Original Tracks from THPS/THPS2:
Bring the Noise – Anthrax featuring Chuck D
Superman – Goldfinger
When Worlds Collide – Powerman 5000
Heavy Metal Winner – Consumed
May 16 – Lagwagon
No Cigar – Millencolin
You – Bad Religion

New songs:
The Bomb – Pigeon John
We the People – Lateef the Truthspeaker
Marathon Mansion! – Pegasuses-XL
Teenage Blood – Apex Manor
Please Ask for Help – Telekinesis
Flyentology (Cassettes Won’t Listen Remix) – El-P featuring Trent Reznor
USA – Middle Class Rut

THPS HD will release sometime in June on the PS3 and Xbox 360

It’s been nearly 10 years since we’ve seen Max Payne sulk through the New York alleys; he’s decided that he’s had his fill of the big apple and is moving to São Paulo, Brazil for the sun, babes, and gangs. With Remedy being too busy working on whatever it is they’re doing (please be Alan Wake 2) Rockstar decided to pick up the third entry in the series. With the trade of gloomy New York for sunny São Paulo don’t go thinking that things are any more cheerful; Max starts out in the shitter and slowly gets in deeper as the game continues that culminates in possibly Rockstar’s darkest game yet.

The game is quick to remind you that Max is still leaning on the booze and pills to keep him running, but things start to look up a bit for him when he moves to Brazil and gets a bodyguard position to protect a wealthy family. That lasts a good five minutes before things start to hit the fan and Max is thrown between protecting the family and controlling his own substance abuse issues. Besides the new cover mechanic not much has changed in how you play compared to the previous titles. You can take cover if you want, but be prepared for enemies to start flanking your position to deliver a healthy dose of ass whooping. It’s the Matrix styled shootdodge mechanic that’s going to be your main source of dealing out death. You’ll see a meter to the right that shows how much time you can spend in this mode and can be refilled quickly be simply scoring kills outside of shootdodge. With the added euphoria engine that powered Grand Theft Auto 4 and Red Dead Redemption, you’ll be greeted to some amazing moments from shooting enemies and seeing them stumble around to diving in the air over a desk, spinning around, and quickly sending a few thugs to meet their maker. Did I mention the physics? Almost everything can be smashed apart and it will with clean rooms looking like a wrecking crew drove through after gunfights. For fans worried about Rockstar dumbing down the game fret not because painkillers are still your only source of health in this game; only multiplayer has slowly regenerating health, not on hardcore though. I found Max to be stupidly brittle even on normal difficulty. I’m always up for a good challenge but later missions really punished you for using the shootdodge mechanic and I found myself starting to use cover more and more. Painkillers can be somewhat difficult to locate if they’re not in plain view, but the game thankfully refills your health each time you die so at least you can’t screw yourself by walking into a situation with little to no health. You’ll find ‘grinds’ to do through both the singleplayer and online. You’ll find a variety of menial tasks such as finding golden guns, and tougher ones such as shooting grenades in the air or scoring kills while on your back.

Besides the 10+ hour campaign and grinds to, excuse the pun, grind through you’ll also have New York Minute and Score Attack to keep you playing. Score Attack rewards you with points for kills, more points the more impressive the kill, with a focus on keeping your multiplier up. New York Minute on the other hand is meant more for speed-running players with each level starting you out with a timer that continually trickles down; the only way to get more time is to score kills.

So when you start up the playlist you’ll think Max Payne 3 has quite a lot of game modes to play, but in reality out of the either modes you see, there are only really 3 different ones. There’s Rookie Deathmatch/TDM, regular Deathmatch/TDM, large Deathmatch/TDM, Payne Killer, and Gang Wars; there are also hardcore variants you can unlock once you get 5000 kills. The idea behind Payne Killer is that two players will play as either Max or Passos while the other team has to work together to bring them down. The player who deals the most damage to either character is re-spawned as that character loaded to the teeth with painkillers, guns, and adrenaline. It’s a neat mode that has you bouncing between trying to deal the most damage to Max or Passos, or trying to let your teammates whittle down their health so you can score a final kill. You’ll get points for dealing damage/killing Max or Passos, but the real numbers start flowing in when you play as either character; winner at the end is the guy with the most points. The marquee mode here is Gang Wars though; in it you’ll take the role of one of the various factions and complete various staged objectives. Each map has its own little story that snugly fits with the main game and you’ll go through various objectives such as defending checkpoints, assassinating targets, straight up elimination, and more. The neat thing is that you’ll never get the same sequence of objectives twice with each game having a completely random set of objectives that change depending on whether you won or lost the previous one. It’s something I’ve loved since Killzone 2 and really hope more games start to implement it.

So you know I love me some customization in my multiplayer games; it’s not so much that I want other people to see how my character looks, it’s just that I’m so narcissistic that I enjoy seeing how I look. There are half a dozen factions, each with their own look/style, that you can change from head-to-toe with gear you’ll acquire by simply leveling up. You’ll also be able to select how you want to look for straight deathmatch modes and you can unlock story characters by achieving either a platinum in each level in score attack or prestiging. So as you kill other players or loot their bodies you’ll gain adrenaline which fuels both your bullet time and your bursts. Bursts are a sort of perk that grants you a special skill divided into three tiers as you fill your meter up. For example, equipping the heavy firepower burst will give you more damage for 20 seconds, the second tier will replace your guns with a powerful LMG, and the final tier gives you a grenade launcher. Players have to be quick to think if they want to spend what adrenaline they have on an extra kill in bullet time or with a burst. Just as in most shooters, you’ll be able to set up various loadouts that will allow you to change your tactics throughout a match. You’ll be able to equip up to three weapons, a head item that gives effects such as not being affected by flash grenades, body armor, your burst, your projectile/grenade, and three pieces of gear. Gear is a sort of passive skill that doesn’t run on adrenaline; with over a dozen pieces of gear you’ll see ones like a lucky coin that grants more cash from looting or a walkie-talkie that puts any enemy player your teammates see on your radar. The game can get quite unfair though, since it seems to not care who it matches you with and will throw you into games with people at level 50 (max rank). These guys will be rolling around with grenade/rocket launchers and bursts that let them appear as allies which makes fighting them some serious bullshit.

The graphics are damn impressive and the attention to detail in all the environments is just mind boggling. Rockstar also had the noise rock band Health to score the game which ended up being another smart move by Rockstar who have a smart taste for music. Rockstar really has a knack for bringing out the best of their voice-actors with James McCaffrey (the voice of Max) pulling in probably his best work here. The sound team should really get acknowledged for their work on the game because the way everything sounds, from the guns to the environment getting shredded during gunfights, is phenomenal.

The Final Word
Max Payne 3 is a great grab for newcomers to the series, but even more enjoyable to players of the previous two games. With a hefty amount of singleplayer modes and a pretty solid multiplayer component, besides the bit of unbalance, MP3 is definitely something that you won’t be trading in anytime soon.

- MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good

If you’ve been living in some sort of ignorance all your life then I suppose I should tell you that Telltale Games focus on point/click adventure games, and they’re pretty damn good at their craft. After tackling two other previous licenses, Back to the Future & Jurassic Park, Telltale has decided to get their hands dirty (literally) with The Walking Dead.

The game opens up with Lee Everett who’s being given a friendly (or not so friendly depending on your conversation choices) trip in the back of a police cruiser. It’s heavily implied that Lee may have killed somebody, but he never confirms nor denies it, but your choices in the first episode clearly indicate that this information will become a major player in future episodes. You quickly meet up with the 8-year old Clementine and your fun adventures through a zombie infested Atlanta kicks off from there. The story plays simultaneously with the comics so while you play as new characters, you’ll meet and see some familiar locations whether you’re a reader of the comics or the show. You’ll be presented with choices to make throughout the story that will not only branch you into different directions in the story, but the characters you interact with will change depending on how you speak to them and what choices to make. Very rarely do I care about characters in a game (even in games I like) but I couldn’t help but like Lee and Clementine. Both characters provide an interesting dynamic that you rarely see in games and the game even gives you the option of either molding your Lee into a caring father figure for Clementine, or be a total dick to her. As a person who prides himself on trying to be the biggest dick possible in games, I just couldn’t take those options; for once I actually cared about what happened to these characters and didn’t want to fracture their relationship. Not you though Ducky, just know your time will come. The game will take you around two to three hours to finish which feels about right with the full game taking a good fifteen hours if this first episode is a good indication on the length of the following ones.

So you’ll control Lee with the left analog stick and move the cursor with the right; once you hover the cursor over an interactive object you’ll be given a prompt to either use it or have Lee talk about it. At certain times you’ll be given a QTE to perform, but these are done pretty well and come rarely so it’s not a troublesome inclusion. Conversations are handled in a Mass Effect style with some moments giving you a timer to quickly respond before it decides for you and you can’t go back to re-select previous options; I’ve noticed it tends to prefer the “…” option, I guess the game is shy. People who like to see all the options in a conversation might end up hating this, but this is what multiple runs are for. Things you pick decide how characters will react to you at that moment and later on in the game which is going to be interesting to see how they balance that through 5 episodes. The moments with zombies are done well enough with the cursor used to hover over any approaching walker and requiring a quick button hit for Lee to perform whatever action needed. The zombie kills aren’t as brutal as Telltale hyped up (besides one in the beginning with a hammer) which is a shame since they wouldn’t stop talking about how over the line they went with the kills, but hopefully they were talking about the other episodes.

One downside many adventure game veterans might frown at would be at the extreme lack of puzzles in the game. So far we’ve only seen Episode One, but I’d be surprised to see if anything changed. On one hand it does make some sense to not include puzzles in a *slightly* realistic setting where having a character try to find the pieces to a puzzle box wouldn’t really fit, while on the other hand the puzzles they actually have aren’t really puzzles and are more “Click on everything until you find the right item”. There’s one moment later in the game where Lee needs to reach through a gate to pick up a brick to use as a distraction but for some reason he simply couldn’t reach for it when it was right there. I figured I need something to break the lock on the door (still confused considering the remote was within arms length) and the objects you interacted earlier were all viable candidates to use in both breaking the lock and reaching out to get the brick. It probably took me around 20 minutes of walking around for Lee to finally say “Maybe I should go help [person] with her problem” and after finishing that objective I finally had an ax I could use to break the lock. Sure, I felt kinda stupid wasting my time when I could have gone to do this mission to get what I needed, but the game really set things up to imply I needed the objects I interacted with earlier; plus that remote was right fucking there. I just hope the next episodes don’t follow this trend of unclear ‘puzzles’.

So the game takes a more stylized look based off the comic book and it really was the best choice. Everything just has a very slick look to it and the way the characters animate has a bit more charm to it that I don’t think would’ve worked if the game was done in a more realistic graphic style. The sound itself takes many cues from the TV show which works well enough too. One thing that kept throwing me out of the game (figuratively, not literally) were the sudden drops in frame-rate. These would happen during hectic moments such as zombie attacks or even during areas such as walking around the farm. It’s noticeable enough to remind you that you’re playing a game and it surprises me considering it’s not a very intensive game to excuse having it.

The Final Word
If you’re a fan of previous Telltale Games’ works then there’s no reason why you should skip out of this game, but I still recommend new players to come join in on the fun. The first episode is a measly $5 so if you don’t end up liking it then it’s not like you invested a lot in it.

- MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair

Newcomers to this Dark Knight adventure can pick up Batman: Arkham City Game of the Year Edition beginning May 29 in North America. The game will include on-disc all previously released downloadable content (Catwoman Pack, Nightwing Bundle Pack, Robin Bundle Pack, Challenge Map Pack and Arkham City Skins Pack), as well as the new Harley Quinn’s Revenge content. Fans who already own the original edition of Batman: Arkham City will be able to download Harley Quinn’s Revenge Pack beginning May 29 on PlayStation®Network ($9.99) and the Xbox LIVE® Marketplace for Xbox 360 (800 Microsoft Points).

Omerta – City of Gangsters for both Xbox 360 and Windows PC will place players in 1920′s Atlantic City, where they’ll spend their time building a criminal empire in an attempt to dominate the city. Players will construct, buy or take over buildings to turn them into speakeasies, distilleries, illegal boxing rings and much more, as they work to generate income. With dirty money come dirty jobs – and the game switches to a turn-based tactical RPG during blazing gunfights and elaborately planned and executed heists. Unique playable and non-playable characters will perform jobs for you, including spying on, fighting with and even fire-bombing the buildings of enemy gangs.

Omerta- City of Gangsters will release sometime this autumn on the PC and Xbox 360.

Pick up Lollipop Chainsaw on June 12th for the PS3 or Xbox 360

Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes releases on June 19th on pretty much every platform.

As you all know from my previous article you can check over here, I loved Minecraft. As the good man I am though, I went through the Xbox version fresh, and it’s actually a pretty good port. If you’ve been living under a rock the last few years then Minecraft is basically a world building game. You dig for materials to build any sort of dream house you’ve wanted such as recreating the League of Doom or building your dream evil scientist lair in a volcano. It’s advertised as an adventure /survival game, but it’s really not; the focus is on gathering materials to build stuff and repeating the formula.

I’m going to kick this off with saying that as much as I felt the game was incredibly over-hyped, I see its appeal. I dropped 10+ hours on this playing split-screen with my younger brother and it’s good fun, but they’re basically selling you the alpha beta. It’s actually funny that this isn’t complete on release considering the PC version wasn’t either. Nonetheless, go download the trial for this and if you really like it go spend the extra $7 on the PC version; it really is the best version. If you’ve got some sort of reject PC that can’t handle it, then you have my blessings to buy the 360 version. There’s also a weird requirement that to play split-screen you NEED an HD television set. If you’re buying it to play co-op like I know many of you are then you need to realize this before you waste $20. The game is also missing tons of content from the PC; to compare, the 360 version is basically everything up to the Halloween update (Nether) with a few random newer additions such as dogs. There’s no Endermen, no Enderdragon/”story”, nothing from the Adventure Update, the world is limited (basically the size to fill the map up) and most importantly there are no mods. Mojang and Microsoft have commented that the 360 version is going to be updated with everything in due time and that it’s all going to be free, but we’ll see how that turns out. As of now they technically released the alpha beta version of the game and you’re just going to have to deal.

So as you’d expect this version comes with some changes. First of all there’s an extensive tutorial that I highly recommend new players go through. You’ll spend a good half hour going through the process of crafting, mining, learning the controls, using furnaces, and understanding how the new menus work. The developers were even nice enough to build you a nice town with a castle you can use if you don’t feel like starting up a random world. The inventory also has a cursor you can move around with the analog stick (or you can roll with the d-pad if that’s your thing) that works well enough, but it just feels a bit sticky to me. I would’ve liked to see two separate sensitivity options, one for the inventory cursor and another for your character.

Now the thing I absolutely love is the new crafting interface. The menu is split between tabs that have the recipes for each item you can build even if you don’t have the ingredients. It’s a helpful design that helps you show what you can build, what you need to build it, and what function it serves. Everything is also neatly kept separate with all tools such as swords, axes, or shovels in the ‘tools’ tab, armor in its own tab, a food tab, and more. It’s as easy as just going to the tool tab when you want to craft a sword, going over to the sword icon, scrolling down the various types of swords (wood, stone, iron), and hitting craft. You won’t need to clumsily drag around items, split them apart, repack them, split them again, and so forth that made crafting on the PC a bit of a drag; now if you have the ingredients in your inventory it simply crafts it with a helpful notification showing you when you’re missing something. Sure, it takes away the “exploration” of discovering what can be crafted together, but fuck that. We all know that everyone spent most of their time playing with the Minecraft wiki open on the crafting page because nobody will memorize all the insane recipes. It also gets rid of the pain of having to drag around everything because I’m incredibly lazy. I welcome this change and hope Jeb adds an option to enable it on the PC.

Ok, so when you start up your world you’ll be able to set your world to online or offline. This basically means that if you set it to online, anyone can just up and join your world. For some reason though I haven’t been able to see any games to join at all since release and I know I’m not the only one with that issue since I’ve asked around. The 360 Edition doesn’t have the full blank worlds that the PC version has so you won’t be able to sit around building Deathstars with people. It’s just you and other guys in your world. The 360 actually implements this quite well with a simple invite/join game system. This is all fine and dandy, but those people can mess with your stuff so I highly recommend playing privately and only inviting people you know. Some people out there are dicks and just want to grief players, even your friends are. Hey Robby, you’re a dick. That glass took ages to forge and now my underwater house is flooded. The game also sports 4 player split-screen [ON HD TELEVISIONS ONLY] and it work surprisingly well. On a big enough TV (I’m rolling on a 46″) everything is still easy to see, when split apart for multiple local players, considering all the text and icons are small and pixilated.

Oh another thing to mention, there are either different skins you can use, the catch is that they’re multiplayer only. When you play with another person your character will be dressed in one of the either different skins depending on what player number you are, this is to help differentiate everyone in the room. Mojang has mentioned that they’re working to bring actual skins to the game in future updates.

The graphics are the same as ever, if anything they look worse if you play on an HD TV so you can see just how lazy the work is, but whatever I guess. The music is the same soothing instrumental which actually feels a lot better to listen to with my speakers than on my computer for some reason.

The Final Word
Basically if your computer is such garbage that it can’t run Minecraft buy this, but please try out the demo and think hard if you want to drop $20 on a game that’s all about building stuff; I mean think REALLY hard. Another reminder, for some reason if you don’t have an HD television set you CAN’T play split-screen. Personally, I’m not fond of the fact that they’re charging people $20 for what basically cost PC players $13 and it still has less content, but anyone who missed out on the Minecraft phenomenon is probably going to pick it up anyway since it is the best block building game on XBLA around. What, are you seriously going to go buy FortressCraft?

- MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average

Game of Thrones releases next week on the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360

You’ll be able to download Harley Quinn’s Revenge on May 29th for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360