In Tropico 3, players will take control of El Presidente as they shape a tropical community into whatever they desire. Of course, tons of gameplay mechanics are in place that will keep the player guessing what will happen next.

Again, Tropico 3 will hit store shelves for the Xbox 360 after the PC version is released sometime this fall.

This game will apparantly take the empire-building elements from My Life as a King and adapt them in a darker way. Players will be pitted against an onslaught of adventurers from who they must protect a tower from with an arsenal of traps and monsters.

There are two more WiiWare titles along with a DSiWare title included in this same update all of which you can read more about after the break.

WiiWare

FINAL FANTASY CRYSTAL CHRONICLES: My Life as a Darklord
Publisher: SQUARE ENIX
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E10+ (Everyone 10 and Older) – Mild Fantasy Violence, Mild Suggestive Themes
Price: 1,000 Wii Points™
Description: Step into the royal shoes of the Darklord’s daughter as she installs traps and monsters inside her tower to fight back the endless waves of invading adventurers in this world-conquest RPG. Known as Artifacts, these monsters and traps are your only hope in keeping the adventurers from destroying the Dark Crystal on the top floor. Fly your tower across the land and conquer every stage on your way to dominating the entire world.

Battle Poker
Publisher: Left Field Productions
Players: 1-4
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 800 Wii Points
Description: Battle Poker is a family-friendly card game with up to four players battling against the clock to make the best five-card hand possible. Battles are played across multiple rounds, and points are scored for each round based on the quality of the hand. Each player uses a Wii Remote™ controller to point and click on a standard deck of cards on the screen. The first click flips the card over, at which point it can be grabbed by anyone else. You’ve got to have fast fingers and eyes to grab the cards you need before someone else snatches them.

5 Spots Party
Publisher: Cosmonaut Games
Players: 1-4
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Wii Points
Description: Have fun with the entire family and compete in three different play modes. 5 Spots Party is a game of skill for all ages based on the popular game of finding five differences. The goal is to find the greatest number of differences in the pictures shown. In the party modes, you must compete with other players and find as many mistakes as possible. In the 1-Player mode, you must find the differences before time runs out in order to beat the game’s highest scores. How far do you think you can go?

Nintendo DSiWare

Art Style: ZENGAGE™
Publisher: Nintendo
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Nintendo DSi Points™
Description: Do you dream of relaxing with a great puzzle game? Art Style: ZENGAGE revolves around sliding cells (squares) to match colors with cores (beads) located on the board. Clear each stage by matching all of the cores and cells. As you progress through the game’s 100-plus stages, you’ll encounter cells with special characteristics, such as immovability, which further add to the challenge. To truly master ZENGAGE, you must keep your mind sharp and employ careful strategy to complete stages in as few moves as possible. Combining wistful graphics and mesmerizing sound, ZENGAGEcreates a surreal world that should be experienced by all puzzle gaming fans.

Basically, in Hell’s Kitchen, much like the show you take on the role of an aspiring chef in the none too tender mercies of Gordon Ramsay. You’ll manage a kitchen and a dining room, seating patrons, taking orders, preparing and detailing food to be served.  Actually, you’ll just tell a waiter what to do by pointing and clicking with your Wiimote.   Everything you’ll do, from mixing ingredients to clearing dishes, is done by pointing and clicking the Wiimote.

You may be wondering how such a game could be on the Wii in the first place, let alone merely rated T, because as anyone who’s actually seen the show knows watching it on network TV ends up with it sounding like a Morse code tutorial as designed by someone on a whole lot of meth.  But they actually managed to pull it off by A. continuing the grand tradition of bleeping out any and all of Ramsay’s profane dialogue and B. making the game itself little more than a casual computer game knockoff with licensing bonuses.  Playing Hell’s Kitchen felt like nothing so much as a particularly deep episode of Diner Dash.

On the one hand, a casual game like Diner Dash is pretty well suited to the Wii’s admittedly inferior graphics capabiliities and control scheme that focuses on the point and click.  Adding on a license like Hell’s Kitchen actually boosts the credibility of things a bit, and gives it a connection to something people are already familiar with.  There’s also a really interesting strategy element here that bears mentioning–dishes are all made differently, and you may have three or four dishes to process per table.  Thus, you’ll have to figure out which ingredients you need, and in which order you need them.  You may need, for example, two eggs, three fruits and two grains.  If you’re smart you’ll already have one of each pre-made before you even start.  But then you’ll have to start preparing ingredients on the fly, seeing which dishes will take longest to prepare and taking advantage of the time lag to prepare the other ingredients.  Plus you’ll have to do the whole thing on the fly under a time limit.

See what I mean?  Despite the fact that this game is fairly simple there’s a lot of different permutations involved here, and getting your head around all of them can be downright difficult.  That dichotomy is actually kind of weird, and adds to the fun factor.  This game shouldn’t be this complex.  Or this entertaining.  And yet, it is.  There’s an odd sort of compulsion to this game that makes you long to jam your success in Ramsay’s smirking little maw and make it all the way to master chef.

And you’ll get the chance to do exactly that here. Even better, you’ll get actual recipes that you can try if you’re desperate to make an incredibly complex dish (seriously, there’s a recipe for a salad that requires BLANCHING vegetables.  I took one look at it and said, no, I think I’ll just cut some lettuce.).  But the key thing is, Hell’s Kitchen is a hell of a game.

But anyway, you can just about imagine my surprise when I didn’t get a map-driven point-and-click strategy simulation game, but rather a third-person shooter.

We start our little affair in the midst of a battle between the Iron Legion and the Solar Empire.  The Iron Legion is about to literally hand the entire world its own ass by knocking out the last functioning army left on the field.  Only a last-ditch effort by a single brave soldier can save the entire planet from being ground under the Iron Legion’s massive, heavy boot heel.  Fast forward a few years–the Solar Empire has been living in relative peace, but all that is about to change when the Anglo Isles, another area power, gets word that the Solar Empire was working on a new kind of superweapon.  The Anglo Isles forces launch an all-out assault, which you must repel.  And this is only the beginning of a massive and world-sweeping plot…but who’s behind it?  Only by playing through a series of battles all over the planet will you manage to find out.

Yes, this is a third-person shooter.  You will, however, have access to a pretty nice variety of units, making this almost a strategy game at the third-person shooter level, forcing you to make decisions about which units to use in which situations.  You may need to use flamethrowers against infantry, bazookas against armor, anti-air units against aircraft, and so on.  I admit, I haven’t seen that many third person shooters involve quite so much strategy, but that’s still like saying it’s the least painful hammer to hit yourself with.

Perhaps another interesting issue with this game is that it’s uniquely well suited for the younger set.  For all the gunplay in this game, I don’t remember seeing any blood.  There are explosions, but these are really little more than bursts of color.  Enemies set on fire with your flamethrower simply fade out after a while.  I’ve heard about parents buying this game for children as young as seven despite the fact that it’s rated for teenagers.  Frankly, I’m not sure why this game rated a T myself–asides from the popgun-like effects of the gunfire there’s not much in the way of truly objectionable content here.  But that’s neither here nor there–I’d honestly say that T might be an overreaction on the ESRB’s part.

The game itself, meanwhile, is fun in a cartoony sort of way, with fairly decent sound and graphics, plus quite possibly one of the better third-person shooters I’ve played thanks to its heavy dollops of strategy and occasional humor.  You might want to take a run at Battalion Wars 2, if for no other reason than they try harder than most of the rest.

NIS America has recently released the above trailer for their upcoming Wii title Phantom Brave: We Meet Again, a game that is sure to appeal to fans of classic SNES-esque RPGs.

The developers are calling this a “strategy RPG that lets you do whatever you want” with over 500 skills, 9999 level limit and 8 directions of movement.

No honestly though, Phatom Braave: We Meet Again is shaping up to be a worthy sequel to the PS2 title Phantom Brave. We’ll have to hold judgement until we get our hands on the game come June.

Basically, in this game, you’re going to go plunging into the depths of Las Vegas, starting as a rookie to take on the greatest names in poker.  And seriously—you’ll be taking on some serious names.  Everybody from Johnny Chan to Annie Duke and the Devil Fish himself, David Ulliott, is here.  And you know it’s not complete without Phil “The Brat” Hellmuth himself in play.  You’ll be playing in dozens of casinos all over the strip—Harrah’s, the Rio, and plenty more.

I have to admit, I loved the World Series of Poker game.  I had a lot of fun figuring the odds of each current hand.  I liked staring down a guy who couldn’t stare back, considering just how likely the outcomes were.  Four hearts on the table…good chance someone’s got a flush.  But you can use that to your advantage, too.  You can act like YOU’VE got that flush, even if no one else does.

Yes, I just explained “bluffing”.  You’re welcome.

Sure, a little of the fun is leeched out of it—it’s tough to bluff people who have no emotions and operate according to the dictates of a microprocessor and RAM—but there’s still that element of fun involved.  You are effectively strategizing against a series of poker players that play at least reasonably like professionals.   And it’s even better if you can find live people to play against—it’s all the fun of a raging gambling addiction without having to sell your car if you have a bad night.  Seriously, you could go all in every hand and nothing would happen, because once you’re broke, you just pull the plug, fire up the power button and take another stab at it.

Of course, you could wind up winning millions and then have to realize that you’re dirt poor and your diet consists entirely of top ramen and sawdust, but that’s just the nature of the game.  The vicarious thrills of poker are all available to you.

The downside, of course, is that this is just a poker game.  It’s not like there’s going to be a whole lot of variety going on in this game.  You won’t get to commit crimes or find lost artifacts to bankroll your poker frenzy—you’ll basically just compete in tourneys or in cash games for the bankroll to compete in said tourneys.  It’s JUST poker.  And if you love poker, then you’re definitely going to be in for the battle of a lifetime when you go into the World Series of Poker 2008 and vie for the Battle of the Bracelets.  However, if you don’t absolutely love poker, then this one’s going to be a busted flush with an off-suit deuce in the river.

I know, that got me too the first time I heard about recent addition to the Xbox Live community MothBallz–a game that requires you to do as I just said–kill moths with a cannon.  You’ll set the angle and the power level, then fire into the open room trying to kill the moths swarming around the light bulbs in the room…and do so without breaking the light bulbs.

This sounds a lot easier than it actually is, especially when you start getting multiple light bulbs involved, but sometimes you’ll actually be required to kill the light bulbs along with the moths.  This isn’t the kind of thing you see very often–I haven’t played a good round of bug killing since Stephen King’s F13.  And even better, you can enjoy all this bug killing frenzy for a measly two hundred Microsoft points.  You can almost hit the dollar menu for that kind of value.

It’s a fun little game, really, and at that kind of price, there’s almost no reason to NOT get it.

Death Tank, recently released to Xbox Live Arcade, allows you to take control of tanks with a small arsenal of weapons, including cannon, machine gun and guided missiles to take on a series of other tanks.  Defeating your opponents allows you a cash budget to upgrade your own tank and improve the chance of killing everyone else.

When I said “an old friend”, I meant it.  There was a game a while back, in which you were required to input the angle and velocity of shots and fire on other cannons.  Death Tank is a lot like that game, only with a lot more movement and a lot less deliberation.

Death Tank is a surprisingly fun title, even if it doesn’t have a lot of replay value unless you get a group game going, then you’ll probably have even more fun with it.  But anyway, it’s a nice little title from Xbox Live and should give you occasional bits of fun for a long time, especially if you spread them out.  A little of this game goes a long way.

An extremely rare and hard to find title from the boys at Atlus, who for some reason don’t seem to be putting out a lot of product these days, Zoids Assault is a long and involved story, which is in turn part of a much longer and much more involved story, about two major nations at war.  The Guylos Empire and the Republic of Helic have been at each others’ throats for years, and this time around, we focus on two smaller appendages of these great bodies politic, Maroll and Jamil.  One of Marill’s military bases explodes under mysterious circumstances—which is odd enough by itself; explosions don’t tend to be mysterious, ever, they tend to be big, loud, and, in wartime, part of a series—and thus two covert operations teams are sent into their rival Jamil’s territory in response.  They’re probably on their way to do some damage in the best loud, grotesque military fashion available, but we’ll never know exactly what they were doing.  But what’s going on right now, with a cold war brewing between Maroll and Jamil, is irrevocably linked to events that happened around the end of the full shooting war between the Guylos Empire and the Republic of Helic, ten years prior.

Yes, you can start your groaning now, because the events you’re about to see and take part in are essentially a flashback.  One gigantic flashback.  In fact, the game will subject you to a whole lot of still pictures and people talking for about three full minutes before allowing you to even start playing the game.  Sure, the pictures are very nice and all, done in a lovely anime style, but for crying out loud, I wanted to start blasting things at SOME point, surely that could be understood!

But sure enough, the game decided that I was worthy to play it eventually and thus opened itself up.  And what I found waiting on the other side was…

…boring.

Catastrophically boring.  It played like a BOARD GAME with some animation.  Basically, I had to move pieces around a field in predefined moving patterns and use said pieces to attack OTHER pieces in turn.  Yes, it’s a real-time strategy game, and it’s very, VERY, short on action.  The worst of it was that the first level I played only offered up two basic types of weaponry, which means I had the whole spectacular choice of deciding if the enemy mechs (which all looked strangely like tigers, complete with mechanical tails, no less!) would get shot with a cannon or with a machine gun.  That’s it.  All the rest of the game is is deciding where exactly you’ll move your pieces to so that they can open fire on the OTHER pieces.  It’s like chess with a few explosions—it certainly moves about as fast.

And while the graphics are bland if inoffensive, and the gameplay trudges along with all the grace and wit of a rock attempting to dance, it’s not that the game is specifically bad, it’s just, well, unimpressive.

Zoids Assault fails to impress on virtually every level, but on the up side, it does fail to specifically OFFEND on just about every level, so if you like your games dull, slow-paced and thoroughly average, then go out and grab a copy.

If you can find one, that is..

With a name like Stormrise, you think it’s got to be a really interesting game, right?  When I first heard about this one poised to invade markets literally just a few days ago, I was picturing a nice Baldur’s Gate style medievalist fantasy.  Of course, if I’d read up on it in  advance I likely would’ve been sorely disappointed right from the word go, but instead my  disappointment had to wait until I finally got my hands on a copy of Stormrise.

Now available for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC, Stormrise presents an ominously possible future, as humanity faces a global catastrophe brought on by what seems to be a combination of its own willing ignorance and global warming.  In response, humanity develops a kind of satellite network to counter the resulting superstorms.  It works, for a while, until things get vastly worse through humanity’s meddling.  The result?  A hellish apocalypse unleashed on earth, and two warring factions left to fight over the ruins: the Echelon, a technologically advanced human society that sealed itself in shelters for protection, and the Sai, a race of mutants who’ve learned to live on the now-blasted surface of earth and instead depend mostly on monsters for assault where the Echelon would instead have tanks.

You play an Echelon commander who’s been out of the fight for some time, and wage war against the Sai for your own survival.  You’ll be in charge of several different kinds of battle unit, including several classes of infantry, aerial units, and giant mech suits.

It’s hard to pan Stormrise directly.  It’s an innovative enough idea, and the real-time strategy subgenre has been badly underappreciated, especially in these days of constant nonstop first person shooters every time I turn around.  There’s even some stuff to like in how easy it is to move from one unit to the next with the right analog stick.  The plot is deep and interesting with a lot of room for growth.

But there are problems here.  Of course, there’s almost inevitable comparison to fellow recent release Halo Wars, and you can rest assured that, giant mechs aside, Stormrise will not even vaguely be able to compete with Halo Wars.  I liked how rapidly I could switch between units in Stormrise, but I found that getting them to move anywhere was a confusing prospect.  The much-vaunted 3D aspect of the game has to take an unpleasant backseat to the sheer fact that, often, you can’t see where you’re supposed to be going next around the buildings and hills and valleys and assorted whatnot that’s cluttering up your field of vision.

There seemed to be a lot of problems with unit balance—at one point, I dispatched a mech and two units of infantry to seize an energy node, while leaving the balance of my force behind to shepherd the portal from which further troops could emerge.  My expeditionary force was chewed to bits by what I later discovered was a nigh-infinite flood of Sai troops, and when that happened, the game apparently decided that I just suck too hard as a commander and forced me to restart the level from the last save point.

Suffering from unpleasant control schemes and a really lousy sense of timing, Stormrise will almost inevitably wind up as second banana to the Microsoft juggernaut as presented by Halo Wars.  And this is sad, as the innovative ideas and interesting storyline will inevitably be lost to bad controls and better alternatives.

Spectral Force 3 is a study in how games can be interesting but only on a niche level.

A turn-based strategy game for the Xbox 360, Spectral Force 3 does manage to put out some interesting gameplay, just not a whole lot of it.

Way off in the distance, in some place called Neverland (no, neither Peter Pan nor Michael Jackson will be showing up on this one), there are gods that rule in heaven, the dead go to the underworld below, and the rest of the land is constantly warred over by humans and demons and whatever else is handy.  All this ceaseless conflict has made the perfect conditions for mercenaries to thrive, and we join one such unit, the Norius Mercenaries.  Currently working for the Army of Flauster, the Norius Mercenaries will field a great many offers of employment from the humans and demons and seven–count ‘em, SEVEN–other races in play in the Neverland War.  Thus, you’ll be able to decide the outcome of the war by always being in the right place at the right time for somebody, somewhere.  You know that whole “for want of a nail the kingdom was lost” thing?  That’s basically what this is, except now you’re going to try and steal that nail in advance, on a metaphorical level.

Like I said, it’s a turn-based strategy game, where you’ll move your characters around a field arranged like a grid.  You’ll move your characters into position, have them perform attacks until they’ve killed whatever creature or soldier you’ve had them engage, and then repeat the process until the field is cleared of baddies.  You can also direct some of your troops to pick up various treasure chests on the field that contain bonus items.

If you choose to be charitable, then you’ll get quite a bit of fun out of shuffling your units around on the field, and in exchange for this you’ll get plenty of great story development as you get to figure out, singlehandedly, what faction of the Neverland War you’re going to back.  Support humans?  Favor demons?  Or maybe you want more of a coalition government on this planet.  Whatever case you decide, that’s what you can work toward.  There’s a certain sort of satisfaction to derive from the clear and present knowledge that what you do, as a tiny band of mercenaries, will have far-reaching effects across the entire planet.

You can, however, choose to be uncharitable and say that the repetitious gameplay (go here, smack that until either it’s dead or you are, find new enemy, repeat until bored out of your MIND) and lackluster graphics keep this thing from being anything even vaguely resembling a good game.

Most seem to be falling into the middle of these two extremes–I heard somebody say that this would’ve made a SWEET download on Xbox Live Arcade and I can’t say I disagree–so essentially, whether or not I can make a recommendation on this one comes down to your own particular circumstances as a gamer.  Strategy buffs will be able to ignore the graphics and repetition and will instead get a huge fantastic gaming experience.  Action and adventure buffs, however, and also shooter fans, will find this duller than dishwater and twice as unpalatable.

You play as part of a mining collective, building infrastructure for your little part of the galaxy.  You’ll have to build energy stations and relays to get power to your mining machinery, and to the lasers and missile launchers that will defend it.  Each asteroid field will get progressively more difficult, with more asteroids to mine and more pirates to fend off in the process of getting the rock out of the asteroids.

It’s surprisingly simple, just a few maps, but it’s also surprisingly fun.  I was frantically hammering away on the map for several minutes, setting up lines of laser emplacements and repair stations.  Sure, the storyline’s nonexistent and the graphics are probably original Playstation grade, but still—the price is right, especially THESE days!

In Knights in the Nightmare, which was released in Japan in September last year, action sequences punctuate the more standard strategy gameplay. As with most strategy titles you can customize your party with over a hundred playable characters from seven different classes of knights. Further strategizing is possible by combining multiple souls into one character. Play through the somewhat unusual game and you’ll unlock a second gameplay mode, where you take on the role of the former antagonist. The game releases on June second.

Fans of the series are undoubtedly excited and hoping for more Nintendo DS remakes, but their future is somewhat uncertain. Intelligent Systems, the developer working on the remake has said they’re not definitively planning on releasing more remakes of the series. If the game turns out to be a ‘very big hit’ they’ll ‘keep their options open’, although the whole studio seems to like the idea of making a new title in the series over doing more remakes. Other ideas that have been tossed around are a more casual-style Fire Emblem game or an ‘all-star’ game that pulls in characters from various games in the series. While I remain hopeful that the game will do well and more Fire Emblem games will be put out for the DS, it seems a bit redundant to say that sequels will be made only if the previous game sells well.

If you’ve unfamiliar with the game, it takes place in the magical Dokapon Kingdom where the King has offered his daughter’s hand in marriage to anyone who can purge the horde of monsters that has overrun the kingdom. It’s a mix between board game randomness and RPG strategy.

You can not only attack the monsters and save infested towns, but you can turn your swords and spells against your friends, stealing items or humiliating them when you defeat them in duels.

via gamespot

Set for release early next year, the expansion will offer a nonlinear storyline, two primary campaigns – elf and human – and a mission editor to let you create your own missions and campaigns, as well as various multiplayer modes.

“This is one of the best-looking TBS games I’ve seen in a long time, and it follows in the same spirit of games like Heroes of Might and Magic, Master of Magic, and Warlords Battlecry”, said Paradox Interactive Executive Vice President Fredrik Wester. “The developers have really taken care to provide extensive depth and content, which could make this game one of those that stays on gamers hard drives for a long time.”

The game will also include “more visceral hand-to-hand brutality” and feature other strategic options. It will also feature certain story elements from the second Godfather movie, intersecting with the story in the game. While the movie was heavy on flashbacks, the game won’t be.

The Godfather 2 is in development at EA’s Redwood Shores studio for release on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 sometime next year.