Time to get derezzed and parkour your way through the world of Tron: Evolution for the Sony Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Wii and PC. As denizen of the digital world it’s up to you to save Flynn and Tron from Flynn’s evil digital doppelganger Clu.

The game’s story takes place before the Tron: Legacy events and provides some insight into the film’s past. The film will also reference elements of the game’s story so fans will want to play the game to learn more about the TRON mythology seen in the film, but according to Disney each entertainment experience will stand on its own.

In the Story mode gamers will take on the role of Anon a character that can best be described as a “digital” version of the Prince of Persia. Much like the PoP you will be spending it parkouring your way through Tron and most likely falling to digital doom over and over again. The annoying aspect in this game is that your parkouring courses features a lot of floorless areas that will require you to make running leaps off a small ramps to get over to other walls and ledges. However these ramps are always located next to the edge of a ledge and most times you inadvertently wind up running off the end of the ledge.

While the parkouring aspects plays a big part in this game so does the fighting. Using your “Tron Frisbee” gamers can beat the digital bits out of some bad guys. Using a combination of the triggers and face buttons players can pull of varying attacks and combos. As you progress you can upgrade your disc to include added attributes like bomb and stasis, which gives you explosive attacks and with the later slows them down to a crawl.

Gamers will also get to ride light cycles and race across TRON’s digital landscape doing 90 degree sharp turns to make spectacular escapes. Players will also get to hop into tanks and blast their way through obstacles and shoot down transport ships. Unfortunately both of these features are laden with finicky controls and once you’ve tried each of them the novelty wears off quite quickly leaving you with no desire to try them again.

Overall game play is fun; however it is repetitive much like shampooing your hair, wash rinse and repeat. Gamers will find themselves parkouring their way to a large hall filled with Tron denizens who run screaming from you to be replaced by a group of bad guys who you pummel to bits, then you parkour your way to the next hall and you keep doing this over and over again. Occasionally you’re rewarded with a very short movie sequence that queues you in a little bit on what’s going on plot-wise and also points you to your next game destination/objective.

There a few multi-player games that expand the worth while-ness of the game and lets you and a few buddies have some extra fun. The multi-player light cycle races are very fun and a very similar to those seen in the movie. The battle arenas are similar to multi-player Quake and Halo matches and unfortunately seems like a simple knock-off of those games.

A special Tron: Evolution’s limited-edition package will also be available that will cost die-hard fans a whopping US$130 (about HK$1,010). What makes this package so expensive is the inclusion of an exclusive Tron light cycle collectible model made by Sideshow Collectibles. Also included in the package is a special casing to house the model so that you can proudly show it off and the display case also features a pullout drawer in its base to store the game’s box.

Hopefully Tron: Evolution isn’t indicative of what the movie will be like. It seems this game falls into the same abyss as other movie tie-in games and fails to deliver an equally exciting or fun experience as the movies that they are based on. While gamers might not find this as stimulating as the like of  Prince of Persia or Assassin’s Creed, fans of the original movie will definitely get some fun out of this game and some extra insight into the soon to be released movie that will be in cinemas on the 23rd of December.

Tomorrow sees the launch of one this summer’s most anticipated games: Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption.

The game can best be described as Grand Theft Auto 4 set in the last years of the cowboy era. Neonpunch was able to play one of the missions from the game and we have to say right now that we can hardly wait for May 20th to arrive and start shooting some sheriffs (but not any deputies)  on either the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii.

Set approximately fifty years after the original game, Red Dead Redemption kicks-off at the turn of the 20th Century – a pivotal time in American history. The old west was dying, slowly being crushed by the rise of industrialisation and the growing presence of federal government, which was starting to assert its power and bring the lawless ‘Wild West’ into line.

Gamers take on the role of John Marston a partially reformed outlaw who, after years as a career criminal in a notoriously brutal gang, has hung up his six-shooters for a more peaceful life and started a family. Three years later John’s life is completely turned upside down when agents from The Bureau (the precursor to the FBI) arrive and threaten his new way of life. Forced to work for them, The Bureau were proving just as ruthless, lawless and evil as the gangs they were paid to hunt down.

After being told the back story, Rockstar handed over the controller to us and we began our mission to tame the “Wild West.” The mission objectives are simple we must find a drunk called Irish who will give us info on the where a bouts of a Gatling gun that we need. Unfortunately the weapon is being kept in a very secure location deep within a nearby mine guarded by dozens of well armed men.

We follow Irish to the Mine’s location and this is where the action starts, we shoot our way through the miner’s camp and enter the mine to be confronted with some more stiff opposition. As we wind our way through the labyrinth of tunnels killing miners with our shotgun or blowing them up thanks to conveniently place boxes of TNT we finally get the Gatling gun which we then have to load onto a mining cart and ride it out of the mine shooting anything that gets in our way.

Now that was an overly brief simplification of what we had to do, those who have played either Red Dead or GTA4 will know there’s a little more to it than that. All we can say is “It was freaking AWESOME!” it was like being in our Spaghetti western with a character that looks somewhat like a cross between John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.

Shooting the bad guys was fun, especially when you use the Dead-Eye function that lets you do some super human shooting, however this time you can use it in three different ways. The first is available with any weapon you’ll come across and it enables you to slow down time, giving you precious extra seconds to pan around an area picking off multiple assailants, or maybe just to hammer the one. The second form of Dead Eye automatically paints shot markers on target; while the most advanced way allows players to paint their own shot markers – perfect for shooting a bounty in the leg to take him alive or to scare off troublemakers by shooting their hats off.

As with the original, you’ll earn Dead Eye in a cumulative way by taking out enemies.

The guns that you can use in the game are based on real weaponry from the time, there are loads of weapons to choose from like rifles to shotguns, sawn-offs, snipers , pistols and different melee weapons such as axes, knives and lassos.

One of the most impressive things graphically was the 3D modeling of the horses, from realistic movements to the incredibly detailed musculature; gamers can even see the horse’s muscles undulating underneath its coat. There is a complete in-game ecology system, bigger animals hunt smaller ones, and the bigger ones have no problems coming after people either. There is a huge variety of wildlife in the game; bears, cougars, wolves, snakes, armadillos, rabbits, vultures to name a few.

Red Dead Redemption is running on a customised hybrid of both Euphoria Physics and the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, which was developed by Rockstar San Diego specifically for this title. It has been used in Midnight Club Los Angeles and Grand Theft Auto IV. Euphoria enables the characters to take on much more realistic properties, their movement and the way they interact with each other, as well as the player. It doesn’t end with humans either and extends to the whole wildlife system.

The game is bigger than any of Rockstar’s previous titles with three distinct massive separate, but linked, areas forming a playing arena larger than GTA IV, including 2 states of the newly formed USA and an area in the north of Mexico. These boast dramatically diverse landscapes and varying degrees of civilisation in these places at the time – from remote ramshackle outposts to organised urban hubs.

If you’re a fan of westerns or GTA then Red Dead Redemption is a game that you should definitely get. It’s available on all console platforms tomorrow in Hong Kong – just in time for the long weekend! Yee-Haw!

Here is IGN’s review:

Nintendo is bringing out a new black Wii in early August to Japan for ￥23,750/HK$1,975. While the white Wii, to us, defines the console, it still is neat to have a Wii that matches our Playstation 3.

Official launch in Japan is August 1, and it should be made available at regular sales outlet in Hong Kong shortly after, or you can run out to Mong Kok on August 2 and find one at an inflated price. It’s exactly the same product as the white one only slicker in black.

Maybe it will make Punch Out seem just that more bad-ass:

This week the long awaited Prototype hit stores across Hong Kong for Playstation 3, Xbox and PC. Infamous hit last week exclusively for the Playstation 3 and topped the sales charts in Hong Kong as well.

Now remember these games are not the same game, even though on the surface they look like it. Both feature GTA-like gameplay with superpowered protagonists and both are crazy-ass action games. But which one should you get if you only have a PS3?

Metacritic has them both pretty much neck-and-neck at 85/100 for Infamous and 86/100 for Prototype, reviews on 3 of our favorite game sites seem to lean towards Infamous:

The race is quite close, so we’re guessing if you want to shoot lightning from your hands or rather turn into a Wolverine-like monster then the choice is clear and even clearer if you only have an Xbox 360. If you have a PS3 then just be happy you have 2 pretty cool games to play at all! Wii owners can go back to Bubble Bobble Plus. We’re just happy we have some new cool games to play with when there’s nothing new to watch on TV and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is still 2 weeks away.

Here is G4′s video reviews for each game, and if you don’t have 8-minutes then the summary is that they slightly lean to the Infamous side:

Infamous:

Prototype:

What’s going on in France? First we saw a Pac-Man live-action video, and now we see Mario dropping real banana peels into the street. Seeing how bad Speed Racer did we don’t expect to see a Wacky Races or a Mario Kart movie coming anytime soon, so until everyone in Hollywood forgets we’ll have this:

Recently, a company called OnLive introduced a totally new idea that attracted an unbelievable amount of attention. They took the idea of remote servers called “clouds” into the video gaming market. They want to start a system where high-end gaming can be played on low-end computers with high-speed internet.

How it works is that all the game processing is done on OnLive’s remote servers, which will send to your computer monitor or TV video signals. With this, it will seem like you’re actually playing the game locally. All you will need is a very basic computer or console that will handle the controller inputs.

We’d have to say that we’re very impressed with OnLive’s idea. If they succeed with this idea, they could easily bring down the video gaming giants Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. However, the only problem we see in this idea is the possibility of lag since there would be quite a lot of distance between your computer and their remote servers.

OnLive says that this system will be available at the end of the year for a price that’s “significantly lower than gaming consoles”. The games can be bought similar to on-demand TV, where you order them through the internet. Look out video gaming giants, OnLive’s coming for you!