GOD OF WAR

Part 1 [99 MB]

Part 2 [99 MB]

Part 3 [99 MB]

Part 4 [99 MB]

Part 5 [99 MB]

Part 6 [99 MB]

Part 7 [99 MB]

Part 8 [99 MB]

Part 9 [99 MB]

Part 10 [99 MB]

Part 11 [99 MB]

Part 12 [50 MB]

Ever since its existence was first hinted at on the back of God of War II's game manual, God of War: Chains of Olympus has been one of the most anticipated games for the PlayStation Portable. Now that the wait is finally over, the question is: Does it deliver? The answer is "yes" almost across the board. The combat, level design, gore, sex, and mythology are all here--albeit in slightly stripped-down form.

Chains of Olympus is one of the best-looking games on the PSP.
God of War: Chains of Olympus' story takes place before the first God of War game on the PlayStation 2, which is a little confusing because you find yourself trying to remember just what had and hadn't happened in Kratos' twisted life at the time of the first game. At this particular point in the God of War timeline, Kratos is a general whose sole purpose is to serve the gods of Olympus. During the course of Chains of Olympus, the gods' orders create a certain moral dilemma for Kratos, and he finds himself faced with the decision of whether or not to do the bidding of his gods or do what is best for him. The story doesn't play a prominent role here, but this is God of War, so all you really need to know is why Kratos is pissed off so you can go off and slaughter mythical creatures with reckless abandon.
With few exceptions, the combat in Chains of Olympus is just as you've come to know and love. The controls are tight and in general quite good. Learning to evade attacks requires a bit of an adjustment, given that you need to hold both of the shoulder buttons and then move the analog stick, but you get used to it and it works fine. Kratos can make light and heavy attacks using his blades of chaos, and you can perform combos by pressing specific, simple button patterns. Eventually you'll get your hands on a second weapon, the Gauntlet of Zeus, which is essentially a giant glove that Kratos can use to pummel his foes. It's a great addition to Kratos' armament and a ton of fun to use. It's just too bad that it's the only alternate weapon in the game. Magic is a bit limited as well, but you'll eventually acquire a few other abilities. Most useful to us was the first one you get, the efreet, which damaged all nearby enemies; the other abilities were of little use. For every successful kill, you're rewarded with red orbs that can be used to learn new attacks as well as upgrade weapons and magic. Once again you can find hidden treasure chests that contain red orbs, as well as others that offer gorgon eyes and phoenix feathers. If you collect enough of them, you can increase your overall health and magic meters. Treasure chests and red orbs are actually quite easy to come by, so you should have no problem maxing out all of Kratos' abilities before the end of the game.
As soon as the opening cutscene ends, you're thrown right into the middle of an epic battle in which you must defend Attica from the Persian Army and a basilisk, a huge, reptilian beast that the Persian forces unleashed on the city. During the course of the game you'll fight your way through Attica, some enormous caves, and eventually Hades. Each level is linear, though there are a few branching paths that can be explored to find bonus items. Chains of Olympus is much more combat-oriented than God of War II. You sometimes have to manipulate statues and other items to reflect light or activate a pressure switch to open doors, and you'll find yourself doing a bit of platforming and swimming, but most often you're on good old terra firma while battling foot soldiers, sirens, medusas, cyclopes, and other mythical creatures so that you can open a door or break through a magical barrier to get to the next area. The heavier focus on action certainly keeps things moving, and the combat is as awesome as ever, but the occasional bit of puzzle-solving and high-wire acrobatics is missed here.
Of course, there are several extras available once you finish the game. You'll unlock concept art along with one bonus costume and video by finishing the game on the default difficulty. You can also go back and play through on the ultrahard god mode or try to complete the five tasks in the challenge of Hades, each of which quickly reveals the reason behind its name.

Yep, this little minigame is one of many returning features.
Chains of Olympus delivers almost everything you'd want from a God of War game on the PSP. It's reasonable to expect a few concessions when a series transitions from a console to a handheld, Chains of Olympus does make a few that are worth noting. The biggest issue the game has is that it does almost nothing new. Even the played-out sex minigame is back for another tryst. Granted, it's the same formula fans of the series have come to know and love, but it would have been nice for at least a few new gameplay ideas to be introduced. Instead, the game goes the other way and actually feels a little stripped-down in parts; there are fewer weapons, levels, and boss fights, though there are still plenty of quick button-pressing minigames--perhaps a few too many.
It's also rather short. As far as we can tell, we collected all but one of the hidden chests and still saw the ending credits in less than seven hours. You're left wanting more because the game is a blast, but it's still over far too quickly. One thing the developer didn't compromise is load times. Most areas stream instantaneously, and there are probably less than 60 seconds out of the entire game in which you're waiting for the next area to load.
Few PSP games can match Chains of Olympus from a visual standpoint, either technically or artistically. Simply maintaining a solid frame rate is impressive enough when you've got so many characters fighting onscreen at the same time, but when you toss in lighting and particle effects, moving backgrounds, and lots of blood, it's even more impressive. The cutscenes alternate between prerendered full-motion video, in-game engine, and concept art brought to life by a bit of animation and camera movement. All three types look fantastic. The levels are varied and expansive, but they don't quite have the same epic feel as in the previous games. This is partially because the first level is the only one that has a lot of action going on in the distance, but also because the PSP's screen is small. Likewise, Kratos is sometimes quite tiny and doesn't look particularly powerful when he's only two millimeters tall. Kratos doesn't always appear that small, though, and his movements and attacks are always nicely animated regardless of his stature. If you own a PSP slim and the proper cables, you can make the size issue irrelevant (as well as improve the brightness, which is often really dark) by playing on your television. The textures, which look just fine on the PSP, don't quite hold up on the big screen, but the rest of the game looks fantastic even when blown up several times on your TV.
Headphones are a must when playing Chains of Olympus; it sounds fantastic. T.C. Carson and Linda Hunt reprise their roles as Kratos and the narrator, respectively, and they once again deliver top-notch performances. The well-known God of War theme is also back, and the whole soundtrack fits the action perfectly. After all, it's hard not to feel like a total stud with timpani and horns bombastically urging you on.

Who's afraid of a man this big?
Like Grand Theft Auto and Syphon Filter before it, God of War successfully pulls off a console experience on a handheld. Some new ideas and a better mixture of puzzles, platforming, and bosses would have been divine, but Chains of Olympus is an excellent game that delivers most of what you've been praying for--more God of War.

Medal Of Honor - Heroes CSO Size: 480 MB

Medal Of Honor - Heroes CSO Size: 480 MB



Part 1 [99 MB]
Part 2 [99 MB]
Part 3 [99 MB]
Part 4 [99 MB]
Part 5 [84 MB]
Password: mickey




Medal of Honor Heroes was a surprisingly good first-person shooter on a system that was not known for having a whole lot of good first-person shooters. Fans of that game will be pleased to know that although Medal of Honor Heroes 2 brings very little new to the table outside of slightly improved gameplay and an impressive online mode, it's just as fun as its predecessor.




It wouldn't be Medal of Honor if you weren't blowing up bunkers.
There's a bit of a story to MOH: Heroes 2 told via narrated still pictures in the form of premission briefings, but it's mostly inconsequential. You're an operative in the special forces, and it's up to you to stop Hitler from deploying his new rocket, the V2. Throughout the course of seven missions, you'll perform the usual array of activities found in many WWII-based FPSs: You'll plant charges, pick up documents, fight in a church, and launch mortar rockets. You'll also man large cannons and stationary machine guns, as well as kill seemingly endless waves of Nazi soldiers. At this point, the developer doesn't even try to explain where these soldiers are coming from because you can literally see them appear from thin air right in front of you on numerous occasions. Don't expect any advanced artificial intelligence from the game either. Enemy soldiers will run right past you in an effort to get to their preprogrammed destination. In a tremendous victory for equal-opportunity advocates worldwide, your fellow squadmates are just as inept; they'll stand mere inches from a bad guy without so much as batting an eye. They also love to shoot walls. Other minor issues include the fact that it is sometimes tough to see where you're getting shot from on the PSP's small screen and there's no way to save midlevel, which is a problem because the levels are significantly longer than in the last game. But given all these flaws, the game is still good. How?

Heroes 2 is able to overcome its mostly routine objectives by performing well in other areas. For starters, the game moves at a fast pace--faster than your typical FPS on the PSP. The series has always had an arcade edge to it and the controls can handle it. Thus, the fast gameplay doesn't feel unnatural and serves only to make things more exciting. You won't spend your time traversing long empty sections of terrain and you won't have to inch forward to progress through a level. You can't just run through the levels willy-nilly because Nazi soldiers are good shots, but usually, you just find some cover so that you can recover your health, quickly take a few guys out, and then scamper to the next group of enemies to mow them down.

The speedy gameplay wouldn't have been possible if this Medal of Honor had poor controls. The controls aren't totally revamped, but they simply feel better. You move with the analog stick, look around by pressing the face buttons, and fire with the right shoulder button. There's always a reticle onscreen that turns red when it's over an enemy, so you can shoot that way or you can press the left shoulder button to raise your weapon and use the sights. This control scheme is shared by many other first-person shooters on the PSP. It might just be that we're growing accustomed to this layout, but it feels better here than it typically does elsewhere. Your aiming reticle moves at just the right speed, making it easy to move from one target to the next, but you don't move so fast that you can't line up the shot once you've found the next target.

The single-player campaign probably won't take you more than four or five hours to finish so it's good that the game's online mode will keep you coming back for more. Given the hit-and-miss nature of online play on the PSP, it's impressive what EA has done with Heroes 2. Up to 32 players can duke it out online, up from eight in the last game. The game modes aren't groundbreaking, but they're what you'd expect from a Medal of Honor game. The level designs are based on maps from the single-player campaign. They've been reworked a bit for multiplayer and are well designed. The multiplayer succeeds because there are 32 players playing at the same time, so there's always some action, even if that action occasionally lags, as was sometimes the case. Although PSP owners have other options for online first-person shooter play, Heroes 2 is a worth a look for its multiplayer alone.




This is one of those times where it's better to give than to receive.
One thing that hasn't changed a whole lot since the last game is the visuals, but Heroes 2 does look crisper and runs smoother than Vanguard. It also has a bit more color than your typical WWII game so it's less dreary than what you may be used to even though the levels take place in the same sort of locations you've no doubt grown accustomed to: underground bunkers, a beach, a church, a small town...you know the drill. Other than offering up stereotypical locations, the only real knocks against the graphics are that enemy soldiers aren't very detailed and frequently clip through solid objects. What you'll hear from Heroes 2's audio is what you've heard from Vanguard, Heroes, Airborne, and every other Medal of Honor game: good-sounding weapons; sparse, but fitting music; and soldier chatter.

Thanks to solid controls, a short, albeit enjoyable single-player campaign, and an impressive online mode, Medal of Honor Heroes 2 is a battle worth fighting. It really is a good game that should please anyone who has enjoyed previous Medal of Honors and isn't yet tired of trying to stop Hitler once and for all.

Tomb Raider: Anniversary

Tomb Raider: Anniversary

Part 1 [99 MB]

Part 2 [99 MB]

Part 3 [99 MB]

Part 4 [99 MB]

Part 5 [99 MB]

Part 6 [99 MB]

Part 7 [88 MB]

When Tomb Raider first hit in 1996, it was nothing short of groundbreaking. While years of sequels that ranged from unremarkable to borderline offensive did a lot to tarnish the Tomb Raider name, developer Crystal Dynamics undid a lot of damage with last year's Tomb Raider: Legend. It focused on the strengths of the series--exotic locales, thoughtful puzzles, and incredible acrobatics--while modernizing the gameplay, as well as streamlining the whole experience. Crystal Dynamics continues its good work with Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which effectively goes back to the original Tomb Raider and rebuilds it from scratch. Now appearing on the PSP a few months after the PC and PS2 versions, Anniversary is still a solid action adventure game. However, some control compromises and inconsistent performance issues put a small dent in the experience.

This is one of those rare cases where the remake is better than the original.
Like the original, Tomb Raider: Anniversary follows the same basic tale of Lara's hunt for the Scion of Atlantis as she does battle with conniving businesswoman Jacqueline Natlas and her various henchmen. You'll explore ancient tombs and forgotten cities in Peru, Greece, or Egypt. You'll also perform plenty of death-defying acrobatics as you work your way through massive, ancient, and often deadly puzzles. The whole experience is highly evocative of the original, and there are certainly plenty of moments that seem specifically designed to create an odd sense of déjà vu. But nothing in Tomb Raider: Anniversary has been regurgitated verbatim: Everything is bigger and better. The environments are larger and more detailed, while existing puzzles have been elaborated upon, often to dizzying effect. The experience just feels bigger; there's so much new content that it honestly feels less like a remake and more like its own game.
A big part of that feeling comes from how much more talented Lara has become since the original Tomb Raider. Aside from a few, nominal differences, she's basically got the same abilities here as she had in Tomb Raider: Legend, which made her one of the most nimble action adventure heroes this side of the Prince of Persia. Her proficiency around ledges is incredible: She can shimmy across ledges, leap from one ledge to another, and scramble from one ledge to a higher ledge. She can swing from dangling ropes or horizontal bars, perform tumbling maneuvers to avoid projectiles, or climb up, leap from, and balance precariously atop vertical poles.
All of these acrobatics feel natural and not overly difficult to pull off, with the game allowing for just the right amount of margin of error. But as good as Lara is, she's got her limits, which is a big part of what makes the action feel dangerous. If your timing is off just a little bit when jumping for a ledge, Lara might only catch it with one hand, which will have you furiously mashing a button to help her recover. But if you miss the ledge completely, Lara's likely to expire or at least incur a serious amount of damage. These misses seem to come a little more often in the PSP version, which is due in part to some imprecision with the analog stick. Other minor sacrifices were made to the controls in bringing Anniversary to the PSP. The shoulder buttons are used to rotate the camera, and you can tap the triangle button to reset the camera position or hold it down to look freely around you with the analog stick. This works well enough most of the time, though during combat it can get a little sticky because you have to hold down both shoulder buttons to lock onto an enemy.
Lara will need to exercise each and every one of her abilities to their absolute limit in Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which features no shortage of ridiculous acrobatics. The game is essentially made up of a series of gigantic, unique set-piece puzzles. Sometimes the puzzles are traditional find-the-key, flip-the-switch-type affairs, but more often than not, the real puzzle is figuring out how to use Lara's ability to get from point A to point B. Additionally, the puzzles are often nested several layers deep. While your overall goal may be to find four keys to open a door, you'll first have to figure out how to get to the bottom of a gigantic, crumbling tower, after which you'll have to figure out how to access four different doors. Then you'll have to figure out how to actually open those doors. But of course, behind each of those doors lies a series of tricks and traps that you'll have to traverse before you'll get to the keys. Solving one of these overarching puzzles can be an involved process, with some of them taking well over an hour to complete.
The environments are your biggest adversaries most of the time in Anniversary, though through your exploration, you'll regularly run into some antagonistic fauna. These include rats, bats, wolves, bears, tigers, gorillas, raptors, and the occasional tyrannosaurus rex. Combat is limited to gunplay, which operates with a simple lock-on system. Lara can also tumble and flip through the air while keeping a bead on an enemy. New to Anniversary is the adrenaline dodge, which at specific moments allows Lara to dodge a charging enemy in slow motion. When time slows, a target will also slowly move toward the enemy, and if you fire the weapon right at the moment it locks on, it'll produce an instant kill, usually when the ferocious beast is just inches away from your face. It still feels like Tomb Raider combat, which has always been a minor part of the experience, but the adrenaline dodge is a nice little touch that adds a little more drama to the action. Tomb Raider: Anniversary also makes use of the same type of interactive cutscenes seen in Tomb Raider: Legend, where you'll have to quickly react to an onscreen button cue to keep Lara alive. It allows for some beautifully choreographed action sequences, but they're rarely very challenging.

It's almost enough to make you forget about Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness.
What keeps Tomb Raider: Anniversary engaging throughout is the strength of the gameplay, as well as the quality of the presentation. Even though you're basically just going from one tomb to another, they feature enough individual detail to make them unique. The environments are also huge, using the occasional curvy hallway to mask load times. Aside from some minor gameplay contrivances, they feel pretty real. Lara looks great and moves with a natural grace that makes her incredible acrobatic feats look feasible instead of ridiculously superhuman, while the various wildlife you confront also moves convincingly. The quality of the design and the animation comes through intact on the PSP, but a few of the finer touches in the PC and PS2 versions are absent. These are specifically lighting and atmospheric effects. But of greater concern is Anniversary's inconsistent frame rate, which can obscure the game's lovely animation and also make the timing of jumps trickier than necessary. While the fidelity of the sound elements seem to have been reduced, the game's sound design still carries a lot of the weight in establishing atmosphere. You'll hear plenty of small ambient effects, such as animal calls and dripping water. Lara's grunts and yelps as she scales these incredible antiquities will also resonate differently depending on the size of the room. Music is generally used sparingly, but it always swells to a flourish at all the right moments.
Tomb Raider: Legend did a lot to make Lara Croft feel relevant again, and Tomb Raider: Anniversary is another step in the right direction. The acrobatic action is consistently exciting and challenging throughout. Thus, despite being a remake, the experience feels new and fresh. This is the best Tomb Raider game in years, and for the first time in a long time, that actually means something.

The Fast And The Furious Usa CSO Size: 408 MB

The Fast And The Furious Usa CSO Size: 408 MB

Part 1 [99 MB]

Part 2 [99 MB]

Part 3 [99 MB]

Part 4 [99 MB]

Part 5 [12 MB]

If there is one force that can be credited for thrusting modern street racing into the limelight, it's the 2001 film The Fast and the Furious. The Vin Diesel/Paul Walker movie's slick sense of style and glamorization of illegally racing highly modified production cars were cribbed almost verbatim by games like Need for Speed Underground and the handful of uninspired also-rans that followed in NFSU's wake. Namco Bandai and Eutechnyx finally squeezed out a game based on The Fast and the Furious for the PlayStation 2 last year, and now seven months later we're being treated to the predictable PlayStation Portable version. The irony here is that this game feels like one of those uninspired also-rans cribbed from The Fast and the Furious in the first place. It's not an entirely bad street racer, but it does nothing new, and it makes pretty lousy use of the license.

You know this ain't no 10-second race?
The game takes a stab at relevance by basing itself largely on the most recent film in the franchise, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, and accordingly, all of the driving takes place in and around Tokyo. Though you'll see the names of characters from the films dropped on occasion, the connection isn't overt, and the game doesn't really have a story of its own. You play as some nameless street racer, and your existence revolves around beating each member of all the different crews in Tokyo, along the way earning a lot of money to be spent on more cars and upgrades.
The Fast and the Furious is strictly about one-on-one races—which take place either on the Tokyo freeway system known as the Wangan or in the winding hills outside Tokyo known as the Touge—and where you race influences the racing style. The Touge is filled with the kind of hairpin turns that make drifting a necessity, while the Wangan is mostly straightaways littered with traffic. All across the city you'll find various hot spots where the different street-racing crews are based, and from these different hot spots you can challenge anyone in the crew to a race of his or her choosing, though there aren't that many race types to choose from and most are finished in well under four minutes. On the Wangan, there are basic point-to-point races, as well as top-speed races that simply challenge you to achieve a higher top speed than your opponent before the end of the track. On the Touge, there are drift battles, where you're scored based on how well you drift around corners, and grip battles, which is just another name for the same type of point-to-point races you'll do on the Wangan.
For a game called The Fast and the Furious, the game is frustratingly slow from the start. The cars you can initially select are painfully sluggish, and it's nearly impossible to do any worthwhile drifting. Additionally, there are only a few crews for you to challenge from the beginning. It can be frustrating to bang away at opponents who simply outmatch you, though just because you beat an opponent doesn't mean you can't race that opponent again. With a little patience, you can take on the same inferior opponent over and over again, racking up the necessary bankroll to get a better car with some high-end upgrades. In fact, there's an early top-speed race that pays well enough that after a half-dozen repeated victories, you can buy a car that will beat any of your opponents in the foreseeable future. The game encourages you to maintain two separate rides, one for straight racing and one for drifting, but by gaming the system, you can easily build a single car that capably suits both needs. And just like that, the game goes from feeling incredibly punishing to offering no challenge whatsoever.
There's an open-world thing going on in The Fast and the Furious, and in between crew challenges, you can drive around the city, hitting various hot spots, dealerships, and tuner shops. However, you can just as easily pull up the game's city map and instantly warp to a specific location, further shrinking the game's already streamlined, miniaturized take on Tokyo. There are a total of 80 different crew members for you to challenge, as well as 40 racers you'll meet out on the open road, whom you can challenge to a race on the spot by flashing your headlights. It's a good amount of racing, but even early on it seems like you're just racing on the same strips of road over and over again.

It'll do in a pinch, but there are already plenty of superior street racers available for the PSP.
To its credit, the game does feature a great variety of licensed production cars and aftermarket parts, with a focus on Japanese makes and models, which adds an air of authenticity to the game. In addition to loads of performance enhancements, you can customize the look of your cars with body kits, rims, spoilers, layer upon layer of vinyl decals, and a veritable rainbow of paint colors. For all the visual customizing you can do, in the end it's not very satisfying, due to the game's jagged presentation.
As is rather popular within the genre of street racers, it's eternally nighttime in The Fast and the Furious, and artistically, the game does a decent job of presenting you with a cool, neon-tinged vision of Tokyo. Unfortunately, on the technical side, the game can't support that vision. Cars tend to look like boxy approximations of their real-world counterparts, and the colors always seem to look flat, with lots of color banding and low-res textures in the environments. There's some wicked aliasing, too, which fuzzes up the horizon to the point that it's difficult to tell where the road goes beyond a couple hundred yards ahead of you. The frame rate is also real choppy, something that the game tries to cover up with a screen-rattle effect, though the constant shaking just makes it that much harder to look at. Save for some really unnatural-sounding squeals that you can get out of your tires, the sounds of the cars are unremarkable. The licensed soundtrack gets dragged down by some songs that sound like they're there on behalf of the marketing department, but there's also some good dark electronic music and Asian hip-hop that's more in line with the tuner feel.
More than anything, The Fast and the Furious evokes a sense of indifference. The PSP already has a wealth of similarly styled street racers, several of which offer a greater variety of driving, some semblance of a story, and a slicker presentation. Those looking for an extension of the films will be sorely disappointed, and those looking for some solid street racing have no shortage of other, better options.

Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max ISO Size: 67 MB

Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max ISO Size: 67 MB

Part 1 [67 MB]

It's amazing what the PSP's bright, colorful screen can do to make an old game look fresh again. Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max is more or less a perfect translation of what's presumably the last game in Capcom's Street Fighter II spin-off series. It's a tried-and-true 2D fighting game, featuring a ton of different modes and a ton of different playable characters, and this particular version adds a few extra fighters and options not found in previous versions. Pulling off certain special moves and combos using the PSP's controls can be difficult, but that's really the only reason you couldn't wholeheartedly recommend this game to PSP-carrying Street Fighter fans.

Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max takes an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to 2D fighting games, and now you can play it anywhere.
There's a good chance you've already played Street Fighter Alpha 3 before if you're interested in this version. Regardless, it's worth going over some of the gameplay differences that distinguish this installment from other Street Fighter games and other fighting games in general. For starters, this is the biggest selection of characters the series has ever seen, clocking in at around 40 different faces. You've got every last fighter from the Street Fighter II era on the lineup, as well as most of the cast of the original Street Fighter game, not to mention a whole mess of other characters. It's a diverse and likable cast, especially since each fighter has his or her own story, profile, and unique lines of dialogue. Alpha 3 Max even goes as far as to throw several extra fighters into the mix, including stick-fighter Eagle and kung fu expert Yun, though these characters hail from other Capcom fighting games. On top of that, you've got three different play styles to choose from for each fighter, oddly referred to as "isms." X-ism is a simple but powerful style reminiscent of Street Fighter II. A-ism is derived from the earlier Alpha games, letting you use multiple levels of super moves when you've got enough energy. And V-ism lets you dish out powerful custom combos by stringing together all the moves and special moves in your repertoire. Some moves and tactics are only possible when using one form or another, and though the style you choose doesn't completely change the way your fighter plays, the options still add variety.
As for the action once you're in the thick of a fight, it's mostly the traditional one-on-one fighting game battle you'd expect, but with a few twists. You've got three types of punches and kicks, plus throws and a handful of special moves and super moves to use against your opponent. However, Alpha 3 introduces some new tweaks to the combat that make it feel quite different from other Street Fighter games. You've got recovery moves for use when on the receiving end of an opponent's attacks, which let you escape additional damage. There's also a guard meter that prevents overly defensive players from doing nothing but block while pecking away at their opponents with light attacks. Defend too much and your guard will be shattered, leaving you completely vulnerable for a dangerous instant. This is a welcome addition, but on the flip side, Alpha 3 makes throws unnecessarily awkward to use by forcing you to press two buttons to perform them.

There's a whole mess of different characters in this game, plus different fighting styles and modes of play for extra variety.
In fact, a bunch of different types of moves are now performed by pressing multiple buttons simultaneously, but these can be a little frustrating to pull off on the PSP. You'd think it would be easy just pressing two or three buttons at once, but it's oddly tougher than it sounds. You have the option to map a single button on the PSP to multiple punches and kicks. However, since there are six main buttons on the PSP and six different types of normal attacks in this game, you don't really have room. Also, neither the PSP's D pad nor analog stick offers quite the level of precision you'd ideally want for such a game. As if in recognition of this, Capcom created limited supplies of an adhesive D pad attachment, which gives your thumb more leverage and simply makes special moves easier to pull off. Diehard fans of this game and Capcom's first PSP fighter, Darkstalkers Chronicle, should seek this new D pad attachment out. For most everyone else, it's really not that bad tolerating the PSP controls with this game. But since it's such an exact translation of the original, you can't help but wish for perfectly precise controls to go with it. Thankfully, you can fiddle with the speed and timing of the action in order to best suit your preferences. You've also got a gang of different modes to mess around with.

Silent Hill - Origins CSO Size: 737 MB

Silent Hill - Origins CSO Size: 737 MB

Part 1 [99 MB]

Part 2 [99 MB]

Part 3 [99 MB]

Part 4 [99 MB]

Part 5 [99 MB]

Part 6 [99 MB]

Part 7 [99 MB]

Part 8 [44 MB]

When you think of Silent Hill, what jumps to mind? A foggy town? Cryptic dialogue? Walls dripping with blood? Well, the good news is that Silent Hill Origins has all those things. That alone should please series fans who are looking to developer Climax's prequel to provide plenty of atmosphere and further expand on the Silent Hill mythos. But in this case, the good news is also the bad news because from a gameplay perspective, Origins is exactly what you would expect, delivering an entirely conventional adventure that relies on eight-year-old franchise hallmarks at the expense of anything truly new.

If you ever see this sign, run. Run far away.
Origins is a prequel set before the events of the original PlayStation game. This time, you're in the shoes of Travis Grady, a trucker navigating through a downpour of rain on an eerie, foreboding night. If that sounds familiar, well, that's because it is. Like the previous Silent Hill games, Origins is light on scares but heavy on murky atmosphere and mysterious dialogue. In this case, it also relies heavily on nostalgia to set its mood, which may be fine for many fans, but the setup lacks the originality of prior series plots. In any case, Travis spots a little girl in the middle of the highway just in time to avoid hitting her. She runs off, and Travis, for no apparent reason, takes pursuit. If you're a Silent Hill fan, you may already have an idea of who she might be.
What's missing here is a clear sense of suspense. Unlike with previous series installments, Travis doesn't have any pressing reason to visit Silent Hill, save for pursuing the strange child. A subsequent fire rescue adds some missing urgency, but the opening never gives you the sense that Travis needs to be in Silent Hill, which makes him the least interesting of the franchise's protagonists. Nevertheless, how Travis fits in to the ongoing mystery of Silent Hill eventually becomes clear. If you're here to fill in missing pieces to series lore, Origins has plenty of meat for you to chew on and plenty of familiar locales to explore.
You control Travis from a third-person view, navigating through the foggy streets of the titular town between destinations. There's a lot to piece together here in the way of puzzles, many of which are entangled in other puzzles. For the most part, they are pretty clever, requiring you to explore every nook and cranny for scraps of clues and various items. They also require you to move in and out of the otherworld (an alternate dimension) at will by touching any of the various mirrors scattered about, which is a new mechanic for the series. It's in the otherworld that Origins is at its most disturbing. Dirty, bloody asylum walls and ragged teddy bears are series standards that still manage to elicit chills. Random groans and sudden encounters with other characters are also appropriately creepy, if not exactly scary.
You'll encounter your fair share of monstrous oddities--some new, many familiar. Unfortunately, combat is as weak as ever for the series. Melee is as plodding and unsatisfying as you remember, usually bloody but too measured and monotonous to be much fun. In all fairness, there are some attempts to spice things up. At times, an enemy attack will trigger a contextual minigame that requires you to hit the necessary buttons within a prescribed time limit to avoid taking damage. Of course, we've seen this mechanic in countless games this year alone, and Origins does nothing to make it any more interesting, so it might as well have been left out.
The other main combat addition is that of limited-use melee weapons. You can grab a television, radio, or hospital drip stand to bash your enemies with. You'll get multiple uses out of some of them, while others are done after a single hit. As long as you avoid combat, however (usually an easy task), you'll have plenty of weapons at your disposal. It begs the question, though: How can Travis carry a TV, a hatchet, a drip stand, a scalpel, a meat cleaver, a filing cabinet, and a huge plank of wood at the same time? It's not that impossibly huge inventory space is new to games, but the extent to which it's carried out here feels wildly out of place. Gunplay feels better, though again, it's wiser to simply avoid combat whenever possible and save your ammo for the boss fights. This is where Origins is at its best: Boss monsters are huge, designed well, and a challenge to take down.

Didn't we see this dance troupe on America's Got Talent?
Origins certainly looks the part, thanks to the traditional Silent Hill mist and its fine re-creation of the environments we've come to know over the years. Interior environments feature a lot of fine detail and crisp textures, and the contrast between the real world and the otherworld is palpable. However, character models aren't as well-crafted as you would hope, and Travis moves as stiffly as his straightjacketed foes. The sound design is fantastic, thanks to a terrifically disturbing soundtrack and all the menacing bump-in-the-night echoes that ring throughout the streets and hallways.
The problem with most of the game is that it's all been done already. It's like the developer had a laundry list of everything that makes a Silent Hill game a Silent Hill game, but forgot to throw in anything new. It doesn't even fix long-standing problems. Finishing blows are still a pain to pull off at times, especially when an enemy falls on top of another corpse. Getting a handle on your health status is still too vague a prospect. If any franchise has room to grow, this is the one, yet not a single meaningful element of Origins takes the gameplay anywhere the original Silent Hill didn't already go. This comfort blanket of familiarity may be welcomed by fans perfectly fine with that, but it does nothing to enhance the series. If anything, it makes you wish that the series would grow up a bit.

Midnight Club 3 CSO Size: 972 MB

Midnight Club 3 CSO Size: 972 MB

Part 1 [99 MB]

Part 2 [99 MB]

Part 3 [99 MB]

Part 4 [99 MB]

Part 5 [99 MB]

Part 6 [99 MB]

Part 7 [99 MB]

Part 8 [99 MB]

Part 9 [99 MB]

Part 10 [81 MB]

Rockstar Games released Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition a couple of months back to both fan and critical acclaim. Eschewing the overly commercialized, hokey, and downright stereotypical stylings of the street racing genre, it was a most welcome offering. Now, developer Rockstar Leeds has cranked out a PSP iteration of its console racer and has managed to cram nearly the entire scope of the console game onto one of those tiny Universal Media Discs. Unfortunately, a few serious liberties had to be taken to make that happen. Some ugly load times, minimal damage modeling, a few periodic sound bugs, and one unpleasant frame rate all conspire to make the PSP version of Midnight Club 3 a weaker overall effort. Sure, it's still a mostly fun and sometimes exciting street racer, but when put up against competition like Ridge Racer and Need for Speed Underground Rivals, it seems a lot more ordinary.

Arcade-style street racing comes to the PSP in Midnight Club 3: DUB edition.
Like the Midnight Clubs before it, Midnight Club 3 offers up a huge, open-ended city for you to race in. Well, there are actually three cities. You'll begin in San Diego, but you'll eventually be able to open up the cities of Atlanta and Detroit as well. Unfortunately, it takes an exceedingly long time to load up each of these cities--upward of 70 seconds in most cases. The in-game loading times are also annoying. During gameplay you often have to switch between racing, cruising, and visiting the local garage, and jumping from spot to spot always results in some lengthy loading. The console versions weren't exactly quick when it came to in-game loading, but they were an absolute breeze compared to the PSP iteration.
Each city is chock-full of back alleys, hidden shortcuts, and special jumps that you'll be hard pressed to discover until you've spent ample time driving around. Thankfully, the game provides a cruise mode where you can just drive and explore, which isn't nearly as boring as it sounds, because there are also some hidden Rockstar logos strewn about that will earn you goodies when you collect them all. It's also useful to get familiar with all the nooks and crannies of the city, as knowing your way around is immensely beneficial come race time, since most of the races in Midnight Club 3 are checkpoint races. These checkpoints are scattered all over the place, and oftentimes there are multiple paths that will take you to each one. Half the challenge of the game is trying to find the best path to each checkpoint. The one problem with this methodology is that it can be quite frustrating the first few times you engage in a particularly challenging race because you won't know where all the required turns and potential obstacles are. This leads to a fair amount of trial and error that isn't altogether detrimental (especially since using the free-roaming mode gives you a good idea of how the city is laid out), but it definitely has its annoying moments. Fortunately, there are also point-to-point races and timed races to provide some variety to the action, and they're far less taxing to boot.
Midnight Club 3 is an arcade racer through and through. If you're looking for even a modicum of realism from this game, you might as well forget it. The physics are geared toward big jumps, taking tight corners at ridiculous speeds, big, exaggerated crashes, and frenetic action. The controls are generally tight and easy to pick up, though it will probably take you at least a little time to get accustomed to the different car classes. With more than 60 licensed cars available, there's a lot to choose from, including tuners, muscle cars, trucks and SUVs, motorcycles, and luxury automobiles. H2 Hummers, Cadillac Escalades, Mitsubishi Lancers, '64 Chevy Impalas, and Kawasaki Ninjas are just some of the many vehicles you can race with. Though nearly all the cars are fast and loose, every car type has its own strengths and weaknesses, which come in to play with the game's unique special moves system.
Yes, that's right. The cars in Midnight Club 3 actually have special moves. While that might sound a little wacky, it's not so bizarre. There are three types of special abilities assigned to the car classes. Big, intimidating cars can use an ability that knocks all the traffic around you out of your way; others can use an "agro" ability to inflict extra damage to cars you hit; and the speedier vehicles can use an effect that slows down time, letting you simply maneuver around any traffic that gets in your way. These abilities are handy, though perhaps not as well implemented as they could have been. The slow-down ability, for instance, slows down time almost too much, and it doesn't last long enough to be useful. Similarly, the intimidation ability the big vehicles use sometimes doesn't do anything except push the car in front of you farther ahead. Still, when the abilities do work, they're satisfying. And when you couple them with the preexisting nitrous and slipstream speed boosts, things can get pretty crazy.
Perhaps the best thing about Midnight Club 3's racing is that the difficulty never feels artificial. If you wreck once, or even twice, you still have a perfectly solid chance to catch up and win the race, as your opponents are prone to wrecking and spinning out as well. Similarly, if you catch the lead and can avoid wrecking or doing anything stupid, your opponents won't just magically overtake you.

The racing in the game is fast and frantic--so you'll do well to learn the city streets ahead of time, since there isn't much room for error.
The bulk of the offline racing you'll be doing in Midnight Club 3 will likely be in the robust career mode. You begin with about 20 grand in your pocket and an introduction to a local garage owner, who sets you up with a ride of your choice and an "in" to the underground street racing scene. Make no mistake, if you're looking for some kind of dramatic tale of intrigue or anything involving a lot of interaction with your typically stereotyped street racing characters, you won't find either here. The career mode focuses squarely on the racing, which is a welcome change from the hackneyed attempts at driving game stories that other similar games have tried.
There are multiple types of races to engage in during the career mode, all of which are structured around the basic checkpoint, point-to-point, and time trial races available throughout. Basically, you start by getting together with various hookmen who will challenge you to a short series of races. Impressing them will get you shots at longer series of races with assorted car clubs, each of which revolves around specific car types. So if there's a club that races with nothing but trucks, you'll need to have a truck or an SUV in your collection to participate in the races. While this might seem like a chore, it isn't, thanks to a number of tournaments that seem to ever so conveniently pop up right around the time a new car club challenges you. In these tournaments, you can win new cars. And they're almost always the precise kinds of car you need to move forward. Apart from all these main races, there are a number of side races available in each city that don't help your career but do provide you with extra cash. That's good, because you'll need it to fully trick out your whip.