Everything Nice Game

The Christmas is already around the corner. The time has come for you to plan your holiday vacation or to figure out some cool gifts for kids of beloved ones in the family. Among all kinds of gifts kids would really love to have it, game is undeniable would be their first choice though. There are so many great games even created and launched nowadays. Though this is a great thing to have wider choices to explore, in fact, many people finds it difficult to figure out the best game they can choose as the Christmas gift.

As you might have lost the compass in finding the best one to present your beloved kid with, actually you can make everything to be much simpler and easier by going online and get some reference of cool xbox games at Tesco Entertainment. You can count on the Tesco Entertainment for recommendations of best Xbox games, specifically the new ones that would be great gifts for this Christmas, such as the latest series of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, Crysis 2, Tron Evolution, and much more along with the brief information and review of the game included on each page. And yes, you can even make it delivered to your home with only few simple clicks of your finger.

So, what else are you waiting for? Just go online now and visit TescoEntertainment.com for some reference of cool games to cheer up those kids on the next Christmas.

Fend for yourself and live off the land in Youda Survivor! After an accident at sea, you have been washed ashore on a tribal island and there’s no way off. Use your survival skills to keep yourself fed and hydrated, and well protected against the cruel elements. Befriend the natives and help them against pirates. Learn powerful rituals and potion recipes from them in order to safeguard the island and eventually find your way back home!

Youda Games, creators of hit time management games such as Youda Farmer and Youda Sushi Chef, is back with their latest offering. Youda Survivor has a Robinson Crusoe-esque story where a shipwrecked man has to do all he can in order to survive on an isolated tribal island. The characters, visuals and setting of the game are entertaining and reminiscent of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie series and the Madagascar cartoons.

The game begins with the island’s shaman predicting that a hero will arrive on their island and save the natives from the threat of the pirates. Unfortunately, the person who arrives is a shipwrecked scrawny guy (that’s you, by the way) who is barely alive. Undaunted, the natives start teaching you basic survival skills as well as the knowledge to mix potions and control the weather, hoping that you will one day be strong enough to drive the pirates off.

The gameplay in Youda Survivor is similar to farm management games such as the Farm Frenzy series. This time, instead of raising chickens and cows to sell their products at the market, you have to gather food and drink to keep yourself alive. You will have an energy bar and a hydration bar. Your energy will decrease as you complete tasks, and your hydration will deteriorate over time. Poor weather will cause both bars to decrease faster as well!

So how do you replenish your energy and hydration? That forms the main part of the game, where your time management skills will be crucial to beating each level. The native tribe is kind enough to lend you a cook, and she is able to turn almost any organic matter into potions that you can drink to increase your energy. Eggs from visiting birds, coconuts and meat are some of the ingredients that can be dumped into the pot to become energy potions. Similarly, the cook can use water obtained from the local watering holes to create potions that will keep you hydrated.

The efficiency of your potions will also increase as you progress through the game. Potions made from powdered eggs will give you more energy than those made from boiled eggs, which in turn give more energy than raw egg potions (eww!). However, these will require machines that you can buy and upgrade in between levels. The game isn’t all about keeping yourself well fed though. Each level will require you to achieve a set of objectives while making sure you don’t die of fatigue or thirst. These objectives usually involve accumulating a certain amount of resources or reaching a target energy level.

The local shaman will also teach you a few rituals to help you achieve your goals. You will be able to learn useful spells such as summoning a rain cloud to fill up your watering holes and create new fertile patches of earth. Similarly, there is a wind ritual that will blow coconuts off the trees for you (beats having to climb the trees to get them!). Unfortunately, these rituals require energy to cast, so you will need to properly manage your resources in order to keep your energy sufficiently high while still achieving each level’s objectives. And you have to do all this while racing against a time limit as well!

And then there’s the pirates that are threatening the natives. You will get random interruptions from an assortment of beach creatures as well as the dreaded pirates. These unwelcome visitors will interfere with your resource collecting if you do not deal with them. The creatures can be removed with a couple of clicks, but you will need to defeat the pirates by reducing their health. Be careful though: each swipe you take at them will use up some of your energy. You will have to decide whether you want to keep your energy efficiently lean, or leave in a bit of a buffer in case a pirate comes calling.

Youda Survivor is a really fun game, and it invigorates the farm management game genre with a whole new theme complete with new mechanics and concepts. It is also a cheerful and bright game, and is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face. Youda Survivor is definitely worth trying if you like any of the other Youda games, or farm management games such as Farm Frenzy 3.

By Steven H. Ng

Oh Lara, you just aren’t the charmer you once were. Sure, it all began well with some innovative ps1-era puzzling and an impractical boob-job, but those times have passed, and now you are very much Nathan Drake’s female dog.

But every dog has her day, and leave it to a Diablo-styled, co-op arcade game to give Ms. Croft her strut back. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light hits all the right notes, and is far more enjoyable than any of her recent “triple A” retail outings.

As you can probably predict, an artifact of mystical nature has been misplaced and an evil demon-king has been summoned from the dead to deliver hell and high water upon the face of the Earth. Also summoned, is Lara’s new co-op partner, Totec, who wields a nifty puzzle-shattering shield and spear. The two set off chasing the demon, encountering deadly puzzles, precarious platforming, yada yada yada. You won’t really care about the story.

What you will care about, however, are the ingenious puzzles designed to stretch the abilities of both Lara and Totec. The pair will need to interact to complete many of the puzzles. Totec has a shield that lara can jump on to get a boost, totec can also throw spears into the wall and Lara can climb them. Meanwhile, Lara has a grappling hook that totec can use as a rope. The best of the puzzles force the utilization of all these abilities, in addition to stage props like switches, boulders, and lovely one-hit-kill flames.

What isn’t as ingenious is the combat. This over-the-head shooter plays just like other twin stick shooters like Assault Heroes, but without much flair. You’ll still get an acceptable variety of enemies, along with some stat-enhancing items, upgrades, and weapons, but battles quickly devolve into 1. create some distance 2. hold right stick in direction of enemies 3. maybe, maybe lay a bomb. Indeed, it is far more fun to be running away from some of these enemies than to actually be fighting them. Some of the chase set-pieces are truly spectacular, and its here where the game shines, whether running from a tuna-monster or booking it through a deadly hall of traps. Solving puzzles with a partner is infinitely more intense when you’ve got a strict, spike-induced deadline.

Graphically, Lara Croft has lost little in her transition from retail release to arcade game. In fact, there are far less glitches and oddities in her latest adventure than in 2008′s Underworld, perhaps making this title the most polished looking Lara Croft game yet. Like previously mentioned, the game is set in an isometric Diablo-style overhead view that makes stage navigation and puzzle surveillance a snap. Every stage has a different feel to it, whether it be the expected ruins, a decaying swamp, a spider-infested temple, or a lava choked wasteland, the environmental variety does a good job of keeping things fresh for the eight to ten-hour experience. Cutscenes are few and far between, but they all look great, despite dodgy writing. Similarly, the music is always fitting, and at times quite good, though you probably won’t care to remember any of it once your adventure is over.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light will probably run you from eight to ten hours, depending on your ingenuity with some of the games trickier puzzles. To supplement this already lengthy campaign, there are devious bonus puzzle rooms hidden throughout every stage that award you with stat-enhancing artifacts and relics. Finding every secret and completing every secondary objective will take you completists a long time indeed. On top of that, the single player and co-op campaigns are different enough to warrant a second playthrough, with most of the puzzles being altered to be challenging for a different number of players. You’ll need to approach these puzzles differently than you did before, and this lends plenty of replayability to this fifteen-dollar gem.

Closing Comments

In 2006 Crystal Dynamics revived the Tomb Raider franchise with a polished, exciting sequel that took gameplay in several new directions. Now, four years later, they’ve done it again. Where Tomb Raider: Underworld felt a little stale and glitchy, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light feels like a revelation in simplicity, where the elements of gameplay are tuned down, but honed to a sheen, and complimented perfectly by presentation, graphics, and music that does its job just right. Throw in these changes, co-op, and some of the best level and puzzle design this side of Japan, and you have one heck of a great, long game for fifteen bucks. Oh Lara, I never doubted you.

By Austin Yarger

PlayStation 2 video games were the bees-knees back before the arrival of the PlayStation 3 and the competitive Xbox 360. Now they’re a much underrated relic of gaming history, and are put aside for the much more expensive PS3 and Xbox360 games. But who needs the extra graphics? Who needs the modern gaming? Anyone who knew the joy of PlayStation 2 in its day will easily play PS2 games and have just as much fun as on any newer console. So let us look at some of the best PS2 games, so that we can buy them at ridiculously cheap prices and smite the modern game developers.

The Final Fantasy games are eternal, evergreen, cult following games, and anyone who became hooked on them at their birth, or even later on the newer consoles, will no doubt still enjoy them just as much on a PlayStation 2. The last proper installment on PS2 was Final Fantasy XII. It was a huge advancement in graphics and playability, with nearly endless amounts of game-play time, and can be picked up for a meager price compared to the game time offered.

If you’re a soccer fan, you will know that the game rules do not change all that often. And, not surprisingly, neither do the console versions of the game. The graphics can only go so far when rendering a field from above, and the controls are generally kept as they are. So, although new games are released every year, you would be better off simply sticking to a good old PlayStation 2 version. What’s the difference?

But if these games don’t grab your attention, look out for some of the other PS2 classics. There’s Jak 3, for quirky, challenging and other worldly missions; Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, for a comprehensive experience of the Metal Gear experience; Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, that classic open world, sadistic game-play crammed with hundreds of missions in the unique and hilarious San Andreas environment; and, lastly, Burnout 3, for high-octane, unreal, speed-crazed fun that lasts all the way up until the caffeine in your system wears off.

To find PlayStation 2 video games you would be best off looking them up on Amazon, but, if you’re eager to score a good deal, try bidding on Ebay, as there are tones of people looking to sell some of their old games and consoles. So, if you want a cheap, fun gaming experience, look no further than PlayStation 2 games.

By Jake L Ross

I love our Wii and I love Musicals so when I saw the game Dance On Broadway for the Wii I knew that I had to have it. Luckily I must have done something that meant that my husband was thinking I also needed a treat and he bought it for me!

We decided that today after lunch would be a good time to play it and as I was taking my time to get back into the living room my husband and daughter started without me. They were going through the songs deciding which ones would be best for them to dance to and decided upon “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from Mary Poppins.

I arrived in the living room just in time to see them exhausting themselves dancing along with the Wii, by dancing badly. My daughter got the highest score and declared herself to have won and that it was now my turn to join in. As all you need to dance is a Wii remote for each player, I was soon clicking on the character I wanted to dance as, and before I knew it we were dancing to “Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Show.

My six year old daughter won again and I came a close second but it was at a price as both my husband and I were exhausted!

We went through a few more songs and each time our six year old daughter won. Although I did redeem myself on “Bend & Snap” from Legally Blonde with a very high score and the sweat dripping off me as a prize.*

My husband wasn’t going to give up without a fight however and kept repeating;

“Just once more!”

Eventually he got his victory with a score higher than both my daughter or I had reached, immediately declared himself the family champion and retired from competitive dancing. Yes, he’s a cheat.

There are a lot of songs on the game (all of which I recognised and was able to sing along with) and they range in effort needed and difficulty. I did work up a good sweat and my first thoughts that this game wasn’t any good because nobody seemed to be doing well, were wrong and I love this game. I am going to add this to my exercise routine and hopefully dance my way to skinny!

By Pippa Wright