You earn XP for killing, sneaking, hacking, talking, completing objectives – anything you could call progress. A certain amount of XP gets you one Praxis point – basically a level up. You spend Praxis on upgrades for your augmentations: each has its own mini skill tree of possible improvements. Praxis is meant to represent the way Adam Jensen gets more effective with his cybernetic implants as he uses them – the word itself is likely a corruption of the word ‘practice’. Expect every review of the game to contain a box titled ‘Praxis makes perfect’.

Right now, the game shows 21 augmentations divided into lots of interesting categories: neural, visual, defence, physical, movement, offence, and sound. Each augmentation then has a few different ways it can evolve: the Hacking Device, a neural augmentation, initially only allows you to open locked doors once you’ve hacked a security terminal. An early upgrade lets you also control cameras, and two later ones enable you to mess around with turrets and robots respectively. Along the way, there are four other upgrades that make the hacking minigame easier, effectively letting you tackle better-defended terminals. Now if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I need to loosen my collar.

The augmentations that are confirmed or are obvious additions are: hacking, cloaking, speed, strength, mind-reading, a close-range explosive attack, X-ray vision, visual analysis, increased health, increased energy, increased lung capacity, soft landing, and comms (the classic guiding voice in your head). Ones that are very likely, from icons we’ve sneakily spied, are accuracy, temporary invulnerability, a map, a security alert delay, and silent movement. Be right back, I need a cold shower.

Even geekier good news is that Human Revolution has a proper, grid-based inventory system with proportionally sized objects – inventory Tetris. The second Deus Ex, Invisible War, simplified all this to a line of slots that could each hold anything from a flamethrower to a chocolate bar. Here, big guns take up lots of room, and they even change shape and size as you add mods to them. If that doesn’t physically arouse you, you’re a psychologically healthy human being and you have no business here.

You might have heard that the game has a regenerating health system – it does, but it’s not like Call of Duty’s. You have to avoid damage entirely for a lot longer before you start to heal, and you heal slowly. Slowly enough to need healthrestoring consumables if you’re under heavy fire, and Human Revolution still has plenty of those.

It’s getting hard to keep my excitement in check. It’s the natural tendency of any fan – short for fanatic, lest we forget – to assume the worst, look for the flaws, and take any differences as detriment. That’s a good thing – Eidos Montreal prowl forums and comment threads for every reaction to what they put out about the game, and they take it all to heart. But now it seems to have worked. Now there’s less to assume, fewer flaws to find, and the differences seem increasingly positive. Do we dare raise our expectations from cautious optimism to open frothing? Personally, I’m not sure I have a choice.

By Tom Francis [PCGamer.com]

I am happy to say that BC2: Viet­nam is superb, Activi­sion take note, this is what DLC should be. BC2 Viet­nam boasts 5 brand new maps, 6 new vehi­cles, 15 addi­tional new weapons that are char­ac­ter­is­tic of the time period, 60’s sound track and new voices to boot. In addi­tion to this there are some other weapons that are in BC2 but they are Viet­nam era mod­els. With a price tag of 14.99 this is quite a bit of con­tent, espe­cially when com­pared to the mea­gre offer­ings of Activi­sons DLC which only con­tain 5 maps and half of which are just rehashes of pre­vi­ous releases on older titles. I may shoot myself later for say­ing this but this cur­rent offer­ing by DICE and EA could of eas­ily jus­ti­fied a $30.00 price tag and if they had a single-player cam­paign to boot it prob­a­bly could of stood as it’s own title.

Viet­nam does not come with it’s own cam­paign… while this is dis­ap­point­ing to me in one aspect, at 14.99 I didn’t expect one and with the amount of con­tent it had I am quite happy with­out it. I should men­tion that this in an Era rarely cov­ered in games and well at that. It would be nice to see a single-player cam­paign designed around Viet­nam. It’s a story still fairly untouched by the game industry.

The maps are a real stand­out for me in this expan­sion. Fol­low­ing the stan­dard Bat­tle­field map lay­out the maps are designed for 3 types of game­play. Rush, con­quest and squad death­match. One map that really stood out to me and actu­ally evoked some emo­tion from the dev­as­ta­tion that I saw around me was Hill 137. If any of you have seen Ham­burger Hill, the movie, this map is based off that. If you want to read more about the bat­tle at Ham­burger Hill you can read about it here. It’s actu­ally quite an inter­est­ing read. The map takes you at the start, play­ing rush, depend­ing on the side you start on, in the jun­gle mov­ing up to take com­mand points. After your team cap­tures the first set of com­mand points you move into the sec­ond stage of the map which is a mas­sive hill that has been bombed into obliv­ion. All you see are burn­ing trees and scorched ground. The fires look real and believ­able and with the gun­fire and the scream­ing of your squad-mates around you ele­vates that real­ity. This is prob­a­bly my favorite map out of the ones I have played so far. From what I can tell all of the maps will play on all three game modes. This is dif­fer­ent from the orig­i­nal BC2 release where only some of the maps were playable in some game modes.

Rush mode made a big stand­out to me on Viet­nam as well. Unlike the rush mode in BC2, and this could be con­tributed to the way the maps are designed, felt much more focused. There were cer­tain maps where you could lit­er­ally cre­ate a choke point in the map and the only way to break that defen­sive line is to use a mix­ture of vehi­cles, medics, assault and snipers. This results in epic amounts of car­nage, destruc­tion and death. Without the proper com­bi­na­tion or “team­work” your team would get slaugh­tered. That being said, it was very annoy­ing when you got placed on a bad team or one that didn’t work well together. It could make for some very long and frus­trat­ing rounds.

I’ve found that much like with BC2, Viet­nam is best played with a group of friends. I have a group of about 8 guys I play with and when we coor­di­nate together it’s about the most fun I have gam­ing period. Noth­ing beats a cohe­sive team in BC2 or Viet­nam. You will walk all over the other team if you have a well coor­di­nated group of guys. If there is one com­plaint I have about the Bad Com­pany series it is that it doesn’t really encour­age the team to play as a team. Instead you just find guys walk­ing around shoot­ing what­ever they can see.

The weapons are great as well in Viet­nam. All of them feel authen­tic and real and fit with the time period. The only gun that I felt was a lit­tle over­pow­ered com­pared to the rest was the PPSH. The gun has almost dou­ble the fire rate of any other SMG and beats most the MG’s in the field as well and it’s far to accu­rate com­pared to what the tra­di­tional SMG should be. I think the AK47 and the MG60 are my favorites in this expan­sion, it’s extremely grat­i­fy­ing to drop some­one with both of those weapons.

Sound fol­lows in the foot­steps of it’s pre­de­ces­sor and does not dis­ap­point. When not play­ing with a group of peo­ple I have it blast­ing on my 1000 watt sound sys­tem and close range explo­sions and MG fire cre­ate bass that will knock pic­tures off your wall. Gun­fire sounds superb and when you are in large fire fights with small arms fire, explo­sions, motors and scream­ing going on all around you I found that the game feel incred­i­bly immer­sive and intense.

I touched on this a lit­tle bit before but the visu­als in the game are top notch. Hill 137 again was where they really stood out. I think this is the best look­ing map in the Bad Com­pany series hands down. I also think the game plays smoother then BC2 did. I don’t think any new graph­ics were added per say but I think the game was opti­mized before it was released. I can feel the dif­fer­ence between BC2 and Viet­nam. Over­all Viet­nam looks bet­ter then it’s predaces­sor in most regards with the excep­tion of explod­ing tree’s. When a tree gets knocked down it cre­ates a paper explo­sion. The leaves look like thin, flat, green, pieces of paper. This seems like some­thing they could of spent an extra day on but it’s def­i­nitely not a big deal.

PC gamers will be happy to know that the game has got­ten released first on PC and that the game has been opti­mized for the plat­form as well. The game plays well and does not feel like it was ported from a con­sole ver­sion to the PC. If you have a decent machine, you are in for a real treat. I run the game on medium set­tings using eye­fin­ity on 3 x 25″ mon­i­tors, AMD 965 Phe­nom X2, 8gb of ram, Radeon 5850. The game looks fan­tas­tic even on medium set­tings. I haven’t tried on High set­tings yet because eye­fin­ity triples the drain on my video card. How­ever, being that the game feels like it runs smooth I will prob­a­bly try it out and see how it feels.

Over­all BC2: Viet­nam is the best value for your money I have seen in a long time. You get basi­cally an entirely new name with the excep­tion of a single-player cam­paign for the price of 14.99. This is an expan­sion more than a DLC but I can’t help but won­der why DICE and EA can put out essen­tially a new game for 14.99 when Activi­sion can’t even put out 5 orig­i­nal maps for the same price. I’m not a fan of EA but EA and DICE got it right with this expan­sion. This is one of the best DLC/Expansions of the year hands down. If any of you are con­sid­er­ing pur­chas­ing this, buy it now, you won’t be disappointed.

Final Score: 9.5/10

• Microsoft® DirectX® 11 Support
  DirectX 11 GPU with Shader Model 5.0 support designed for ultra high performance in the new API’s key graphics feature, GPU-accelerated tessellation.
• NVIDIA® PhysX® Technology
  Full support for NVIDIA PhysX technology, enabling a totally new class of physical gaming interaction for a more dynamic and realistic experience with GeForce.
• NVIDIA® 3D Vision™ Ready¹
  GeForce GPU support for NVIDIA 3D Vision, bringing a fully immersive stereoscopic 3D experience to the PC. A combination of high-tech wireless glasses and advanced software, 3D Vision transforms hundreds of PC games into full stereoscopic 3D. In addition, you can watch 3D movies and 3D digital photographs in eye popping, crystal-clear quality.
• NVIDIA® 3D Vision™ Surround Ready²
  Expand your games across three displays in full stereoscopic 3D for the ultimate “inside the game” experience with the power of NVIDIA 3D Vision and SLI technologies. NVIDIA Surround also supports triple screen gaming with non-stereo displays.
• NVIDIA® SLI® Technology³
  Industry leading NVIDIA SLI technology offers amazing performance scaling for the world’s premier gaming solution.
• NVIDIA® CUDA™ Technology
  CUDA technology unlocks the power of the GPU’s processor cores to accelerate the most demanding tasks such as video transcoding, physics simulation, ray tracing, and more, delivering incredible performance improvements over traditional CPUs.
• 32x Anti-aliasing Technology
  Lightning fast, high-quality anti-aliasing at up to 32x sample rates obliterates jagged edges.
• NVIDIA® PureVideo® HD Technology⁴
  The combination of high-definition video decode acceleration and post-processing that delivers unprecedented picture clarity, smooth video, accurate color, and precise image scaling for movies and video.
• PCI Express 2.0 Support
  Designed for the new PCI Express 2.0 bus architecture offering the highest data transfer speeds for the most bandwidth-hungry games and 3D applications, while maintaining backwards compatibility with existing PCI Express motherboards for the broadest support.
• Dual-link DVI Support
  Able to drive industry’s largest and highest resolution flat-panel displays up to 2560×1600 and with support for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP).
• HDMI 1.4a Support⁵
  Support for HDMI 1.4a including GPU accelerated Blu-ray 3D support, x.v.Color, HDMI Deep Color, and 7.1 digital surround sound.

NVIDIA SLI®-ready1	3-way
NVIDIA 3D Vision Ready
NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround Ready2
NVIDIA PureVideo® Technology3	HD
NVIDIA PhysX™-ready
NVIDIA CUDA™ Technology
Microsoft DirectX	11
OpenGL	4.1
Bus Support	PCI-E 2.0 x 16
Certified for Windows 7

Maximum Digital Resolution	2560×1600
Maximum VGA Resolution	2048×1536
Standard Display Connectors	Mini HDMI Two Dual Link DVI
Multi Monitor
HDCP
HDMI4	1.4a
Audio Input for HDMI	Internal

Tron: Evolution puts players in the digital shoes of Anon (short for Anonymous), a faceless system monitor that gets caught up in the struggle between the original movie’s hero Kevin Flynn and Clu, a program created in Flynn’s likeness to represent him inside the digital world of The Grid. Clu has gone rogue, and it’ll take all of Anon’s free-running parkour skills and disc combat proficiency to set up the plot for Tron: Legacy.
Ideal Player

Players intrigued by Tron’s glowing digital world will find plenty of backstory lurking within Evolution’s extras, while devotees of Prince of Persia-style action adventure games might enjoy the action, as long as they don’t mind repetition.
Why You Should Care

Tron: Evolution is the direct sequel to what many consider the world’s first great video game movie, and elements from the game are said to give extra insight into scenes from the upcoming feature film Tron: Legacy.

How does Evolution fit into the Tron story? Evolution seems to take place way before the events in Tron: Legacy, mainly because Flynn is still a relatively young man, the mirror image of his evil avatar Clu. Olivia Wilde’s Quorra appears as she does in the film, though not nearly as sexy thanks to the game’s rough character models. Evolution basically establishes the status quo as seen in Tron: Legacy, showing us how Flynn became trapped in the Grid and how Clu transformed from a loyal program to an evil digital dictator. The meat of the Tron fiction found in the game comes from data files unlocked along the way, with the story often taking a back seat to the action, such as it is.

So that’s the adventure, what’s the action? I spent equal time in Tron: Evolution battling glowing enemies with my deadly disc and navigating the convoluted architecture of the grid using parkour-inspired wall running and climbing moves. Combat was dynamic and compelling at first, but soon it became clear that the best tactic to win was spamming energy-fueled power moves, transforming battles into a dance back and forth between enemies and energy wells. Likewise jumping, climbing, and wall-running about the environment was entertaining initially, quickly becoming stale as I realized the obstacles weren’t really evolving as the game progressed. Towards the end of the game the only real excitement came from being blinded by bad camera angles.
Surely there’s more to it than that, right? Well there is the odd light cycle segment, though they’re a far cry from the tense light-trail based battle arenas of the original film. Here the light cycle is merely a method of conveyance, transporting Anon from point A to point B, often as the world is crumbling around him. These segments would be more enjoyable if the world were less monochrome, which would in turn make obstacles more visible. There are also a couple of tank-driving levels, which, while slow and plodding, were probably my favorite moments in the single-player campaign

Is the multiplayer just as tepid? Not at all! The multiplayer is actually where the action is in Tron: Evolution. Getting together with a bunch of players and tossing discs at each other or trying to trick them into running into your light cycle trail is a real blast. Unfortunately it’s a real unbalanced and repetitive blast. See, as you play through Tron: Evolution in multiplayer or single-player, you earn experience points which give you memory to spend on upgrades. These upgrades carry back and forth between the story missions and online modes. These upgrades are substantial, granting players massive chunks of extra health and powerful new weapons. Since there is no way currently to limit online matches to people of similar levels, I often found myself playing my level 21 character against lower-level players, and I tore through them like tissue paper. Conversely I could barely scratch a level 50 character. Between the unbalance and the fact that the game only comes with four maps (two more with the day-one free DLC), I can’t see multiplayer being a source of lasting entertainment.

The Bottom Line

Tron: Evolution wants to be a sexy, high-gloss Prince of Persia, trading desert sands and Arabian castles for the shining neon of the Grid. Sadly that aspiration is never fully realized, leaving us with an experience that’s dull despite its brilliant glow; a game that’s most impressive accomplishment is making a four to five hour adventure seem long and drawn-out. Multiplayer offers a spark of hope, but that spark dies out too quickly. It’s true that the game contains scenes and background information that could enhance your appreciation of both films, but those revelations will still be fresh when Tron: Evolution hits the bargain bin.

Tron: Evolution was developed by Propaganda Games and published by Disney Interactive Studios for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC, released on December 7. Retails for $59.99 ($39.99 PC). A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played through the entire story on average difficulty, earned level 22, and participated in multiple lengthy multiplayer matches.

Send an email to Michael Fahey, the author of this post, at fahey@kotaku.com.
via [kotaku.com]

Also, there are attack dogs.
Our final preview look at Dog Days before its release in a few weeks consisted mainly of firefights and dialogue, and I’ve come away with a few things in mind prior to my final verdict on the game.

First, as I mentioned before, the new visual style and presentation quirks are really selling the narrative and subject matter much more successfully than pretty much any game dealing with this subject matter has. By comparison, GTA’s crime infused stories look like kids’ stuff. The language and delivery and camerawork are disturbing, violent, gray stuff, but they’re presented with conviction and confidence, and 3 full chapters in, Dog Days is pretty engrossing.

Second, the story and gameplay are coming together much more fluidly than they ever did in Dead Men, and the pacing feels much better so far. This could change of course; it’s still early in the game. But it’s got me hopeful – by the time the build was over, I wasn’t ready for it to be. That’s a good sign, right?

Finally, my major concern for Dog Days right now is a question of difficulty. Not only is the AI extremely aggressive, most weapons in Kane & Lynch 2 are inaccurate and difficult to score effective shots with, meaning enemies don’t go down easy. Put simply, I died, often and frequently without much warning.

Again, these aren’t final thoughts. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days releases in a few weeks. However, Dog Days seems to be doing enough right to surpass IO’s previous effort and then some. We’ll just have to wait and see by how much.

Source IGN

Source IGN

Plain Sight is a game about self-destructive robots banging into each other in low-gravity levels fashioned after cassette tapes, pirate ships, and pocket watches. And if that isn’t enough to pique your interest, then consider this: It’s also a ton of fun. This multiplayer-focused action game is a chaotic hoot, filled with cel-shaded robots zooming about beautiful minimalist environments. In fact, the frantic pace and flighty targeting can sometimes lead to a bit too much chaos, making it tough to tell exactly what’s going on, let alone respond to it. For the most part, however, the dizzying pace is an absolute joy. Plain Sight is an elegant and rewarding game that serves as a reminder that the sweetest pleasures are often the simplest.

The anarchy begins with a simple move: dashing. By holding down the left mouse button and then releasing it, you will dash forward. This is a good evasive move, but it’s also key to an offensive strike because holding the mouse button down will also lock on to an enemy in your field of vision. As long as your target remains within view and within range (in plain sight, if you will), your katana-wielding robot smashes into its clanking victim when you release the mouse button. This destroys your victim, and lets you suck up all of his stored energy. That energy may eventually translate to points, but only if you’re willing to make the ultimate sacrifice: suicide. The energy you accumulate only does you good when you blow yourself up and, hopefully, take down your enemies in your blast. The more energy you’ve stored up and the more zippy bots caught in your explosion, the more points you earn for upgrades. After each death, you apply these points to various enhancements to your jumping skills, your dash power, and so on. Then, you respawn and do it all over again.

Such a dry description doesn’t do Plain Sight’s moment-to-moment gameplay a bit of justice, however. Game arenas float in space like freaky deformed planets with stairways that lead to more stairways while you and your foes dash and triple-jump about like overcaffeinated toasters with legs. That every object exerts a gravitational pull further contributes to the fury. You cannot fall off any map–gravity will always pull you back. Using gravity to your advantage, you can circle about various objects for any number of seconds, trying to keep a surface between you and your foes by staying constantly on the move. Some of the maps make absolutely brilliant use of the force exerted upon you. On one map, for example, an inner object pulls every player to the center, while peripheral platforms offer a chance for respite. It’s wonderful chaos to be flung about space with a dozen or more other players or AI-controlled bots; explosions and trails are everywhere while you slam into your victims and catch them in your suicidal detonation. Because you earn points by detonating, you perpetually need to fight the urge to accumulate just a bit more energy, which leads to a bigger blast radius and more points. Of course, the longer you cling to life, the greater the chance that you will end up feeding the energy accrued to your next assassin. This points mechanic throws in a welcome sense of tension amongst the freewheeling fun.

Plain Sight’s greatest asset–this breakneck tempo–also happens to be its primary flaw. The madness of robots, robots everywhere is hugely entertaining, but you don’t always feel completely in control. You automatically target whomever the game wants you to target. This keeps the pace moving because you never have to fiddle with manual targeting, but with bots flying every which way, you aren’t guaranteed to lock on to anyone, let alone a specific target. This can lead to some camera flipping and random dashing as you try to get your next hapless victim in your view or simply try to come to grips with the gravitational pull of multiple objects at once. Nevertheless, it doesn’t take too long to wrap your head around Plain Sight’s quirky rules. Once you get a feel for the pull of gravity and the way you latch on to vertical surfaces, your twitch skills will rise to the occasion. Soon, you’ll be soaring through the abstract skies and zooming toward enemies at screaming speeds and only occasionally getting flustered by the bedlam.

Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch modes offer a great way to enjoy all this chaos. In fact, the speedy nature of the gameplay is a perfect fit for these tried-and-true modes, which allow you to zip around without worry of additional objectives. You can also try your hand at Capture the Flag, though it’s the other two modes that bear special mention. Ninja! Ninja! Botzilla! is an all-versus-one mode in which one player starts at gargantuan size with a Godzilla mask on his or her head, and the others repeatedly slam into the superpowered Botzilla, whittling his size down with each successful smash. This can be a lot of fun, though because your sights are set on a single player, you don’t get the pandemonium that makes Plain Sight so special. (Granted, it’s a ton of fun to be Botzilla and slash away at the little bots that hound you.) Lighten Up mode is a King of the Hill variant in which players compete to see who can set off the largest explosion in a particular location. While it can be tricky to maneuver to a very specific platform, this is Plain Sight at its best: absolute mayhem. Ostensibly, you can check the in-game leaderboards to see how you stack up to others, at least in the Steam version of the game, but as of this writing, the leaderboard screen never got past the “looking for entries” indicator.

Plain Sight pairs its insane speed with a beautiful visual style, in which rich, bold colors provide a galactic backdrop to the sterile constructs on which you run and tumble. Players leave behind them vivid trails that indicate the amount of energy they’ve hoarded, and foes explode in a flashy twinkle of glittering stars. Even the platform you land on glows in the same hue as your trail, and the resulting look is crisp and colorful but never so busy as to be distracting. The jaunty jazz of the menu screens might lead you to believe that Plain Sight will sport a similarly catchy audio design, but the sound is minimal. Yet while the sound effects harbor no surprises, there are minor delights in the clink-clink of your ninja robot prancing across a platform and the joyous grunts he occasionally emits.

Plain Sight is a cheerful flight of fancy. Things can get a bit messy, but that’s a forgivable side effect of a game that is all wonderful madness. While there aren’t great hordes of people playing online, you can practice against bots if you have trouble finding a match, and bot play is almost as much fun as competing against humans. Plain Sight is available on Steam and other digital distribution outlets and offers as much pure fun as you could expect for $9.99.

While playing Sims games of yore, sending your little computer people off to work was a straightforward process: The carpool drove up, and you waved good-bye to your digital self, who then earned simoleans by doing unseen tasks in some unseen work environment. In the Sims 3, you could exert minimal control, but your sims’ workday tasks were hidden safely under the hood. The Sims 3: Ambitions changes that. Now, with the addition of professions–as opposed to careers–you no longer need to wait patiently for your sims to return from work before you can set your evil (or altruistic) plans in motion. Work tasks are now integrated into your sims’ daily lives, sending you about town to accomplish such tasks as solving mysteries, fighting fires, and capturing ghosts. This expansion adds other goodies to the main game as well, from new hobbies to new public lots. None of these extras are as unexpected or game-changing as the additions made by The Sims 3′s first expansion, World Adventures, but you shouldn’t sell this expansion short. Ambitions alters the moment-to-moment gameplay in fun and refreshing ways, and Sims fanatics needing more to tinker with in their digital dollhouses will want to pick it up.

The most obvious way Ambitions enhances The Sims 3 is with professions. By choosing a profession rather than a career, you receive job-related tasks on your designated workdays that you perform to earn simoleans. These objectives are generally fun and clever role-playing-type missions typified by grin-inducing writing and a touch of the bizarre. Take the ghost-hunting profession, for example. Paranormal investigation involves sucking up spirits into your portable ghost vacuum, though as you progress, you encounter a greater variety of jobs. For some extra cash you could sell the lost souls you collect to the local lab, but if you look kindly upon these groaning ghouls, you may prefer to set them free in a nearby graveyard. If you’d rather pursue a more earthly personality, you could always be an investigator. Your initial assignments are fun and funny, having you interview clients who may inform you that a nemesis is talking smack on some Internet forum or that some mouthwash has gone missing. As you rise up the ladder, you dust for fingerprints, hack computers, write police reports, and root through your neighbors’ trash. Though you should expect to do some low-level grunt work for the police station early on, you might eventually set up your very own investigations office. You could be an architect, a stylist, a firefighter, and more, but no matter which you choose, you’ll enjoy meeting your clients and completing your objectives. City hall may even have some substantial rewards in store for you for a job well done.

If you want to make your workday even more free-form, you could designate yourself as self-employed and take advantage of other aspects of The Sims 3′s economy. Dedicate yourself to gardening, fishing, or World Adventures tasks like nectar-making, and sell off the fruits of your labor to make a living. Even better, you could dabble in some new hobbies: inventing and sculpting. Inventing requires you to collect scrap, which you can buy or gather at a junkyard. Early inventions are good for selling off at the new consignment shop, or for a bit of household decorating. But there are also new related social opportunities, so you can earn a decent reward for making a bunch of toys and donating them to the neighboring school. Eventually, you’re making time machines (just wait until you see what you can do with that) and ghost-capturing devices. Just be careful: Inventing is a dangerous hobby, so have a fire extinguisher handy, lest your ingenious inventor die a horrible flaming death. Or perhaps a partner sim can come to your rescue in a fire truck and put out the blaze before the grim reaper arrives to make his deathly deal.

Sculpting is a bit safer, and while any given sculpture usually takes more time to complete than a given invention, the resulting art brings in more dough and looks nicer sitting by the pool. This hobby, too, is nicely integrated into the other parts of the game. If you like throwing parties and want to improve your social status, impress your guests with an ice sculpture. Choose your medium–be it clay, wood, or something else–and chip away. You can duplicate previous creations easily, but it’s much more fun to set your sim to work on something new, because it’s a joy to see what interesting creation might spring forth from the raw materials you start with. Yet whether you spend your day putting out fires and rescuing trapped neighbors, giving your friends and family members a new hairdo, or doing laundry using the newly added washer and dryer appliances, you’ll have a smile on your face the entire time. As it turns out, your sims don’t always lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity, and Ambitions makes a standard workday as enjoyable as you could hope for.

All these new professions and hobbies come with new animations and sound effects to liven up the mood, and they’re as excellent as series fans expect. The way your investigator sim waves underbrush in front of her face as if hiding behind camouflage isn’t realistic, but it’s absolutely charming and hysterical. Watching your inventor dig through the trash at the local dump is equally fun as he throws about unwanted pipes. All that beloved Sims personality is keenly on display, what with the delightful Ghostbusters -type music you hear when capturing poltergeists and the clever designs of the inventions and sculptures you might strew about the house and yard. Unfortunately, there are still bugs and performance issues, and you may run into a few glitches with Ambitions that you haven’t run into previously. We encountered long-standing saved-game bugs that have carried over from the main game, along with relationships that refused to update regardless of continued interaction. In addition, item pop-in and stuttering can also be an occasional eyesore, particularly when moving the camera across the map.

The Sims 3: Ambitions isn’t an outwardly dramatic addition to the Sims universe, and technical problems could potentially get in the way of your fun. Yet this is a thoughtful and delightful expansion, full of wit and character, and it gives you even more control over your sims’ daily lives. If you enjoy nurturing (or antagonizing) these unintelligible avatars that need to be told to empty their bladders, then adding Ambitions to your games library is a sure way to show off your logic skill.

As a romantic comedy, Runaway: A Twist of Fate works pretty well. As an adventure game, not so much. Pendulo Studios’ final chapter in the trilogy recounting the travails of lovable goofball Brian Basco and his erstwhile girlfriend, Gina Timmins, sacrifices gameplay for a whole lot of story in this mostly traditional point-and-click adventure. While you might enjoy this chick-flick-mimicking romp as a gorgeous animated movie with two likable leads, the dialogue is windy and not nearly as funny as it thinks it is, and the puzzles are thin and predictable. It’s not a great way for this charismatic series to go out, and even Runaway veterans will probably be left feeling flat.

The story is a little offbeat, especially if you finished the previous game, Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle. That game took place on a tropical paradise and ended with an abrupt “to be continued” conclusion, while its follow-up begins in New York City with Brian dying in a mental hospital after being convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. Other than the characters, nothing directly connects this game to the last one right away. You have to wait until past the midway point before things start to connect, which is frustrating for those who have been following the trials of this pair since 2003 and want a more immediate payoff. The only upside of this fresh start is how it allows newcomers to jump on board with the new game and not feel as if they’ve missed anything.

The personality of A Twist of Fate follows in the footsteps of the two previous Runaway games. Lush production values remain the highlight. The exaggerated faces and backgrounds gives the game a unique aesthetic which fits in nicely with the cartoonish vibe of the storytelling Nothing is taken seriously, even a supposed murder and time spent locked up in Happy Dale Sanatorium (where the slogan is “You’d be Mad to Go Elsewhere”). In a game like this, it’s perfectly natural for a dimwitted pretty boy like Brian to have wide eyes atop a lantern jaw, for goofy sidekicks to resemble cartoon Steve Buscemis and fat Elvis impersonators, and for the heroine Gina to rock a spunky look with cocked eyebrows and Sophia Loren lips.

Voice acting is equally luxuriant. Every character comes equipped with excellent, if intentionally cheesy, spoken dialogue. But you can have too much of a good thing. Most conversations drag on far too long, forcing you to wade through lots of unnecessary wordplay. Even worse, lines often give center stage to dumb jokes a lot less funny than the writer thought they were. The only real exception is Brian’s nutcase buddy Gabbo, who has a lot of funny tics, like how he shouts “Bananas!” in the middle of sentences for no reason. Even the music is a strong point, with the tunes perfectly reflecting what’s happening on the screen and adding to the interactive-movie atmosphere.

Puzzles are simple point-and-click item collections, resulting in a short game where you do nothing aside from picking up odd bits of rubbish and experiment with this stuff to see how it might solve various dilemmas. Chances are you know this tune very well. In every scene you hit F2 to highlight the hotspots on the screen, and then you pick up whatever you can and go straight to the obvious solution if one presents itself or start playing around until you stumble upon what you need to do.

Just about everything is at least somewhat convoluted, so you do need to use some adventure-game logic. When breaking Brian out of his tomb, for instance, Gina has to go through a crazy sequence of actions, such as flash-freezing a glove and translating an Ikea-esqe coffin assembly manual with the help of a dead Swede (well, actually a crooked medium with a Swedish-English dictionary). So much for just heading down to the local hardware store for a sledgehammer. Still, even though you need to make outlandish leaps of logic, there are few enough items and locations in the game that it’s never difficult to figure things out. Trial and error gets you through in a jiffy even when Sherlock-ian deduction fails. And even if you do somehow happen to get really stuck, you can fall back on the in-game hint system (although some of its hints are more cryptic than the actual puzzles they purport to help solve).

Runaway: A Twist of Fate is an adventure for those who just want to enjoy the ride. It’s an interesting enough story with likable protagonists and great graphics, even if the dialogue is stretched out beyond all limits of patience at times, but the actual game-playing part of this adventure leaves a lot to be desired. There isn’t much challenge, nor is there any innovation over what developers like LucasArts and Sierra were doing well over a decade ago, so what you’ve got is more of an animated movie than a game.