Naples Blogs

Spore is like a combination of three or four games all in one, with varying levels of gameplay. It's the brainchild of Will Wright, creator of Sim City and The Sims, and Spore seems to follow their shared creed of imagination, creation, and community but with a broad scale. In Spore, the game begins with you as a single-celled organism eating smaller creatures and avoiding hunting predators at a microscopic scale. After some time of eating food and surviving, you gain appendages of your choosing (a spike or flipper, for example), and decide where they are placed on your body.
This Pac-Man style of “eat-or-be-eaten” gameplay continues into you becoming a sea-living creature, then a land-dwelling mammal and so on, until you begin building a community and form a civilization; and there is your Sim City/The Sims style of gameplay. Soon after developing your creatures cities, you'll have developed a certain level of technology, and be able to blast-off from your planet and explore the space and stars around you! By that time, you'll finally be able to experience the last form of gameplay that's a part of Spore: a massive single-player online game.
As you play the game and make your own unique choices for your creatures' appearance, behavior, and civilization, all those attributes were being uploaded to Maxis' servers, and distributed to other gamers' games. Meaning, you'll be able to interact with many other creature's unlike your own! What will you do? Will you make friend's with the aliens next door, or will you bring inter-planet war to your people? The possibilities are just like a Will Wright game should be: endless.
If you want to give creature-creation an early shot before Spore is released in September, you can purchase Spore's Creature Creator for roughly $10 from their website, at Spore.com.

This is the game that I am most excited about, mostly due to my past experiences with Bethesda Softworks. They have made some of the best games of their genre, which currently focuses mostly on role-playing games (RPGs). After playing their last two releases of the Elder Scrolls Series (Morrowind and Oblivion) I believe it's safe to say that Fallout 3 will deliver the best Fallout experience of the entire series.
Fallout 3 is an action based, role-playing game, much like Oblivion was a couple of years back (and Oblivion is still recognized as one of the best games, today). You control a survivor of a post-apocalyptic nuclear blast in Washington, D.C., now called the Capital Wasteland. The year is 2277, and you are one of the first to leave the shelter, Vault 101, that's been housing survivors ever since the war 200 years ago. Be prepared to face organized mutants that are surviving above ground in the nuclear fallout, mutated wildlife including giant insects and animals, and even remnants of the U.S. Government now known as the Enclave.
Despite the overwhelming odds against you, you have some new technology to assist you in your journey on the outside: the Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System allows players to stop and aim for key points in their enemies body, including the ability to literally shoot off an entire limb with ease. Are you being chased by your enemy? Take off a leg or two! Don't want to hurt the mutant, but want to disarm them? Shoot the weapon out of their hand! If you miss, they lose an arm: job well done! If you aren't much of a fighter, and like to avoid the bloodshed if at all possible, the game allows you to try and avoid confrontations with the surviving factions of different cities. So you can make the choice between a gunfight and a conversation (or, sometimes the other party makes the choice for you).
Combine their excellent style of gameplay along with the HD graphics and visual design that Bethesda has been practicing for years ahead of the competition, and you're in for one awesomely horrifying experience. You'll be able to walk around the Capital Wasteland and recognize some features of the modern-day Washington, D.C.. I'm even told that you are able to take an elevator to the top of the Washington monument for a birds-eye view of the entire land. With the quality consistency of Bethesda's games, and their vision for what could be of the Fallout series, I have no doubt that this game will be one of the biggest hits for years to come in gaming.

I believe this is the most anticipated game to come this year, on an international scale. The previous Starcraft game became so popular, well-developed, and balanced that it's still used in high-prize gaming tournaments across the world; and that's over a decade after it was originally released. It's been recognized as one of the best-selling games worldwide, with over 11 million copies sold. What's even more interesting, is that over 4 million copies were sold in South Korea alone, where sponsored professional gaming matches of Starcraft are broadcast on national TV. Ever since the beginning, it's been one of the most popular online games in gaming history, and has even been called the best game in the world by both Gamespot and IGN. All that, and this is its second coming.
Starcraft II, a real-time strategy (RTS) game, is going to be based by a large majority on it's nearly perfect predecessor. The same playable three-warring races are available: the surviving human race called Terrans, the technologically advanced Protoss, and the primal and beast-like alien race of the Zerg. The major differences between this and the past game would be what you'd expect: the audio and visual appearance of the game has been changed dramatically. Ten years is a long time, right? And believe me, it shows. Also, in-game physics will be implemented in Starcraft II, and you'll be able to notice it in the way that rocks or other debris will fall down an incline in the terrain, or as a ship falls from the sky.
Of the unexpected changes, you can see a small change in the single-player aspect of the game. Unlike the previous Starcraft, where your character was bound to a single path of mission-to-mission gameplay, they've revamped this experience for Starcraft II. From what I understand, you'll be able to experience the Starcraft universe much like the game Mass Effect had allowed you to explore their universe: you choose which missions to participate in, in non-linear fashion. In-between missions, you use your prize earned from successful ventures to increase your units or buy newer technology to fight with. However, the game sticks to one story per campaign, at this time of writing. But you'll be able to choose which way to go in that story, and how to fight your battles in space. Expect this game to be around for a long time, because just like the past, it's another successful formula for the RTS genre.

Other games that you might want to check out for this fall and winter are Gears of War 2, Farcry 2, and World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King.

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