Publisher: Riot Games
Developer: Riot Games
System requirements: Windows 7, XP SP3 or Vista SP1; 2.0 GHz CPU; nVidia GeForce 5 or higher graphics card with shader model 2.0; 1 GB RAM; 1.3 GB hard-drive space; Internet connection
Genre: RTS
Release date: Available now

Games journalism is a grim and solemn business, and editors routinely beat those of us who appear to be having fun, but League of Legends is a game I’ve been playing (and secretly enjoying) quite a bit. It can best be described as an inverted tower defense game built using a PvP concept. Curiously enough, League was originally a Warcraft III mod that became a full game that’s free to download and play.

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Sometimes beating a game is not enough. Often you want to share the results of your labors with other gamers so they can use your strategies and make their own lives easier. If you’re like me, you may just want to rub your victory in people’s faces. You could also do video reviews, or use in-game footage to make a music video for your favorite song. Whatever your goals may be, in order to do this, you have to record your moment of glory. Usually one would use Fraps to do that, but now a challenger has arrived.

PlayClaw is a video capture program by Sytexis Software. It is small (requiring only 1.85 MB of hard drive space) and lightweight (20 MB memory footprint). Like its competition, it also allows you to take screenshots in BMP, TGA, PNG and JPG formats. If you use the JPG one it allows you to use a slider to select the desired quality for the image. For video, the options are Low, High and No compression, with frame-rate choices of 15, 30 and 60 frames per second. Just as with Fraps, PlayClaw does not allow you to save videos at arbitrary resolutions, instead defaulting to either the resolution at which the game is running or half of that.

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Back in the day, then I was writing for another site, the kind people over at Atari UK sent me a copy of The Witcher. You may wonder why I got in touch with the UK division, and the answer is simple, the American version was mercilessly censored at the time. In any event, The Witcher is a wonderful game, and I was very happy with it. (That means you should buy it, by the way.)

Later, however, the patch came out, and then an extended edition, and another patch. These were not your regular patches; they actually added content and improved many things about the game. Or so I have heard, because I couldn’t install a single one of them.

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Hello, everyone! Congratulations to all of you, for today is the day of my glorious return. It’s been 1606453 hours since I departed, but now you can stop holding your breath. That’s right, I have come back and will write for Avault once again. Just as before, I will focus on reviewing PC games so that you know what’s good for you. Follow my recommendations and you will live a long, productive and healthy life, become successful in your business and studies, acquire fame and riches beyond your wildest dreams, get the girl, win the lottery, your children will be accepted into a good college, and your enemies will tremble! Go forth my minions and… Umm… Sorry… I’ve been seeing a specialist for my megalomania.

In any event, I’m glad to be back officially. You’ve probably seen some of my reviews over the past few months, but now that I have a blog of my own – I’m a real boy… man… man-child.

As to my latest gaming endeavors, some of you will be pleased to know that I am currently playing a new MMO, with intent to review. Also I am in a beta test of a multiplayer tactics game, which I may also write about. If that’s not enough, I am playing World in Conflict, which I will not review because it’s old, but I’d like to report that I am kicking some serious commie behind which (along with zombie, nazi and orc ones) is the best behind to kick.

Alaric out

Publisher: Namco
Developer: Namco
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista; 1.0 GHz CPU; 512 MB RAM; DirectX 9.0; 330 MB hard-drive space
Genre: Puzzle/Casual
Release date: Available now

Have you ever wanted to produce feature films? You know, that business in which you stress out and lose your hair but could potentially cash in big time? Buying props, building sets, hiring actors, investing in special effects and praying to a higher power that the public won’t snub you: does that sound like your cup of tea? If your answer is “yes,” then you should play Lionhead Studios’ 2005 game The Movies, because Tinseltown Dreams: The 50s is nothing like that. If, on the other hand, you are into casual games such as Jewel Quest, then Namco’s latest release could be exactly what you crave.

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Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Transmission Games
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista; 2.66 GHz CPU; Radeon X1600 or GeForce 6800 video card; 1 GB RAM (2 GB for Vista); 9 GB hard-drive space
Genre: Flight Simulator
Release date: Available now

WWII-themed games will never stop being made. Ever. Even a thousand years in the future, most games will use that setting with complete disregard for all other wars that preceded and followed it. I don’t know what it is about World War II that seems to resonate with most game developers. The only time I feel it’s justified is when the game in question is of a flying sort. That’s because of a specific kind of aerial combat, which was pretty much exclusive to this time period. Air conflict in this era is the transition between the bamboo-and-canvas planes of WWI and the jets of later years; if you want to pilot a monoplane at 300 mph, then WWII is for you.

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Publisher: Corbomite Games
Developer: Corbomite Games
System requirements: Windows 98 or later; DirectX 8; .NET Framework 2.0; 3D accelerated video card compatible with DirectX 8
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now

About eight or so years ago, everyone was screaming rather loudly that adventure games were dead. Then, after a steady flow of bad games set off the zombie alarm, everyone was screaming that adventure games were undead. Today the drama is fortunately over. We live in an age of excellent indie adventures (Ben There Dan That), oldie remakes (The Secret of Monkey Island), resurrected franchises (the Sam and Max episodes) and some promising games in development (The Whispered World). Adventure games are being released regularly, the latest being Pizza Morgana Episode 1: Monsters and Manipulations in the Magical Forest.

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Publisher: Playlogic
Developer: WhiteBear Studios
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista; 1.8 GHz Pentium IV or equivalent CPU; 256 MB RAM; 256 MB graphics card, DirectX 9.0-compatible sound card; 2 GB hard-drive space
Release date: Available now

Sudoku Ball Detective is a peculiar murder mystery in the style of Agatha Christie novels, that comes complete with the classic collection of characters, such as aristocrats, a doctor, and a detective. The peculiarity lies in the fact that, playing as the detective, you complete all of your tasks by solving Sudoku puzzles. Trust me, you haven’t lived until you’ve experienced the heart-pumping excitement of chasing after an escaping suspect via Sudoku.

The main feature of this precious offering is that the puzzles are located on a ball that you can rotate. To some of us such a solution may appear obvious, now that someone else has done it, but nobody can deny the genius behind this seeming simplicity. It’s as if someone had cut out a bunch of Sudoku puzzles from a newspaper and pasted them on a soccer ball—truly a most glorious innovation. To play the game, you click on empty fields and a radial menu appears with numbers from 1 to 9, which you use to complete the puzzles.

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Publisher: Southpeak Games
Developer: Timegate
System requirements: Windows XP SP3 or Vista SP1, 3.0 ghz Pentium 4 or higher, GeForce 7800 or Radeon X1800 graphics card, 1 gb RAM (2 gb for Vista), 6 gb hard-drive space, broadband connection for multiplayer
Genre: First Person Shooter
Release date: September 2009

Section 8 is a futuristic combat game in which two teams of Angry Internet Men shoot, stab and smash the crap out of each other, all while jumping out of spacecraft without parachutes, leaping across buildings in jet-pack-powered jumps, manning tanks and bipedal war machines and generally blowing stuff up. Team 1 is called The 8th Armoured Infantry Division, affectionately nicknamed Section 8 in reference to a code used for those who are mentally unfit to serve in the armed forces. Their opponents are known as the Arm of Orion, and are some sort of insurgents.

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Publisher: Codemasters
Developer: Triumph Studios
System requirements: Windows XP SP2 or Vista SP1, 3.4 ghz Pentium D or equivalent CPU, GeForce 6800 or Radeon X1800XT video card, 1 gb RAM, 1.5 gb hard-drive space
Genre: RPG/Action
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Teplitsky

Did you ever want to control an army of gremlins who would attack your enemies, set things on fire, bring you gold and perform other vital tasks? 2007’s Overlord was one of the first games that let you do it. A mix of role playing and action, it put you in the spiky, iron shoes of a mute Lord Sauron lookalike who commanded an army of minions. It’s now two years later, and the sequel has been released. Welcome to Overlord II.

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Review By: Michael Teplitsky
Published: April 7, 2006

Every now and again a game appears that seems nothing special at first glance, but later proves to be so addictive that your concerned family will be forced to commit you into a recovery program. In my particular case, I am referring to “Thomas and the Magical Words”. ( read more… )

Review By:Michael Teplitsky
Published: August 10, 2005

Most of us visited an emergency room at one point of our lives. Some of us were injured; some went with a friend or a family member. The odds are, we were made to sit there for hours upon hours and when the doctor showed up he gave us little more than a glance and then ran off as if pursued by Serious Sam. ( read more… )

Review by: Michael Teplitsky
Published: June 13, 2005

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the continent of Europe found itself split into a huge number of loosely defined principalities. With no Romans around to guide them, people quickly shattered the aqueducts, forgot the military drill manual and lost the recipe of concrete. Upon accomplishing these important milestones, they concerned themselves primarily with waging war on everything that moved. This happy period of human history would later be called the Dark Ages. Recently, however, it was discovered that the ‘darkness’ was relative so now we refer to it as the medieval times (not to be confused with a restaurant by the same name). Still, contrary to what some romantically inclined authors would have you believe, this was not a very pleasant time in which to live.

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