Reviews

When the first anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach ticked by in February, our own JR Sutich decided to take a second look at the game. While it had launched originally to less than rave reviews, after a year, many MMOs hit their stride. Find out if DDO is one of them in our review.

One of the detractions from DDO that I found was the necessity of repeating quests. The quests are fun and interesting the first time, but after the fifth or sixth time I ran through them, I began to lose my sense of fun. It became even more evident when I found groups and they were just running straight through them without pause and I didn't get a chance to really enjoy much of the discovery elements from being in them for the first time.

Read his full review after the click.

Last fall, Ideazon released their latest gaming peripheral: the Ideazon Reaper Gaming Mouse. This was the company's first foray outside keyboards (ZBoard). It was a solid debut entry and over the last several weeks WarCry Senior Editor Dana Massey has been using the Reaper day-to-day and offers this review.

Its sensitivity combined with its extreme light weight can cause some occasional problems. Most notably, if I sneeze while using the mouse, my cursor flies all over the screen in a way that rarely happened with a more hefty, less responsive mouse. Despite a few easy to undo Photoshop accidents and some disorientation in FPS titles, this is a relatively minor issue born out of the combination of two good things.

The full review is available at the link below.

In our second Zboard keyset review of the day, we look at Ideazon's offering for World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade. Whitney Butts took this one for a spin and came back with a more mixed review then Sutich did for Guild Wars Factions.

You can also get a chance to win your own World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade keyset and Zboard in a contest we're holding.

The overall functionality of the custom buttons seems cheap. They don't always work and there is a bit of delay. You press the button and in game you'll see your chat cursor activate. Once the cursor activates you will see the slash command for the action being entered in the chat window. At times, the delay was so long I likely could have typed the slash command faster than it took the keyboard to enter it in. Overall, the buttons seem like a glorified macro interface for slash commands that didn't quite work all of the time.

Click below for the full article.

Today we have a review of the Guild Wars Factions Zboard keyset. Ideazon, the makers of these keysets, specializes in custom keysets that plug into their own keyboard. These are designed to swap in and out and work specifically for each game. Our own JR Sutich had a chance to review one.

You can also get a chance to win your own World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade keyset and Zboard in a contest we're holding.

Do one thing and do it well. The Zboard is a great example of that, as it chooses to focus on being a great custom keyboard layout for various videogames. The specific layout I had the chance to use was for Guild Wars Factions.

Setting up the keyboard was a fairly simple operation, once I had figured out that the newer keysets were not compatible with older Zboard bases. After installing the drivers, it was only a matter of plugging in the USB Zboard in and letting the system detect it. The Zboard application was immediately able to show what keyset had been used, with a graphical representation of the Guild Wars Faction layout.

The full review can be found at the link below.

In recent years, The WarCry Network has not been a site for reviews. Today, we hope to begin a new tradition by reviewing the biggest expansion of them all: World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.

We've opted to stay away from grading the games we review, as the numbers are too subjective and usually, over time, become wildly inconsistent. Instead, we're going to give you our heart-felt opinion, some pros and cons, and then let you make your own choice.

John Funk took the time to pen this review. So read on to find out what WarCry thinks of The Burning Crusade.

It's taken them two years, but the Blue Crew in Irvine has finally launched the first expansion pack to their proverbial 800-pound gorilla, 'World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.' With two new races to play, a brand-new crafting profession, and a slew of new lands filled with dangerous and deadly beasties that all hunger for your demise, 'Burning Crusade' has rapidly become one of the fastest-selling games of all time.

It is said that "the apple does not fall far from the tree," and the statement holds true for the WoW expansion. Much of what is good about 'Burning Crusade' was good in 'World of Warcraft,' and many of its flaws are from the parent game as well. Even so, Blizzard has jam-packed a whole mess of content into their first expansion pack, and the vast majority of what is there is excellent.

Click read more to find out what he thinks.

The playable demo of Ninety-Nine Nights, a collaborative effort between Q Entertainment and Phantagram, recently went live for download via Xbox Live. Having been wowed by the various movies released over the past year or so, it was something I was eager to get my hands on. As soon as the demo finished downloading here on the office's Xbox 360, I plugged in, closed the door, and prepared to watch numbers on the screen scroll up to ludicrous levels. I was not disappointed.