

All in all, the sequel to the fantastic MOH:H easily and convincingly fails to impress. Unless you happen to be from Europe, multiplayer is basically non-existent, and the severe shortage, and at times superhuman-difficulty, of levels just made it worse. It is certainly enjoyable, but only for a short amount of time. So, unless you happen to have five or six mates who have MOH:H2, the excitement of the game fizzled out like a packet of fizz lollies in lemonade. (Oh, and if anyone comes up with a hack so you can play multiplayer infrastructure, please tell me.)

GAMEPLAY: 7/10

GRAPHICS: 6.5/10

SOUND: 8/10

DIFFICULTY: 6/10

MULTIPLAYER: 3/10

LEVEL DESIGN: 9/10

GAME EXTRAS: 5/10

OVERALL: 6.35/10

This review was by josh

Review-PSP-Game-Metal Gear Solid:Portable Ops +

I'd say this game is far too under-appreciated by the critics. It is my first MGS game, and it left absolutely brilliant first impressions in my mind.

Highly addictive multiplayer is what makes it for me, along with its superb graphics and lovely level design. Although the game does not have an actual story-line, it has a lengthy, enjoyable, and rewarding single player 'Infinity Mission', which I have been playing for 10+ hours. The difficulty levels are perfect ie: easy is easy, hard is hard, etc. The whole idea of this single player, is to train and recruit new soldiers, which you split into squads for multi player use.

One thing that I did not see coming when I started the multiplayer, was the fact that you can lose your soldiers obtained in single player, if captured by the enemy team, if the server mode is RC (Real Combat). There is also standard VR mode, where you cannot lose your soldiers.

Another surprising aspect of the game was the included Boss-Rush mode, where you can challenge all of the bosses from the original MGS: PO, with no risk of losing obtained soldiers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the American version, you must import a game save from the original MGS: PO to unlock this feature, whereas the Australian copies (mine) come with it included.

Altogether, an addictive multiplayer game, a nifty little (yet challenging) single player addition, and with superb graphics, amazing sound effects and a heap (68) of characters make up for a great portable gaming experience.

This review was by Aydan from Handheld game reviews and is avaliable on that site.

All scores out of 10:

Graphics -8
Sound -8.5
Gameplay -9

Overall Score -8.5
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