SOCOM US NAVY SEALs was one of Sony’s flagship franchises on the PlayStation 2 that served gamers a tactical based experience on the home consoles. Despite the fact that I never owned a SOCOM game at the time of the franchise’s release era, I had the opportunity to play them at my uncle’s place every-so-often. When I first played SOCOM online, Zipper Interactive changed my impression of online gaming completely. The cooperation from my team was outstanding and the tactical mindset needed to make my way to victory was incredible.

This was years ago.

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Aaron Espinoza takes on the Ubisoft “Assassin’s Creed II”. Did the developers learn from the mistakes of the first Assassin’s Creed?

From Prince of Persia to Ghost Recon, Ubisoft has held a tight grip on their games. I absolutely love Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 as well as Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter 2. In 2007, Ubisoft announced a new IP for the next generation of consoles titled Assassin’s Creed that played and looked very similar to their Prince of Persia franchise.

Unfortunately for Ubisoft, I found the game to be a disappointment due to it’s repetitive missions that got old after the first few times of play. Despite the repetition I still continued to play the game because of it’s intriguing storyline and how fun it was to control Altair through a religious city such as Jerusalem jumping from rooftop to rooftop. However, the game received high scores by various critics that, in my opinion, it did not deserve. Assassin’s Creed deserved an average of 7 out of 10.

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Many of Sony’s first party developers have always been listed among my favorites. Many of these include Naughty Dog Inc, Sucker Punch Studios, Zipper Interactive and many others to go on with the list. However, the one company that sticks out to me is Insomniac Games.

I felt that they have truly set the “Gold Standard” high for Action-Adventure Platformers. Spryo the Dragon was a great franchise during the PlayStation days and I still continue to play the games from that series every once in a while. As amazing as Spyro was, I was extremely blown away by what Insomniac managed to pull off in the PlayStation 2 era; Ratchet and Clank.

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I am going to take a different route with this review because it seems that everybody and their Grandmother have reviewed this game. So this review will be short, sweet and to the point.

As you all know, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (or just Modern Warfare 2 depending on who you talk to) is the follow-up to Infinity Ward’s smash hit Call of Duty: Modern Warfare for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC. Modern Warfare 2 was pretty much the most anticipated game of 2009. All you have to do is look at the 24 hour sales for this game to see what I mean (something like 5 million+ sold in 24 hours).

What can I saw about this game? It is riveting; it is breathtaking at times, it is drop-dead gorgeous and easy on the eyes. Infinity Ward, love them or hate them, has pretty much made the perfect war-game.

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Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising tries to bring the gritty feel of war to the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

The GCN staff are all trying to get over a really bad bug that seems to have infested our office. So I took this review off of Sean Foster’s hands and gave it a full test drive. Now I am the first to admit that I love first-person shooters. And it seems that most gamers are feeling that love these days due to the sales of games like Halo 3: ODST, Left 4 Dead, Battlefield: Bad Company and the Call of Duty series. I love war games. And it is funny because I am a peace-loving kind of bloke (most of the time anyways).

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Developer Nihilistic Software takes the nostalgia of 1970’s and 1980’s Italian zombie horror flicks and gives gamers one of the best old-school Arcade shooters since Smash TV.

Since the crew over at Nihilistic Software took the time to implement pretty much everything I love about classic zombie flicks from the 70’s and 80’s so I feel I need to take the time and not give you guys some half-ass review for Zombie Apocalypse. I have read a few of the early reviews and it always leaves me shaking my head in wonder as to what game these guys are playing when they sit down and bang out that review deadline. Are most gamers so blinded these days by shiny big games and 50-60 million dollar gaming budgets that they overlook gems that smaller developers make?

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GCN’s Aaron Espinoza gives his take on the PSN game “Shatter”.

You really have to give credit to Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo for creating a great feature like the PlayStation Store, Xbox Live Market Place and Nintendo Shop channel on their current generation of consoles. If anything, the online stores are one of my favorite thing this generation that have really booted up our gaming experience and bring us new ways to game.

Over the summer I have bought many games- some addicting and other just a waste of money. If anyone read my review on GripShift, they would know that I absolutely disliked that game. This time, Sidhe Interactive, the creators of GripShift, have released a new title on the PSN Store called, “Shatter”.

Shatter is a game block-breaking title much like the classic Breakout game but with newly added features and a whole new style of play. Unlike Breakout, the game changes the positions around from time to time. The dead zone can sometimes be located the left side of the screen, and sometimes at the bottom base of your television rather than the dead zone being in one position through the entire game giving it a new and fresh gameplay experience.

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The game that revolutionized first-person shooters makes a return on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

Being the older 34 year old gamer that I am, one of the first “first-person shooters” that I ever played was Wolfenstein 3D on my old PC. I remember exactly how I got a copy of the game. I was living in Baltimore back in 1992 and knew a guy that would set up at the local flea market. He would sell PC games real cheap. This was before the days of Internet. He normally sold platform games like Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II (before he was 3D) and one day he said “Hey kid, you need to check this game out. This game is in 3D!”

This dude showed me a gray game disk with the name “Wolfenstein 3D” across the label.Needless to say I was blown away by the game. Back in 1992 it looked amazing and it played amazing. It does not hurt that you can go around blowing the hell out of Nazi’s and Nazi dogs.

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