PC Game Reviews

by Magnus Geijer

To increase our nerd factor, this issue's Sapphire Wire will contain a few reviews of recent games for the PC.

The Sims 2 (Electronic Arts, 2004)

Here's a game that a lot of people have been waiting for. The Sims (Electronic Arts, 2000) was groundbreaking when it came out. Not only did it break all previous PC game sales records and appeal equally to male and female audiences, it also doesn't contain any violence (unless you really want it to.) Maxis/EA Games wasn't slow to pick up on the financial possibilities and have released a never-ending string of add-ons, and so the sequel has been hotly coveted. For those of you not yet familiar with the game, it's a life simulator. You create your characters, build and furnish their homes, guide their careers and love lives, help them gain friends and influence and try to prevent them from burning the house down or electrocuting themselves while changing light bulbs.

So how do you follow up on the best selling game of all time? You make it again, only a little prettier. In The Sims 2, the movement patterns of the characters are amazingly natural. The textures and facial expressions, not to mention the possible varieties of characters, are miles ahead of the first game. There's now a generations feature, where children actually grow up and can be played in their own households, while the older characters will go through old age and in the end pass on to the place where all computer game characters must go. The career feature is similar to the familiar one, and so is the character interaction, even though there are new options. If you never played the original game, The Sims 2 should prove a treat, and might well take a disturbing amount of time out of your life for a while. Fans of The Sims will probably want to reacquaint themselves with Pleasantville and its inhabitants, but due to the overall similarity probably shouldn't expect to be quite as infatuated with the sequel as the original.

The Lord of the Rings - Battle for Middle Earth (Electronic Arts, 2004)

The concept of The Lord of the Rings - Battle for Middle Earth is a tried and proven one, to the point where you might wonder if yet another title could actually hold anything new. The concept was pioneered in Dune 2 and has followers like Warcraft, Command & Conquer and Age of Empires. Labeled Real-Time Strategy, the basic idea is to build a town/camp/production facility that in one way or another produces gold, iron, food, wood or other raw materials, and then to use these materials to produce military units of various sorts. Once the military units are in place, you defend your camp and take over those camps belonging to the enemy. In Battle for Middle Earth, you can choose to play either as Good or Evil, and rather than just changing which side of the battlefield you start out on, in this game it actually sets you up with a completely different game. The missions all have some connection to the plot in The Lord of the Rings, and you can recruit some of the heroes from the books/films, which adds a bit of personality to the game, at least for this particular Lord of the Rings nerd. As you progress through the missions, you build command points, which lets you command larger armies, and power points, which lets you purchase special powers, and increase your production power, until you stand ready to completely vanquish your enemy. There are oodles of upgrades and characters available, including ents and oliphaunts, summoned Balrogs and just about anyone seen in the movies holding anything more offensive than a bread knife. In all, The Lord of the Rings - Battle for Middle Earth might not add anything truly new and amazing to the genre beside the Lord of the Rings franchise, but the graphics are attractive, the sounds and little film clips from the films build a strong atmosphere, and the missions have enough difference between them to make the game interesting from beginning to end. I find it one of the better RTS games I've seen.

Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic 2, The Sith Lords (LucasArts?, 2004)

Here's another sequel to a best-seller, and another game basing its fame on a movie franchise. The first Knights of the Old Republic came out in 2003 and was chosen game of the year. Although LucasArts? has tried many times to produce games based on Star Wars, it wasn't until KOTOR that they got things right. KOTOR is a first person role-playing game set several thousand years before the movies take place, but things are amazingly similar to the familiar Star Wars world, to the point where the only difference between a 4788 model X-wing and a 9233 in "Dune Sunset" rather than the original "Beige" has become the standard interior color. In both games your character starts out with no memory of what's happened to him recently, and has to struggle through all sorts of trouble to find out who he is and how to regain his Jedi powers. During your travels you can join up with several familiar-looking characters to battle your way through various aliens of known and unknown forms. The environments are pretty and the conversation options are impressive, and of course, the chance of light saber fights is always an incentive, but what makes the games differ from most other games is how your actions will impact the outcome of the game. Most things you do will be attributed either light points or dark points, which guides your development to become either a good Jedi or an evil Sith. This impacts the outcome of the game to the point that most players will want to go through it twice.

So what makes KOTOR2 different from the first one? Not a whole lot, really. The plot is brand new, of course, and so are the characters. There are some new Jedi mind powers, some new weapons and some new twists to the plot, but in most things KOTOR2 is an update on the original. The environments can be a little barren and non-interactive, and sometimes the gameplay is a little more linear than one could wish, considering the advertised options and differing outcomes. However, even if you played the first game into the ground, the sequel is still a worthwhile play. I shall refrain from ending this review by saying, "May the force be with you."