[bad soda]

[PSP] God of War: Chains of Olympus – SCORE: 10

Highest Level Achieved: Played through one time. I was able to upgrade all the of weapons. I did not try any of the challenges.

Description: This is all the stabbing, killing and decapitating of the first two games, in a convenient, on the go, portable format.

This game was so good I don’t even know where to begin. I can start by saying that this game has the best graphics of any handheld game I have ever played. (Keep in mind that at this point I have not played Final Fantasy: Crisis Core, which I am sure will have better graphics.) This version of God of War runs with no slowdown and almost as fluidly as its PS2 predecessors. You can tell that they scaled some things down, but it was not really a big problem. You still get blood splattering, and you still feel immersed in the God of War world.
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(edit:  click the picture of the title or visit ikariam.com if you’re interested after reading the article)

At work yesterday I was dragged into a one-way conversation with a customer about some crazy new computer game he was playing. He went on and on and I drifted in and out of interest; most of what he was tossing my way was typical of the kinds of characters I run into at Gamestop: rabidly eager to interest me (or anyone listening) in their newest obsession but painfully unable to describe it to the uninitiated. Most of the time it’s World of Warcraft, with some crazy throwing out statistics like “20.7 crit ratio” or name-dropping things like “Outlands” or “purple.” This time it was a game called Ikariam.

From what I could catch before I was subjected to more bold claims of pwnage was that Ikariam was some kind of MMO that played like a Civilization game and was absolutely free to play and completely browser-based (ergo no skeptical or lengthy download). To be completely fair to him, I am paid to act interested (and in this case and many others I genuinely am interested, if only because I like video games or because people are intriguing). Regardless, this was free and harmless so I gave it a shot.

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