Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 Hands-On Preview.

We take a brief look into the life and times of Naruto Uzumaki in his latest fighting game.

There’s probably a pretty good chance that you’ve at least heard of Naruto in one of its many forms–TV show or manga. But for the uninitiated, Naruto follows the story of a young ninja who not only struggles to become more skilled in the ways of the stealthy, powerful warrior through training, but also struggles with his own identity. Naturally, some of that also has to do with Naruto becoming more mature and more comfortable with friends who are uneasy when he’s around (at least, initially), but Naruto has something special about him. He’s the vessel for the nine-tailed fox–an evil creature imprisoned inside Naruto–and he’s not too happy about it.

The early portions of Ultimate Ninja Storm 2’s Ultimate Adventure mode focus on Naruto and his return to Hidden-Leaf Village after training with Jiraiya. Wasting no time, Naruto then meets up with some old friends, like Sakura, who then join him on some simple missions issued to him by the Hokage. These missions are used to help familiarize you with some of the basic elements of the Ultimate Adventure mode. You’ll learn about collecting materials that can then be used to make items that have stronger status effects than most standard items. You’ll learn how to properly equip certain items before battle–these items range from offensive weapons to items that give you increased chakra (also known as magic). Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, you’ll learn how to incorporate attacks from your partner when fighting an opponent.

Fights happen pretty regularly in the Ultimate Adventure mode, and it doesn’t take long to get a pretty decent strategy going quickly or to discover an enemy’s weakness. Actually, one of the very first missions has you venturing just outside Hidden-Leaf to the forest where there’s a doppelganger of Naruto, which has similar skills and abilities. Fights take place in a full 3D arena where you’re able to move in just about any direction. All characters have a relatively weak projectile attack, as well as a throw, a default combination attack, a jump, and a variety of chakra attacks. Interestingly, you can actually change the kind of chakra attack you launch, not only by using different face buttons and their corresponding basic attack (like using a chakra-powered projectile), but also by pressing the chakra button multiple times. Of course, if you do this, it means that you won’t have as much magic left over when the attack is finished, but you can always run for safety and attempt to charge it back up.

When they’re indicated, you can also perform special attacks with your in-fight partner that deal out massive amounts of damage, but using your buddy usually involves more strategy than that. Simply pressing the bumper button to have them come in and attack won’t get much done because their attack is usually restricted to a certain area or where your opponent was standing when you pressed the button. If you mistime it, then you basically waste one of your partner attacks. At any rate, you’ll learn how to use support characters more effectively as the game progresses, and you’ll also learn how they differ from each other in their skills.

As you progress through the Ultimate Adventure mode, you’ll encounter more characters and more fights. At one point, Naruto has to engage in the bell drill with Kakashi with the aid of Sakura. The three then form Team 7 and continue performing missions for the Hokage. But you won’t always play as Naruto and his team, even in these early parts of the game. As you’ll quickly find out, Gaara the kazekage (who, like Naruto, also has a powerful evil trapped inside) plays a big role in this mode, and his similarity to Naruto will be a driving force in what our hero does to save him.

Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 has more than an adventure mode to take part in. It also features a versus mode where you can go up against a friend or computer opponent in any one of several battle arenas. This mode is perfect for refining your skills as well as finding out the offensive and defensive capabilities of various characters that you encounter in the adventure mode. It’s worth noting that a good number of the characters in this mode won’t be available to you until you get through Ultimate Adventure, but there are several well-known characters to choose from right off the bat. Also, you can choose to fight with or without partners, but it’s a good idea to fight with them in the early going in case you’re not too sure how they factor into a fight. Additionally, Ninja Storm 2 features an online mode, and while we weren’t able to try it, the single-player mode does drop hints about it–particularly the profile system that lets you edit various ninja info cards that ultimately serve as your online descriptors.

Like most Naruto games, Ninja Storm 2 already looks pretty fantastic. The characters appear nearly identical to their TV show and manga counterparts, and some of the especially dramatic moments (or more specifically, those involving the powerful jutsu skills that incorporate some light quick-time-event button presses) are impressive. That aside, we’re interested to see how the Ultimate Adventure mode expands in the later chapters and just how well the online fights work. Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 is scheduled for release on October 19.

By : 20th CGN.

Info By : Gamespot.

Plants vs. Zombies Review. [X-Box 360]

• PopCap.
• Strategy.
• Release: September 8, 2010.
• ESRB: Everyone 10+

The Good

• Accessible, satisfying tower defense gameplay
• Controls are smartly adapted for X360 controller
• Loads of things to do beyond just beating the campaign
• New competitive multiplayer option is a blast
• Cute and colorful presentation.

The Bad

• Multiplayer modes are local only
• Early campaign levels offer practically no challenge.

You’re trapped inside the house; brain-craving zombies are closing in from all sides; and there are no firearms or weaponized power tools in sight. What do you do? In Plants vs. Zombies, now available for the Xbox 360 a little over a year after it debuted on the PC, you have only one option: to strategically surround your home with a selection of combat-ready plants. Both the plants at your disposal and the zombies you’re disposing of in this tower defense game come in a wonderful variety of shapes and sizes, and are introduced gradually as you play through the occasionally challenging campaign. The Xbox 360 version of Plants vs. Zombies boasts the same campaign, minigames, and bonus features found in the PC original and also adds some great new two-player options to the mix, making this the most feature-packed version of the game yet.

[The new co-op modes demand that you work closely with your partner.]

Most of your time in Plants vs. Zombies is spent either on your front lawn or out back, where there’s a slightly larger garden with a pond running down the middle of it. Both are divided into grids, and each square can accommodate any one plant of your choosing. Zombies shamble, sprint, and swim from right to left toward your house, while you establish defenses that can include any of almost 50 different plants (though no more than 10 different species in any one level). Sunflowers are used to collect the sun that serves as currency, wall-nuts obstruct zombies for as long as it takes for them to be chewed through, potato mines explode when zombies step on them, peashooters do exactly what you think they do, and so on. As your arsenal increases in size, you have to choose which types of plants you’re going to take into each level. You’ll inevitably have favorites, but these decisions are also based on a sneak peek that you get of the zombies that are going to attack. If you see that some of the zombies are going to be attacking by floating over your garden suspended from balloons, for example, you need to make sure that you have a plant that can either puncture or blow away those balloons. Though most levels have you doing much the same thing, the ever-changing zombie horde and the different plants that you use to combat them–as well as levels set at night and in fog–prevent the action from getting repetitive.

Also keeping the action fresh are levels that take the form of different minigames. For example, there are levels in which you use wall-nuts as bowling balls, and other levels in which the plants in your arsenal are dealt to you randomly like playing cards. All of the minigames that pop up during the campaign can also be played outside of it, via a menu that lists no fewer than 20 different minigame types. You can do battle against invisible zombies, you can play a Bejeweled variant with the plants in your garden as zombies attack, and you can even raise your own undead in a zombiquarium. Even if you’re only playing solo, Plants vs. Zombies is a game that just keeps on giving long after you’ve beaten the campaign. Add a second player, and this great game gets even better.

[Rooftop gardens have rarely seemed like such a good idea.]

It’s unfortunate that Plants vs. Zombies’ multiplayer options aren’t playable online, but both the cooperative and competitive games are fun to check out with a friend. Cooperative play is available in all of the dozens of campaign levels as well as in similar levels accessible via a co-op menu. In co-op, you and a friend must work together to defend the house from zombies in exactly the same way that you do in solo play. The twist is that you have completely different selections of plants at your disposal, so, for example, you might be the only one who can plant the sunflowers needed at the start of any level. There’s no shared pool for the sun resource in co-op, which means you need to work closely with your friend to make sure that you both have the sun that you need to build plants and defend against the unrelenting zombie horde. Oddly, you have the ability to manually apply large lumps of movement-hindering butter to zombies’ heads in co-op, which adds little to the game other than something for you to do when you’re all out of sun. Competitive play is far more exciting than co-op because, for the first time in a Plants vs. Zombies game, one of you gets to play as the zombies in a meaningful way.

If you’re playing as the plants, the only real difference between competitive and solo play is that you have to concern yourself with attacking stationary zombies on the far right of the screen while defending the house. If you’re the zombie player, you have to defend those stationary zombies while deciding which of your undead minions to send on the offensive. You use tombstones in place of sunflowers, your resource is brains rather than sun, you have only three columns of the garden to play with, and your minions are mobile rather than rooted, but these obvious differences aside, playing as the zombies isn’t wholly unlike playing as the plants. There are 18 different zombie types to choose from, though you go into each match with an arsenal of only five. If you choose the quick-play versus option, both players have access to only basic minion types, but if you randomize the loadouts or opt for a custom game that lets you pick which types you want, you have the option to include some really formidable frontal-lobe munchers. Digger zombies mine their way under the garden and then attack plants from the rear, catapult zombies drive vehicles equipped with long-range weaponry, and trash-can zombies are slow moving but heavily armored, to name but a few.

[Versus mode is a great addition to the game that you’ll keep coming back to.]

In addition to the all-new multiplayer options, one of the big differences between the Xbox 360 version of Plants vs. Zombies and those that have come before it is that you play it with a controller rather than with a mouse or a touch screen. If you’ve played previous versions, you’re probably wondering how the controls translate, and the answer is very well. As the undead encroach from the right-hand side of the screen, you move your cursor around the garden with the analog stick and use the A button to place whichever plant you’ve used the left and right bumpers to select from your horticultural arsenal. The shovel you use to dig up plants when you want to replace them with better ones is mapped to the B button, which makes the act of replacing one plant with another even quicker and easier to perform than in other versions. Some of the minigames require different controls, but those aside, you already know everything that you need to. Furthermore, collecting the all-important sun resource is made effortless by the fact that it gravitates toward your cursor anytime you get close to it, which is a great addition given the relative lack of precision afforded you by an analog stick.

Plants vs. Zombies impresses across the board with ingenious game design, uncomplicated controls, colorful visuals, upbeat audio, a decent difficulty curve, and frequent player rewards. If you’ve never played Plants vs. Zombies before, it’s time for you to spend 1200 Microsoft points ($15) and find out what you’ve been missing out on. And even if you’ve already devoted numerous hours to garden defense on other platforms, you should seriously consider doing it all again just to get your hands on the new Versus mode.

By : 20th CGN.

Gun Loco – Official Latest Trailer [HD] [EXCLUSIVE]

Title: Gun Loco
Release Date: TBA 2011
Platforms: Xbox 360
Label: Square Enix
Genre: Third-person shooter
Age Rating: T

This game is not up to the standard of the gaming that is currently being played at the moment from late 2009 to 2010. With games like Kane and Lynch and GTA 4 : The Ballads of Gay Tony. This game has average graphics, and to dampen this game even more the story line is quite weak. Certainly not a game that you can sit for hours and play. Unlike GTA 4 and other games. So anyways after all it’s a game, and it’s my duty to post this game in my blog. But do leave some bad comments about this game 😛 Just kidding, you decide whether you like it or not and tell me.

By : 20th Century Games & News.