Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Ahh, the beginning of summer. While June is normally the start of the gaming drought before the congested winter holiday buying season, this June has some surprising stand-outs that will let the kids start off summer break with a blast and let the adults enjoy the fruits of their labor.

We start off with one of the bigger releases of June and that is the return of Ms. Croft. The revitalization of Lara Croft in last year’s surprising Tomb Raider: Legend game had the developers going back into the past to reinvent and retell the original Tomb Raider game, but with some new puzzles and a snazzy new graphics engine that has been tuned to perfection this time around. Can lightning strike twice for Crystal Dynamics? For our sakes, lets hope so.

Call of Juarez has been around for some time now, with some technical betas running around the web and so forth. The game does have some incredible graphics and the wild west setting is a refreshing change of pace. Techland has gone to great lengths to give us a solid, well written story with well defined characters that keep the story moving with the action. While this is a First Person Shooter, I hope that they can catch the magic the same way another western game did 10 years ago in Outlaws.

Monster Madness is a furious paced 4-player actioneer that plays in a similar fashion to Gauntlet in the fact that you are faced with unending zombies that you need to kill. You play one of four teen characters that have banded together to fight off the zombie menace. This game is coming to the 360 as well on the same day, but there is nothing that states there will be cross-platform play or achievements in the PC version. But the game has some sharp looks and if it can capture that arcade fast action feel, then South Peak Interactive may have a huge hit on their hands.

Rally racing has been a somewhat neglected genre on the PC, but Codemasters gives PC gamers the chance to play the next Colin McRae rally racer called DiRT. This game is more of an off-road racer than a true rally racer from my few glimpses of the game. But if it can give the excitement of fast racing on near claustrophobic tracks, then it should be a keeper. One thing that I have been wondering is what kind of rig it will take to unlock the full graphic options of the game, because it looks amazing from the screens that are out there.

Well, it seems that every few weeks, there is a new Sims game out on the market and this week is no different. This time out it is the Stories franchise that is getting the new game. The Sims Pet Stories, as with the Life Stories game, gives the player a more structured gaming experience, so they do not get lost in the options of a full blown Sims game. This time out, the franchise is focusing on the pets. You will train and care for pets in each story, making sure that you meet the goals of the game. While some may be burned out on the franchise, the game does get bonus points for being optimized for laptops.

Lost Planet was a huge success for Capcom on the 360, so they decided to port the game to the PC and do it rather quickly. The game is a sharp looking game that has been optimized to run at higher resolutions and cleaner graphics. While I have only played through the DX9 demo, the DX10 demo is suppose to look even better. There will be no cross platform multiplayer in the game as of yet, but it could be added as a patch possibly down the line. I will say that I have a rather high end machine and the game continuously told me that my machine did not meet the requirements of the game, making me wonder if it is better optimized for Vista over XP. One last thing, there is nothing listed about achievements either.

While 360 gamers got a crack at this game a little more than a month ago, it is the PC gamers turn with higher resolutions and sharper graphics. Multiplayer is still there and all the combat from the first one is back with some minor refinements. While the single player storyline is rock solid, the multiplayer component is where most gamers will be spending their time. All the modes from the first game are suppose to be back allowing all GRAW players to continue their favorite form of mayhem on the online community.

Well, those are the pick of the litter. There are still some others that have some intrigue, like whether Driver: Parallel Lines can be any good after the last Driver game, or will Trackmania continue to surprise people even though it comes out of a small shop. But overall, it is a jammed packed June with more than enough gaming goodness to keep you busy till our July list comes out.