A+
		Title	Freedom Force
		Publisher	Electronic Arts	Graphics	A-
		Developer	Irrational Games	Sound	A+
		Released	January 2002	Gameplay	A
		Platform	PC (Windows)	Longevity	A-
	ESRB Information
	Violence
	Full Review

Recently when I was cleaning out my desk (those sour starburst wrappers really start to build up), I came across some games that I haven’t played in far too long. Freedom Force was at the top of the pile, and I decided that for my first published review on Retropixels it would be a good place to start.

The first thing that came to my mind while waiting for the installation to finish was how bad most superhero games are. As a whole, the superhero game genre is littered with bad movie tie-ins and even worse gameplay mechanics…if anyone ever played the Catwoman game for more than five minutes (which would require a high tolerance for pain) you understand the norm for superhero games.

The issue (as I see it) with most superhero games is that they are based on characters that originated elsewhere. Way back in middle school science (or earlier) we were taught about the loss of energy that occurs when energy is transferred (such as when a cow eats grass and humans eat the cow). Most superhero games suffer from such an energy loss…videogames are based on movies which are based on comics, and something is lost in the process. Logically (at least to vegetarians), cutting out the cow (so to speak) and starting at the source would cause the least amount of energy to be lost in transfer. Following that train of thought (the crazy train perhaps) it seems logical that the best games should cut down on the energy transfers by either coming straight from the source (the comic) or by creating a new set of superhero’s specifically for use in the videogame. The latter method is what Irrational Games chose to do in the creation of Freedom Force, and in my opinion it was a wise decision.

Freedom Force is a tactical role playing game based in Patriot City (seemingly based on parts of New York). When firing up the game and starting the campaign, the game starts with (you guessed it) an origin story (it is still a superhero game) that explains the framework of the game. Lord Dominion (an alien with a really big brain) is planning to destroy earth from within by planting Energy-X among the worst people on earth. The Mentor (the first hero introduced) is spying on Lord Dominion, and steals the Energy-X and a spaceship and flies towards earth. He is (of course) found out and shot down, and the Energy-X scatters all over Patriot City. We are then introduced (through an origin story) to the Minuteman (the games primary protagonist). He is an old man who was kicked off the Manhattan Project for trying to oust a communist spy. He sees the man making a deal with a communist in the park, and he is discovered spying on their transaction and is shot. He crawls away and comes to the statue of the Minuteman in the park (which is glowing). As he touches the statue, he becomes younger (Energy-X for the win!) and decidedly more muscular. He vows to protect the country from her enemies (For Freedom!), and thus becomes The Minuteman.

During the introduction to the game, there are two things you’ll immediately notice. The first is that the game (especially its cut-scenes and origin stories) feel very much like a comic book…the animation style involves having images that move over the top of each other and slide in different directions to accomplish the intended effect. The second thing that stands out (over all other games in my opinion) is the quality of the voice acting. From the stentorian voice of Minuteman to the somewhat manic, desperate tones of Mentor, the voice acting is as good as it gets.

The first few levels (as with most games) are geared towards explaining how to play the game. Rather than having a tutorial level per se, the game has floating information bubbles (conveniently being the games logo) placed anywhere and everywhere they could be necessary (they taper off considerably after the first couple of levels). It isn’t even necessary to click on them, and as the information they give is done through a voice over by the narrator rather than the traditional cut-scene there is no gameplay interruption. The first few levels are strictly standard stuff; learning how to play the game. The first thing you’ll notice is that Freedom Force is not an easy game…unless you dumb down the difficulty, you will most likely die on the first level…on NORMAL! There are a range of difficulty modes, from very easy to very hard, and unless you’ve played it before, even the normal difficulty will have you straining to complete some levels (go for easy on the first playthrough).

Although the game is a few years old, there are a couple of things that make it stand out graphically. The first is that every attack has a different animation and comic book style sound bubbles (FWAP, POW, etc.) on landing an attack. It really adds to the comic book feel of the game (and it’s a superhero game, so why not). Graphically speaking, the game engine allows for rotating the camera, zooming in and out, buildings become transparent if in the way, and all the other necessary stuff to allow for a good experience (because nothing is worse than having your view obstructed by a building when you can’t move the camera). While the graphics are obviously not still top of the line, they hold up quite well and stylistically are a perfect fit for the game.

The gameplay in Freedom Force is basically a real-time strategy/role playing game with a pause button. It has the standard elements any RPG would be expected to have, including leveling up of heroes and their powers/attributes. Each hero has attacks and defenses that can be improved through going on missions and gaining experience points (smartly, all of the deciding of how to allocate where each characters points go is done between missions, not during). There can also be a lot of strategy involved in playing the game…deciding which character of the 4 (sometimes less) you control has the best attack for the situation can be somewhat difficult to perform in real-time (hence the pause button). It all comes together to be fun, but it can get somewhat frustrating if you start a mission with the wrong mix of hero’s (so save before you choose a team so you can adjust if necessary).

After the initial (introductory) levels what the player can do opens up a bit (attack wise and superhero-wise). Going further through the game, we meet multiple characters that help to advance the game, from El Diablo (a Mexican flier who controls fire) to Man-Bot (a rich guy who gets struck by massive amounts of Energy-X and accidentally kills his scientist brother, forcing him to wear a metal suit) to Law and Order (A combination of a blind woman (Law) and a huge police officer (Order) who have been struck by Energy-X). There is an origin story for each superhero, almost all of which are well thought out, and only one of them makes no sense (Eve…it’s not an origin story because there is little explanation of how she came to be and she was never hit by Energy-X).

The first major foe encountered in Freedom Force is Nuclear Winter. Nuclear Winter was a communist Russian leader who gets frozen in liquid nitrogen, but due to his exposure to Energy-X survives and steals a nuclear warhead. After a fairly lengthy series of ice missions (he’s Nuclear Winter…he froze basically everything) you come to the final ice mission, which gives you the task of disarming the bomb while being attacked by Nuclear Winter and his minions. Luckily MinuteMan helped invent nukes (seems rather convenient does it not?), and can disarm it (and yes, there is a timer countdown on the nuke). Basically your other three characters (Mentor, Man-Bot, and El-Diablo) have to keep enemies away from MinuteMan while he disarms the bomb…if it sounds very MacGyver-esque, it is (but everyone likes MacGyver, right?). The entire plot segment is very familiar feeling, but it is set up very well by the in-game cutscenes so that the plot devices may be obvious, but it’s fun and challenging nonetheless.

After the ice levels, the variety of locations and missions increases dramatically. There are levels involving everything from closing dinosaur-birthing portals, to underground battles with ex-beauty queens who mind control uglies, to battling evil clones of MinuteMan concocted by an enemy known as Déjà Vu (who happens to have a gigantic cloning ray-gun). There is a huge range of missions and objectives from the bizarrely entertaining (Déjà Vu speaks in bad rhymes) to the incredibly difficult (fighting the robots of Mr. Mechanical before they destroy all of Patriot City). Freedom Force is never easy (regardless of difficulty), but the Mr. Mechanical missions may leave you somewhat frustrated if you don’t have the right plan of attack.

The one part of the game where I question the point is towards the end of the game where there is a series of missions involving Eve being mind-controlled by the Greek God Pan (horse legs, man body…think Philoctetes from the Hercules movie). The whole set of missions is kind of a side-ploy to foreshadow the conclusion of the game (Pan is released by the games final antagonist), but it seems unnecessary. These missions all revolve around a character that the player has little reason to like…she has no logical origin story and is basically detached from all the other characters. She is quite simply the only character in the game that the player has no reason to become attached to, so why have 3 or 4 missions predicated on saving her?

Finally, at the end of game comes the understanding of what is really being fought for. Time Master is the games main villain…he can travel forward and backwards in time, and open portals to pull things from anywhere in history (or in the future). Basically he is Dorian Gray without the picture…the only way to keep himself from getting old and dying is stopping the celestial clock and killing everyone else in the process. Evil for the win!

So of course Freedom Force wants to stop Time Master from killing everyone (they are superhero’s after all). In order to keep Freedom Force from dashing his evil plans, Time Master throws wave after wave of enemies Freedom Force has defeated to attack them. After clawing through past enemies, Freedom Force finally faces Time Master on the celestial clock. While I won’t completely throw out the ending for anyone who hasn’t played it, Time Master is defeated and the universe is saved by the sacrifice of one of the members of Freedom Force.

After reading this review it should be obvious that you should go play Freedom Force ASAP. It has all the elements a game needs to become a classic. In my mind, it is easily on my Top-10 games of all time list (FFvTTR is on there as well) and if you play Freedom Force you will understand why. The voice acting is the best in any game you will ever play, the game is fun, and it will leave you wanting more. If you don’t have it, get it…you will not regret it.

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As you may well have figured out by now, there have been a few changes on the site in preparation for a big content pushout in the next couple of weeks. The written review for Freedom Force is done, and I am now solely focused on putting together it's video.

I'll be the first to admit that I am (at times) easily distracted. I've been playing Burnout: Paradise a lot more than I would care to admit on the PC. It's probably the most entertaining racing game I've ever played (although I think some of the earlier Need for Speed games were excellent as well). Despite not having even touched the multiplayer (and the multiplayer is somethng to behold from what I've heard) there is a ton of stuff to do in the game. As with the earlier Burnout games, there is a lot more than just racing involved (which is good...strict racing games get boring really quickly). My favorite event types are Marked Man and Road Rage. Marked Man involves trying to get to an endpoint without getting totaled by the multiple unbranded Mustangs trying to total your car. Basically you have the choice of driving a fast car and being very susceptible to getting shoved into a wall (and having better ability to maneuver) or having a go at it with a larger, more durable car (or SUV, conversion van, or 4x4 truck) that is less susceptible to getting pushed into a wall, but much slower, with a turning radius roughly equivalent to that of a houseboat. The Road Rage event is exactly what it sounds like...your job is to smash cars into the wall (a specific number in a certain time, which is extended with every car you takedown). This is where the visuals shine brighest in the game...cars flying all over the place trying to wreck anyone they can, with spectacular crashing animations when you manage to takedown another vehicle. Criterion Games was not messing around when they made this game...it always runs butter smooth, looks fantastic, and there is a ton of variety. Is that too much to ask for from every racing game? (And the answer from every other racing game maker is YES). After I've gotten the highest license in single player (which will happen soon I'd imagine) I'm going to finally go online and I'll be sure to tell you if my overall opinion of the game gets better or worse (and at this point I'd give it a 9/10 if I were reviewing it, the only downfalls being the cumbersome menu system and the all over the place soundtrack).

I also played a few hours of Left 4 Dead this week against some former coworkers...I'm still trying to figure out if there is a good way to bull through the final chapter of No Mercy (on the roof of the hospital) without taking massive amounts of punishment. Every other campaign seems to have an almost foolproof gameplay trick on how to get through the last chapter (at least in advanced and below). If anyone knows of a good way to beat No Mercy without getting messed up, let me know, because I'm seriously tired of dying after the helicopter gets there when the third tank shows up.

As always, if you have any comments or questions, feel free to email the retropixels.org staff.

As promised, this is the first installment of What I'm Playing Now. I've been playing both the original Freedom Force and its sequel (Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich). As I'm trying to get together the first massive review, I've also been doing a decent amount of video capture and re-encoding of game footage. FRAPS does a magnificent job of capturing video without causing any lag, but it's video's take up massive amounts of space. I've been playing the original Freedom Force at 800x600 to limit the size, but even at that low resolution they take up about a gig a minute (which is why I'm re-encoding into high bitrate mpeg-2 for the time being). To give you an idea on the scary bitrates FRAPS puts out, a typical x264 1080p movie is encoded at around 10,000kbps. The captures I've been taking (at 800x600) are right around 320,000kbps (yes, 32 times as large as a 1080p video)...in fact, while taking video captures of Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich with FRAPS (at full 1080p resolution of 1920x1080 because I just bought a new 24" ViewSonic Monitor, and because it looks pretty), each 1:40 capture (that's 100 seconds of video) is taking up 4 gigs of space...the bitrate is usually upwards of 720,000kbps. To put that in perspective, 3 minutes of video is taking up what 2 hours of 1080p x264 video would. My Barracuda's and Caviar's tremble in anticipation of more video...

In addition to the Freedom Force games, I've also managed to play a few hours of Left 4 Dead online. I'd like to think I'm pretty decent at it (I am admittedly terrible at playing as the Infected, so forgot about Versus), so if anyone wants to give campaign a go I am certainly up for it. One thing I will say about the game (as it'll never get reviewed on here...it's not an older "retro" game, and it had no possibility of being overlooked as a Valve game) is that few games offer so much replayability. Even with only 4 campaigns, the challenge is never the same. If there's one thing Valve can never be questioned for (and in efforts of full disclosure, I think they are better at making computer games than anyone else) it's the AI in their games. The AI Director in Left 4 Dead always makes the experience different, and always makes it fun and challenging (except when all 4 people get pounced on by Hunters simultaneously in Expert difficulty...but I digress). The point is, if you haven't played it yet you are seriously missing out.

Other than playing games, I've been doing far too much photoshopping for my own good lately. The family wants cool posters on the walls in the game room, and since we can't find the perfect poster to buy, I have been making one (which happens to be a combination of multiple animated cartoon characters). I'm no expert on photoshop, but I think I've done about as well as I could. ITGeek recently put me on to watching some photoshop podcasts, and it's made me want to start using Photoshop more to figure out some of the more complicated stuff (but as my mind wanders frequently, we'll see if I ever do anything to fulfill the want to learn more).

As alway, contact us with any questions or concerns.

				B+
		Title	Jones in The Fast Lane
		Publisher	Sierra On-Line	Graphics	B
		Developer	Sierra On-Line	Sound	B+
		Released	1991	Gameplay	B-
		Platform	PC-DOS	Longevity	C+
	ESRB Information
	Not rated by the ESRB
	Highlights
	A great PC game to play with friends if you know three people willing to crowd around a keyboard to play an old DOS game.
	Full Review

Jones in The Fast Lane is yet another gem from the golden years of Sierra On-Line. Released in 1991 for DOS, this competetive time management game features support for up to four players hot-seat style. Each player takes turns living their lives one week at a time. The goal of the game is to reach your characters life goals, which you set at the beginning of the game.

There are four goals that each player must achieve in order to win the game. The first, which needs little explination, is money. As you would expect, you can earn money by workind, investing in stocks and winning it big in the lottery (good luck with that one). Unfortunately it is not as easy as it seems; rent, clothing, doctors bills and the occasional stock market crash all seek to eat up all your hard earned dough. The next goal is happiness, which increases when you buy expensive toys like TV's and hi-fi stereos and decreases when you work all week. The last two; education and career, are met by obtaining better college degrees and jobs. Unfortunately, working as a janitor ar the local burger joint with a high school diploma will not get you very far in this game, much like real life!

You can only really play this game on your own once or twice. The AI player provides a good challenge, but the game is just kind of dull. The real fun in Jones In The Fast Lane is playing with your buddies. Laughing at the guy who just got his savings wiped out by a stock market crash, only to find out that you just lost your job, makes for good times.

The graphics are definitely old looking. The characters and buildings are very pixeltastic, but your eyes wont bleed out of your head. The game uses the same engine as the Liesure Suit Larry 3, so if you can play that without going blind (hands on the keyboard please), you should not have any issues with Jones In The Fast Lane.

With the audio, there are two differant versions of the game floating around the internet. One of which is the original game and the other is an official CD re-release with CD audio. Personally, I would stick with the original game, because it plays well in DOSbox and sounds better than the audio tracks in the CD version. Less anoying if anything else.

Basically, Jones In The Fast Lane is an awesome game to play with friends, but does not last very long if you go it alone. The graphics and sound show their age, but they will not prevent you from having a good time.

For a taste of the game, try this flash port