God of war II review

Kratos is as crazy as ever in God of War II for the Playstation II, for players of the the original game this will be recognised as more of the same, if you are new to the series, now is a really good time to jump in and start ripping off some heads. The God of War series started just a couple of years ago and turned out to be a real gem, it's always nice to play a great action adventure game where you can semi mindlessly kill hundreds of dudes in some fast paced action. God of War delivered it and now God of War does the same, new creatures, new weapons, more killing. It's not all about Kratos' rage though, often you'll find a door you can't get open, or a ledge you can't reach, this is where the puzzle elements come into play to slow you down and give you a short break before the killing resumes. People who would avoid the Zelda series for it's puzzle nature need not fear this element of GOWII's gameplay, puzzles are brief and simple usually involving you pushing a block onto a switch or just testing your timing so you avoid some spinning blades. These pauses are pretty infrequent and short and play a lesser part than they did in the first GOW, the balance feels about right and any puzzles are usually solved long before they become frustrating, although I seem to have some problem in identifying walls that can be climbed.

Large amounts of enemies are no problems for an angry Kratos

One of the improvements over the first game is the graphics, there are some new effects and what feels like a slightly improved art style. The first game was definitely not bad to look at, but when you put the high def cheat on the game looks more like a current gen title rather than last gen, the PlayStation 2 is really pushed to it's limits. The high def mode is a strange one, you have to hold down a series of buttons as the game starts to activate this and it's not available in the European version as the space on the disk is required for the extra languages available. Not having the high def in Europe is a shame, but it shouldn't deter anyone from experiencing this game, the graphics still look great without it. GOWII also features the same style of cinematic cut-scenes as the first, with similar high quality. The overall graphical presentation is a high class package all the way.

Magic powers will be unlocked throughout the course of the game and leveled up

Boss fights come at you throughout the game, you'll find that on average you'll have one of these fights every hour or so throughout the 13-14 hour game. Right from the get-go you'll encounter the Colossus of Rhodes this is one of the largest and most impressive boss battles of the game, it really helps set the pace for the whole experience. The other battles vary from single one-on-one battles to other large scale battles like the giant Kraken. These battles vary as much in impressiveness as they do in difficulty, playing through on medium I often found I fell to some bosses 4-5 times before I claimed a victory, it wasn't overly frustrating and felt to be the right degree of challenge. When you're not fighting bosses or solving puzzles then the minions will be keeping you busy, these vary as much as the bosses, some can be ripped up with just a couple hits, where as others you'll need to use a little strategy and slowly work them down until you can finish them with a few context sensitive button presses.

Fighting some of the larger creatures can be tricky, epically when there is more than one

A few RPG elements appear in GOWII as they did in the original, these are noting major but rather than the same endless fighting the character improvement system does make it feel like you are achieving a goal rather than just furthering the plot. You'll start with just the ability to just improve your Blades of Athena, but as you earn new weapons and skills you'll be able to upgrade them also. This includes new attacks, more damage, combos, and with the skills you'll collect you'll be able to drop more balls of lightning or just in general increase the effectiveness of your magic. This also increases re-playability since you'll keep your red orbs (that are used to level up) when you start a new game, so you can play through with a different strategy and different weapons. As well as testing out new weapons you may find yourself crawling through the game a second time to find the 6 hidden urns which will grant new abilities and cheat like skills, such as infinite magic.

The scale of some of the areas is just fantastic

Overall GOWII improves on it's predecessor, fans of the original will love it, and fans of this game type will find it one of the best of it's class.

Graphics 10 Gameplay 9 Sound 9 Length 8 Overall score 9

Great graphics Fast action gameply Huge levels and bosses Battles can get repetitive

How I setup my tri-boot on a Gateway 500s with XP, Kbuntu and OSX (hackintosh)

At home I have a relatively old Gateway 500s I use it as my second machine for writing, or surfing while I am gaming on my main PC. I grew a little tired of having XP running on both computers as I felt I was missing out by not trying something a little different, this is why I set up the task of tri-booting my PC to get the most out of this little box. I am using the default specs for a Gateway 500s but I've also added enough ram to take me to 768mb, a 5600 GeForce card and most importantly a DVD reader (you'll also need a way to burn DVDs)

Firstly and most importantly, make sure you backup everything you want to keep, personally after backing up my files I like to ghost the machine so I can quickly restore it back if I need the machine for something quickly. But however you do it, do run a backup, and heck you should have one scheduled to run anyway... right?

I'm going to do the best I can to break this down into steps, my main reason for crating this guide is so when I inevitably I end up breaking something I'll actually have some guide to get things working again. That said, lets go through what you'll be needing.

l A gateway 500s. Other systems will likely work, but bear in mind I am writing this for my specific hardware, specified above

l Windows XP SP2

l Kbuntu 6.10

l OSX X86 JAS 10.4.8

l Gparted

l About 4/5 hours of your time

1) Prepare the machine

a) Now you have backed up you files throw in the Gparted CD and answer the simple startup questions until you get to the partition screen.

b) For anyone that's used partition magic before this should be a cakewalk, begin by wiping the whole drive and we'll now create our separate partitions

c) The goal here is to create 3 primary partitions one for each OS. The exact sizes do not matter so much just follow this basic guideline then reboot. I have a 40gb HDD so my drive now looks like this

i. 13GB Primary, NTFS, Label “Windows XP”

ii. 13GB Primary, FAT32, Label “OSX”

iii. 7GB Primary, EXT3, Label “Linux”

iv. Extended Partition

v. 6.5GB Logical, FAT32, Label “DOCS” (Makes it easy to move files between OS')

vi. 500MB Logical, Linux Swap

2) Windows XP

a) Throw in your XP CD and begin the install on the first and only NTFS partition available

b) After install I recommend Autopatcher XP and running Windows Update

c) Reboot, XP is done!

3) OSX

a) This cam get pretty tricky, firstly put the DVD in the drive and continue until the install screen appears

b) At the top of the screen select Utilities / Disk Utility

c) Format the 13GB FAT32 partition as HFS+ Journaled, close the window and continue with the install, until......

d) Once you get to the screen with the little (and easy to miss) customize button the the bottom left, press the button and be sure to select the appropriate core based on your system, for me that'd be Intel and SSE2. From there you can continue with the install

e) At the point where OSX wants you to register you can press ALT+Q (If I remember correctly) to abort the registration

f) Now you should have OSX running, I found it was worthwhile to disable power management on my system as I felt it was doing more harm than good. If you do leave power management on you may need to change your BIOS to S1 mode, else the system seems less reliable when coming out of power save

g) Before we call it good, check your Internet. If you have a card like mine you'll likely find it not working. We can't fix this just yet, so continue onto Kbuntu and reboot for now

4) Kbuntu

a) Start up your PC with the Kbuntu CD in the drive, you should be taken to the live install screen

b) Choose advanced configuration of partitions

c) Be sure that the root partition is the 7gb partition, the swap is the 500mb partition and the 6.5gb FAT partition is mounted for ease of use

d) After install run the updater, you should have a flashing icon in the bottom right

e) Install NVIDIA drivers by launching; (K), System, Adept

f) Search for nvidia

g) Select nvidia-glx, request install and apply changes.

h) Start the terminal, you'll find this under; (K) , System , Konsole

i) Type
“sudo nvidia-glx-config enable” and reboot

j) If you get an error about X starting and don't get a graphical display. Then you might have to try “sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” and test.

5) Grub

Now we're nearly there! We have all 3 OS' on the system, we just need a way to access them all, we can do this with some simple changes to the GRUB boot loader

a) Login to Kbuntu and start the terminal, you'll find this under; (K) , System , Konsole

b) Firstly we'll back up your boot list, type this command
“Sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.bak”

c) Now we'll edit the boot list
“Sudo pico /boot/grub/menu.lst”

d) You should now have a little window with all your grub paths in it, I won't explain everything here as it speaks for its self mostly, I'll just mention the basics

i. title – The text you want displayed in the boot loader

ii. root – The partition you want to boot from (hd0,0) would be the first partition on the first drive (hd0,1) would be the second partition and (hd1,2) would be the third partition on the second drive. Etc.

iii. savedefault – Makes the selection the default once you have used it (always defaults to the last chosen OS)

iv. makeactive – Makes the partition active and allows the OS to boot from it. I'm no expert on this, I just know it works :)

v. chainloader – No clue, I use it, it works (see above)

e) So, with that knowledge, if you've partitioned the same as me, you should have something like...

title Linux root (hd0,2) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-generic root=/dev/hda3 ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-generic quiet savedefault boot title XP root (hd0,0) savedefault makeactive chainloader +1 title OSX root (hd0,1) savedefault makeactive chainloader +1

f) Save the file by pressing “CTRL+X” “Y” “enter”

g) Reboot and test the boot loader, if all works okay, then CONGRATULATIONS!!

6) Cleanup

Like I mentioned I had no luck with my Intel Pro/100 VE on board card, now we have XP loaded I can show you how to get that card working again

a) Login to Windows XP start up device manager and find your network card

b) Check the details, you should see the device instance ID, make a note of these details
VEN_XXXX DEV_XXXX

c) Reboot back into OSX

d) Now we need to add that card to the list of devices, so firstly copy the file from “/System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext” to your desktop

e) Duplicate the file again onto your desktop (always make those backups)

f) If you right click the file you should have the option of “Show package contents” this will allow you to browse the .text file.

g) Browse all the way down to Contents/PlugIns/AppleIntel8255x.kext and then show the content of that package also

h) find /Contents/Info.plist and open it with a text editor

i) find the line “<key>IOPCIMatch</key>”

j) Underneath that line is a list of the supported hardware IDs, you'll have to add yours to the end of the list, My note shows I was ven_8086 & dec_2446 this made my code 0x24498086, this means my info.plist file shows...

<key>IOPCIMatch</key> <string>0x10518086 0x10508086 0x10298086 0x10308086&amp;0xfff0ffff 0x12098086 0x12278086 0x12288086 0x12298086 0x24498086 0x24598086 0x245d8086 0x10918086 0x10608086&0xfff0ffff 0x24498086</string>

k) Save the file and copy it back to “/System/Library/Extensions/” overwriting the existing file

l) open the terminal (click the spyglass in the top right, type terminal)

m) Type the following two commands
“sudo rm /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache”
“sudo kextcache -k /System/Library/Extensions”

n) close the terminal and the open windows, click the spyglass again and start the Disk Utility

o) Click the repair disk permissions button and reboot.

p) Click System Preferences / Network and OSX should report that it has a new Network Card!

8) Sources

I could never of completed this guide or have made my own tri-Boot machine if it wasn't for the great sources available on the Internet. Here are the sources of the info I found so credit can be given where it's due

Wtcnbrwndo4u & elislider at insanelymac.com
If it wasn't for this thread I don't know if I'd of ever got my network card working

cybernet1 at blogspot
This is the guide I loosely followed to understand how to start tri-Booting

yolinux
I'm terrible at remembering Linux terminal commands as I'm a dos man, this is my translator

Opera
Now you have 3 great working OS' be sure to install the Opera browser on each

9) Footnote

I am no expert of OSX or Linux, as I mentioned before this guide is mostly for my own reference so I can learn more about these alternative OS.

Please run a backup before attempting any of the steps outlined in this guide, I'm not responsible for your data.

If you find this guide useful and want to reference it, that's great, but please give me appropriate credit.

Do not pirate! It hurts the industries I care about, and bumps up the prices that honest people must pay.

- Mad Elk