TNA iMPACT! Review

Professional wrestling has long been maligned as a place where spandex-clad ogre-men go to act out contrived rivalries and pretend to actually wrestle. While these derisions certainly hit on some truths about "sports entertainment," the remarkable talents and impressive athleticism of its practitioners cannot be denied. If you're the kind of person who enjoys the high-flying, hard-hitting spectacle of pro wrestling in spite of its myriad absurdities, then TNA Impact may be the game for you. It has some aggravating problems, but it does a good job of translating the excitement of TNA Wrestling into fluid action and visceral fun.

A wrestling game is only as fun as the moves you can perform, and in this regard, TNA Impact does quite well. You ratchet up your basic punch and kick attacks by holding the strong modifier or by performing them from a run or in a grapple. This simple layering allows for a wide range of moves without requiring complex button combinations, so it's easy to unleash your nastiest attacks right from the get-go. You can also reverse almost any attack with a well-timed button press, and many reversals can be reversed again. The accessible variety of attacks and the ever-looming possibility of reversals make the action fast and furious.

The more you mix up your moves, the more likely you are to come across some of the game's many technical hitches. When the animations run smoothly, they look good and produce satisfying impacts. When they don't quite line up, you see fists and feet clipping through torsos, as well as apparent misses registering as hits. These oddities are a minor distraction, though, because at least you are still performing the moves you want. The more frustrating glitches cause your character to perform an unintended maneuver, often with disastrous results.

The glitches are prone to surface in a few situations, the most frequent of which are transitions, such as when your character is getting up off the mat, climbing a turnbuckle, or exiting the ring. Because your attack changes depending on your opponent's position, you may often find yourself aiming to punch an enemy as soon as he stands up, only to execute an elbow drop and lay yourself out at his stomp-happy feet. You can also dodge grapples or attacks when you're near the edge of the ring because the animation of rolling out of the ring will often negate incoming moves. Then, there's the particularly tricky situation when your opponent is down near the edge of the ring. Climbing up on the turnbuckle, rolling out of the ring, and pinning an opponent are all mapped to the same button, which makes it very difficult to figure out how to position yourself to execute the action you want. In this case, you're better off avoiding those three actions altogether.

When you're playing against other human players, these hang-ups don't feel so frustrating because you are all subject to the same pitfalls. In the single-player Story mode you can suffer a few miscues and still scrape out a win a win early on. You'll hit a wall when the foes get tougher, though, because the room for error diminishes so much so that a missed move or missed opportunity can cost you the match. This is vexing enough when it's an honest mistake, but it becomes downright infuriating when it's an animation glitch.

The punishing difficulty in the latter part of the Story mode isn't its only weak point. The voice acting feels flat in contrast with the vigorous banter featured on the actual show, and the actor who voices your character is just terrible, dragging every other character down with his lifeless tone (the closest thing you'll find to personality is in the training videos featured in the extras menu). The only incentive to play the Story mode is to unlock new characters and arenas. With each victory, you earn style points, and the more various and risky your moves are, the more points you'll earn. Unlike in the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions, these points don't actually appear to earn you anything, given that you don't actually customize your character or move set. As if to compensate for the puzzling lack of character creation, there are a lot more unlockable wrestlers in the PlayStation 2 version, though many of them are no-name goons.

Multiplayer is the best way to enjoy TNA Impact, and there's a full array of match types available. One-on-one matches, three-way free-for-alls, tag-team brawls, handicap contests, and the signature Ultimate X matches are all playable, though only two players can actually compete at a time. Ultimate X matches, while dramatic on television, often feel less exciting than normal matches because the focus becomes staying aloft on the cables rather than pummeling your opponents. There's nothing unexciting about that per se, but the hanging combat is awkward and limited. Actually grabbing the X also requires you to tap a button when a moving cursor lines up with a target area--an action that could be diplomatically described as "anticlimactic."
So, TNA Impact is not without its flaws. The character models are good, and the animation is fluid and lively, but the unpolished physics of fighting can create some frustrating situations, and the lo-fi audio often sounds flat. Yet despite these technical shortcomings (and silly costumes), it's still good fun to clothesline, drop-kick, and power-bomb your friends all around the ring. And, ultimately, isn't that what pro wrestling is all about?

By Chris Watters, GameSpot

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Review

You hear the big chord and the brass fanfare, and you know what's coming. It's easy to get excited when you hear the rousing Star Wars theme, though the franchise has hardly been known for exceeding expectations in recent years. If you're interested in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for its story and theme, you won't be disappointed: It supplies a weighty plot with a few stunning surprises. If you're more interested in the action, you'll find that the game is a mixture of fun and frustration that you'll get some enjoyment from, but ultimately fails to live up to its potential.

You're cast as Galen Marek, aka Starkiller, Darth Vader's secret apprentice. The Clone Wars have ended, and Vader orders you to hunt and destroy the last of the remaining Jedi. Exploring the universe from this dark perspective is remarkably compelling. The story is brief (expect to finish the campaign in about seven hours), but it contains multiple twists, features some friendly and not-so-friendly faces, and is both explosive and remarkably intimate. You'll interact with Vader, of course, but Starkiller spends most of his time with an android called PROXY and his female pilot, Juno Eclipse. Sharing the details of the trio's adventures would spoil too much, so suffice it to say that you'll grow remarkably fond of Starkiller and his companions, and their moral conflicts carry a lot of weight.

Unfortunately, the game's limited visual capabilities somewhat soften the story's dramatic impact. The cutscenes are rendered within the game engine, and are undercut by stiff animations and abrupt, jarring transitions in and out of gameplay, as well as some odd-looking character models and occasional glitches, such as blinking geometry. Audio also takes a hit, which is odd, considering that much of the voice-over work is lifted directly from the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 version of the game. Poor compression is the culprit here, and it makes the dialogue sound as if you're listening to it on an old record player.

That's not to say that Force Unleashed looks and sounds bad, considering the aging hardware pumping these elements out. The moderately sized environments are fairly detailed, and the saber action and powerful-looking Force abilities produce flurries of particles and other special effects. However, there are some brief moments of slowdown not seen in the Wii version, which uses the same graphics engine (and looks essentially the same). John Williams' music and some original tracks, as well as the familiar swooshes of sabers, sound like you'd expect, and they only occasionally suffer from the poor compression to which the voice-over was subjected.

The star of the visual parade is the robust physics engine that powers your most impressive moves. Using Force grip, you can grab and fling any number of objects, including your enemies; with Force push, you can shove items and foes out of your path. These skills and their variants deliver the game's best moments. Whether you're flinging Felucians into each other or offing swarms of rebels with a burst of energy, there are a number of "did you see that?" moments that will have you grabbing your friends to show them your saber-slinging prowess. Nevertheless, it's disappointing that these moves can't be strung together more easily. The controls can be unresponsive and sometimes lack the fluidity of the other versions. At times, you might be mashing on the square button and wondering why you aren't swinging your saber, or tapping X but not making the corresponding jump. Additionally, it's odd that the triangle button does double duty, activating both Force push (if you tap it) and Force grip (if you hold it). The other versions use separate buttons to perform these powers, which is a more logical choice and feels more intuitive.

Although the environments aren't totally cluttered with useful objects, this actually works to the game's advantage, considering that the targeting problems prevalent in the other console versions are diminished as a result. There are still some moments when you'll grab a different object than you intended, but given that there are fewer objects to grab, these moments will provide only the occasional frustration. The annoying camera of the Wii version has been leashed and tamed a bit on the PlayStation 2 thanks to the right analog stick, which gives you the full camera control that you would expect. However, many of the levels are claustrophobic, which makes it difficult to move the camera into helpful positions, especially when you are fending off multiple enemies.

Nevertheless, the game moves along at a relatively quick pace, so between droid encounters and boss battles, you'll always be in the thick of the action. You won't find much challenge here; there are plenty of health drops scattered around, including respawning ones during boss battles. Should you die, you'll restart at the most recent checkpoint with all of the damage you've already done to your enemies still intact. This is probably for the best because it keeps the pace moving. Some variety comes by way of Force Unleashed's God of War-style quick-time events, which result in some terrific, flashy-looking moves, whether you're smashing on an opposing Jedi or defeating a rancor in a series of thrilling acrobatics. And it's a welcome sort of variety, given that you'll be visiting the same exact levels several times over.

Unlockable costumes and other extras won't give you much reason to return, but some extra levels lengthen the playtime over the mostly similar Wii version. So if you're in the mood to slash up Jawas, this is your chance, though The Force Unleashed may not be as raucously entertaining as you may have expected. Nevertheless, if you've got six or seven hours to kill, this is a fair way to spend them, particularly if you're a Star Wars devotee looking to fill in the gaps between Episodes III and IV.

By Kevin VanOrd, GameSpot