NBA Street Homecourt Ps Game Torrent Download

When the original NBA Street hit the scene in 2001, it took the over-the-top basketball formula established by the NBA Jam series to the next level. Since then, enormous rim-rocking dunks, intentional fouls, and blatant goaltending have been a part of nearly every play. Rather than simply adding more content and possibly making the latest game in the Street series too complex, developer EA Canada has trimmed the fat and focused almost entirely on simplifying and perfecting the gameplay. NBA Street Homecourt is easier than ever to pick up and play, and almost all of the new moves and dunks are fantastic, but because of a shallow career mode and a limited number of other gameplay modes, there aren't enough ways to enjoy it.

Once again, the dunks leave Mars Blackmon asking, 'Is it the shoes?'

NBA Street's fast-paced, over-the-top gameplay is back, and it's as good as ever. The trick stick has been removed, but the new simplified controls work very well. Basic dribble moves are mapped to the square and triangle buttons, and the really crazy stuff is performed by hitting one of those face buttons in conjunction with a shoulder button. As always, the more moves you make, the faster your gamebreaker meter fills. And if you really make a defender look bad, you'll earn a bonus for your trick points. As crazy as they are, the series' dunks are so frequent that they've almost become routine. Almost. Homecourt has breathed new life into dunks by adding a few twists. For starters, teammates will sometimes get down on all fours at the top of the key and act as launching pads. All you've got to do is run up to them and jump, and you'll soon find yourself high in the sky heading toward the rim for a vicious dunk. The biggest addition to the dunk repertoire is the double, and sometimes triple, dunk. A meter fills as you hold down the dunk button, and the longer you hold it, the more powerful your dunk. If you release the button too late, you'll get denied by the rim, but if you time it just right, you can dunk the ball, catch it, and dunk it again. If you do this during a gamebreaker, you can dunk the ball a third time. Multiple dunks are both awesome and awful. It's great when you're the dunker, but as the dunkee, it's maddening to lose a close game as a victim of a double dunk. It's bad enough when you're playing against a friend, but it feels downright cheap when the CPU does it.
After you've performed enough tricks and dunks to fill the gamebreaker meter, it's time to unleash some pain. Once the meter is activated, you've got a limited amount of time to score, but you'll want to take some time to perform as many tricks as possible because the more you refill your meter, the more points your bucket will be worth. As usual, the moves and dunks you can perform here are completely over-the-top, even by Street standards. While the game's focus is mostly on offense, you'll need to hunker down on defense if you're to rule the streets. Goaltending and fouling aren't just allowed--they're encouraged. The way you play defense is largely unchanged, and for the most part, it's very satisfying, especially when you're blocking shot after shot. The only negative aspect of the gameplay is that it's often very difficult to pick up loose balls, particularly if you're on defense. The CPU even has a difficult time picking the ball up and getting it back to the baseline after a bucket.
The one area in which Homecourt is lacking is the number of gameplay modes. You can play a basic game without tricks and gamebreakers or play games where points count only if they're scored with a full trick meter or a gamebreaker. However, none of those modes are particularly interesting. Online play offers up the same games, as well as leaderboards. While the game runs well online, it would have been nice to have some sort of true online career mode. Because the other modes are so shallow, nearly all of the game's value is found in the Homecourt Challenge.
Homecourt Challenge is where you play on your local court, eventually make a name for yourself, and take on real NBA players on their homecourts. You start by creating a baller, but rather than altering individual features, you select from one of a handful of generic heads and then merge it with the heads of two NBA players. This means that you can finally find out what the love child of Steve Nash and Yao Ming would look like. (It's every bit as horrifying as you might imagine.) Outside of being sort of creepy, the create-a-player feature is quite limited. After you've created your Frankenstein baller, you assign him a position and playing style. Then, you head to the court where you can round out your squad of three by picking up some no-name locals. Once your squad is assembled, you'll play pickup games against other local players, and eventually, you'll get to take on teams made of NBA and even a few WNBA players. The rules for victory vary. Sometimes the winner is the first to score 21 or the first to lead by three points; other times, you'll only be allowed to dunk or take jump shots. Your created player's attributes improve slightly after each game, and when you reach a certain level, you can max out one skill by designating it as a "freak skill." This makes your player nearly unstoppable in one aspect of his game, and knowing you have a deadly shooter, shot blocker, or rebounder is invaluable in tight games against the CPU. You won't want to get attached to your teammates because you'll constantly be adding and dropping players to improve your team's talent level.
Part of the appeal of the NBA Street series has always been the great player animation, and Homecourt does not disappoint. Dunks are satisfying not only because they change the score, but also because they look powerful, leaving fallen players and bent rims in their wake. You never know what mind-blowing dunk you'll see next, either. It might be a reverse, or a reverse with a flip, pump, spin, and a windmill. These moves look even better, thanks to a consistently snappy frame rate. The players look realistic, and because the game's roster is mostly made up of the NBA's better players, they're almost all instantly recognizable in-game and look even better in the replays. The real-life courts on which you play vary greatly in style and design. Most of them aren't instantly recognizable locales, but whether it's an indoor gym, beachside court, or urban setting, they all look nice.
It's odd that the developer decided to muck up all of the great-looking animations, players, and courts with a "retro" look. Everything is run through a filter that gives it a sepia tone. The idea was to make the NBA players' homecourts look as they might in home movies or pictures. This might make sense if there were any old-school players, but it's a safe bet that Carmello Anthony's home movies weren't shot with an old 8mm camera. There's no option to turn the effect off, either. Eventually you can get past it, but it's still lame. Homecourt supports 1080p, but it doesn't look much better than the lower resolutions; and the frame rate, which is fine in 1080i and 720p, takes a pretty big hit in 1080p.

Unless you look like a combination of both AI and T-Mac, morphing two NBA players into one isn't the ideal way to create your own baller.

The game's audio also has a bit of a retro feel to it, but it works because it's cool. When you bust out a gamebreaker, you'll do so to the synthesized funk of Herbie Hancock's "Rockit." The outstanding soundtrack features artists, such as RJD2, Quincy Jones, The Jackson 5, DJ Shadow featuring Q-Tip and Lateef, the Herbaliser, and many more. On the court, players will talk trash, which itself is nothing new, but here it actually doesn't sound supercheesy.
There's a lot to like about NBA Street Homecourt's debut on the PlayStation 3. The controls are easy to learn, the gameplay is as tight as ever, players look great and move well, and the soundtrack is top-notch. As any good game should, Homecourt leaves you wanting more, not only because it's so much fun, but also because there isn't enough to do. However, there are worse things you can say about a game other than it left you wanting more.

MotorStorm Apocalypse PS Game torrent Download Game Review

Sony and developer Evolution Studios' Motorstorm is undeniably one of the more anticipated of the upcoming crop of PlayStation 3 games. It was one of the first major games shown for the system and looked to demonstrate the kind of incredible visual fidelity the PS3 was to be capable of. In this regard, Motorstorm does not disappoint. It's easily one of the best-looking games on the system (if not the best thus far), and you'll be hard pressed not to ooh and aah as the game's vehicles crash and explode into one another again and again. Trouble is, that's pretty much the bulk of what you're going to get from it. While the racing is legitimately exciting and filled with visual treats, there's only a handful of ways to experience it, and the only way that really holds up over time is online against friends.

It's safe to say that this beats the hell out of Lollapalooza.

Think of Motorstorm as what would happen if someone in a postapocalyptic future decided to crossbreed rallycross racing and Burning Man-style music-festival culture into one ridiculous orgy of vehicular violence and heavy music. Of course, no one would ever do that, but it makes for a compelling-enough game concept. The twist with Motorstorm's brand of racing is that a variety of different vehicle types all coexist on one track, from big rigs all the way down to dudes on motorcycles. While that might sound like a nightmare for those who prefer their vehicles more on the svelte side, don't worry--you're not destined to be bopped endlessly by bigger vehicles. All the tracks in Motorstorm have multiple paths, and different vehicle types are more suited to some than others. If you're on a bike, ATV, or dune buggy, you can take the higher ground, which tends to be loaded with jumps and other obstacles not properly suited to the bulkier racers. On the flip side, the lower ground tends to be muddy and less reliant on crazy turns and narrow ledges--precisely the kind of stuff a bigger vehicle would be perfectly designed for.
This balancing act permeates every aspect of the racing, and it actually works quite nicely. Some of the vehicles can be a bit of a drag to drive on certain tracks, but as there are plenty of vehicles to choose from, you're bound to find something that works for each situation. It's all about finding the type of vehicle you're most comfortable with and then finding the sections of the track that will get you to the finish line fastest. All the while, you'll be fighting off both other racers and the track itself to survive. Make no mistake, the tracks are treacherous. Jumps are often a tricky prospect to pull off, and there are broken-down cars, mud pits, ledges that will send you flying off a cliff and to your doom (until you respawn, of course), and all sorts of other unpleasantness there to get in your way. As things go, you'll have to deal with the incessant bopping and other antagonizing antics of your opponents. The big guys can wreck into whomever they please, but even the little guys aren't left out in the cold. Racers on bikes and ATVs can attack one another as they drive past, knocking opponents off their rides, which can be immensely satisfying.
It's too bad, then, that there's not more to it. As chaotic as some of the cinematics of the game make the racing look, it's not quite as chaotic as you might expect. The racing isn't exceedingly fast, and the whole core of the racing experience is really just about vying for position based on size and which paths you can take. Your vehicle has a nitro boost that can be liberally used to help put you past opponents and take higher jumps, but there's no real combat to the racing beyond bumping and the occasionally thrown elbow. There's nothing really wrong with that, but the racing in Motorstorm can still get a bit tedious in spots. Once you figure out the right way to take a track for your type of vehicle, that's pretty much what you tend to stick to. That there are only eight tracks in the game heightens the repetitive nature of the racing. They're long tracks, and with all the varying paths, it will take you at least a few go-arounds with each to figure out their various intricacies. But once you do, you'll find yourself pining for some additional variety.
It doesn't help that there's so little to do in the game overall. All Motorstorm offers is a kiddie-pool-shallow single-player mode and online racing. The single-player mode offers up a series of event tickets. These tickets open up races to take part in, and how you place in each race determines how many points you earn to spend on more tickets. You keep doing this until you've unlocked all the races, and, well, that's it. If you're waiting for the part where you unlock new race types or new, unique vehicles, keep waiting. Yes, you can unlock new vehicle types, but they're purely aesthetic changes. New vehicles don't display any new or improved statistical info, so if you're racing one vehicle in a weight class, you're racing any of them. As for race types, there's only one: races. You can't even adjust what types of vehicles play in a race--all that stuff is predetermined based on the event, meaning you're stuck with a specific class in the vast majority of the races. The actual progression of the events doesn't offer a lot beyond the ability to unlock new vehicles and to serve as a practice mode for the online game. That's a decent-enough offering, though once you get to the later events, where the CPU drivers turn into sadistic jerks that endlessly frustrate you, you'll probably just give up on the single-player mode altogether and stick to the online play.
The good news is that online mode is a fun time all around. The unpredictable style of racing Motorstorm uses is a perfect fit for rousing multiplayer matches, and with the ability to have up to 12 players in a race, there's plenty of anarchist fun to be had. The game uses a solid lobby and ranking system (though it only ranks wins, not other placings), and voice chat is supported, as well. Furthermore, the online mode lets you do a few things that you can't in the single-player, like letting you choose from any of the available vehicles at all times. Online matches don't seem to suffer from much, if any, lag. The only real bummer about the game's multiplayer is that you can't play it offline. Online play is excellent to have, for sure, but if you just want to hop into a race with some friends that happen to be sitting next to you, you can't do it.
However, when you consider how fantastic Motorstorm's graphics are, the lack of split-screen multiplayer maybe makes a bit more sense (though it's no less disappointing, all the same). Of the current crop of PS3 games, Motorstorm absolutely takes the prize as the best looking. Sure, there's some ugly textures that crop up now and again, and the frame rate tends to dip during particularly destruction-heavy moments (split-screen would have probably murdered it altogether), but those few issues aside, the game's a real visual achievement. It all starts with the vehicles, which are some of the most beautiful jalopies you'll ever see. Each vehicle is extremely detailed from bumper to bumper. Even the driver models are fully detailed, which is plainly obvious when you're driving a motorcycle or ATV. And the crashes are even better. Your rides break apart in incredibly dynamic ways, creating completely different forms of destruction each time out. And even when you just slam into something and don't completely wreck it, you'll see that damage. Tires will bend or start to come off, bumpers will deform, paint will chip, and every vehicle eventually becomes so caked with dirt and mud that the paint job is practically irrelevant from the get-go.
That the tracks are just as excellent looking is really saying something. Again, there are only eight of them, but each one is a long, drawn-out trek through one form of desertic hell or another, and they're all a treat to look at. Motorstorm has some of the most impressive lighting effects you've seen in a racing game to date, and depending on the time of the day, the sun is either completely washing out a barren wasteland or coloring a beautiful landscape with gorgeous oranges and reds. Even the distant mountains and hills in the background look excellent, though it's the up-close pieces of the track that really impress. Dirt and mud fly everywhere, deforming the track itself in the process, and many of the pieces of junk littered about the track can break or be otherwise moved. The copious dust and dirt is maybe a bit overboard when it drenches the screen, but it's a neat effect all the same. Less impressive is the array of available camera angles. The standard from-behind camera view is fine no matter what vehicle you use, but the first-person camera mode is really only enjoyable when you're on a bike or ATV. The view isn't exactly a hindrance in any of the other rides, and you do get to look at some of the track details much closer this way, but it's just not as enjoyable a way to drive. A real, in-the-cockpit view would have been nice in this case. But cockpit view or no, it's hard to find much fault with the way Motorstorm's visuals are presented.

Oops.

Motorstorm's audio is also pretty great. On the track, engines have a ferocious roar to them, and every time you wreck into something, the booming, crunching sounds of the crash really make you feel it. While you race, you get one of several rock or techno songs from major artists like Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age, Wolfmother, Spiritualized, and Slipknot, among others. It's a diverse soundtrack that always manages to fit the vibe of the overall game, in that every song heightens the intensity of a race in one way or another.
Motorstorm is a good game that also feels like it has a great deal of untapped potential. As an over-the-top, gorgeous-to-look-at racer, Motorstorm is absolutely a success. As a deep and lasting experience, it's far from it. The question, then, is what's more important to you? Is it of greater import to you that a game feature great racing mechanics and incredible graphics, features be damned? Or does a deep array of lasting modes and features make or break a game for you? If you answered yes to the former, then Motorstorm is unequivocally the game for you. If you answered yes to the latter, pay consideration to just how much you're going to get out of a solid online mode and a cheap-feeling single-player mode that you'll probably never go back to once you finish it. Either way, here's to hoping that the next time around, Evolution turns in a more fleshed-out experience to go with its great game design.

Full Auto 2: Battlelines PS3 Game Review | torrent Download

Full Auto 2 is technically proficient, but almost every aspect of this car combat game's gameplay is messed up in one way or another.

The Good

• Has a more stable frame rate than the previous Full Auto.

The Bad

• Bad car physics make everything feel too light  
• no communication options in the online mode  
• enemy artificial intelligence feels very robotic.

The original Full Auto debuted on the Xbox 360 and tried to be a thrilling combat racing game but ultimately failed. The explosions were cool, but the handling was bad, the car physics made everything feel weightless, and the weapons weren't much fun to use. Full Auto 2: Battlelines has switched sides and is exclusively available on the PlayStation 3. It makes some changes to how you outfit your vehicle, attempts to add a storyline, and adds a new arena mode that makes it a bit more like the car combat games of old. But it doesn't fix the core problems of the first game, so all the new modes only serve to make the bad handling, questionable physics, and dull weaponry stand out that much more. Whether you're familiar with the previous game or not, this game probably isn't for you.

Full Auto 2 attempts to add a story to the single-player mode, but it's barely there and kind of dumb.

The storyline has you answering to a computer-based authority figure called S.A.G.E. This female-voiced computer summons you because an evil gang is running the streets. The police can't stop them, so it's up to you to enter the gang's car combat events and take them out from the inside. It's a very thin story that doesn't add anything meaningful to the game. The career mode takes you from one series to the next, and each series has a number of different events in it. While there are more events than there are tracks or arenas, the game changes things up by giving you different primary and secondary objectives. Sometimes you'll just need to finish first. At other times, you'll have to gun down a specific vehicle, then finish first. There are also arena levels that take away the racetrack and give you a wide-open level on which to fight. In the arena levels, you'll have to blow up your enemies to succeed, and you're usually on a time limit too. You'll have to hit the primary objectives to move on, and meeting the secondary objectives, helps you to unlock more stuff. But you'll unlock most of what you need just by getting the primaries, so unless you're crazy about getting new paint jobs for your car, you don't need to get every single little thing.
So the main focus of the game is racing around in cars and shooting everything that moves; two things that are cornerstones of the video game industry. But the way Full Auto 2 brings them together isn't very exciting. The driving is brought down by poor car control. The vehicles all very floaty and weightless, and the way they fly through the air after hitting jumps just doesn't feel right. Also, the handling lacks finesse, making it very easy to just bang your way through every corner without really caring that you're hitting walls all over the place. The hand brake lets you slide a bit through turns; but the sliding, too, doesn't feel right at all. In addition to basic driving, you can fire two weapons. You select your weapons individually prior to starting the race and unlock more as you go. So the weak machine gun and smoke screen combo you're limited to at the beginning quickly gives way to a shotgun, grenade launchers, mines, and so on. The fire controls work decently, and you can even aim some of the front weapons with the right stick. But because you need to hit the face buttons pretty frequently to fire your secondary weapon or hit the hand brake, you don't have much time to fiddle around with aiming your front weapon. The other two things at your disposal are a speed boost and "unwreck," which is a button that lets you rewind time when things go wrong and hope that they pan out a bit better the next time. Unlike the first game, your boost and unwreck are linked to the same meter; so if you boost a lot, you'll be unable to unwreck as frequently. But the speed boost almost always seems more useful than the ability to rewind your mistakes, so unwreck feels mostly useless.
In addition to the career mode, you can jump into any race or arena via an arcade mode and just play, but you'll still be limited by what you've unlocked in the career. The multiplayer options let you play two-player games locally or up to eight players online. The online mode has options for ranked and unranked arena battles and races, and you can limit which cars are chosen to help keep things fair, but the weapon selection is always based on what you've unlocked in the career. Of course, there is a catch. It's either a function of the rarity of the PlayStation 3 or a statement about the popularity of Full Auto 2, but it seems like almost no one is playing this game online. Ranked matches require four players to start, and even after sitting in a ranked connection screen with one other racer for more than an hour, no one else joined up to play. Unranked games can go with just two players, but even those seem to be in extremely short supply. To add an extra layer of frustration, there's no way to communicate with other players, so you can't even put on a headset or plug in a keyboard and say "Hey, instead of sitting here for another hour, how about we go try an unranked match instead?" In the few multiplayer games we were able to find, the game ran reasonably well, but there was a noticeable amount of jumpiness and lag to the way the opposing cars move. Of course, your mileage may vary when it comes to online experiences of any kind, but don't expect to find a bustling community to play with online.

The game's multiplayer options are fairly bare, but considering it's tough to even find other players online at the moment, it sort of doesn't matter.

Full Auto 2 runs in 1080p, if you're equipped with a television that can handle it. Even at this high resolution, the game runs at a mostly stable frame rate, but it isn't as smooth as Ridge Racer 7, the other 1080p racing game on the PS3. The game has decent explosions, but the environments are sort of plain, and the game doesn't deliver an especially thrilling sense of speed either. If you're looking for a point of comparison, it does look better and run smoother than its Xbox 360-based predecessor, but the difference never seems huge. The sound is essentially what you'd expect it to be, with plenty of explosions, gun fire, and engine noises. The music is pretty generic electronic music that fits with the action. The more important vehicles in the career mode actually have licensed music associated with them, with the idea that as you get closer, that car's theme song starts getting louder and louder. But the jarring switch from the regular racing music over to the licensed track and then back again if you fall behind, makes this better in concept than it is in practice.
In fact, that's the case for all of Full Auto 2: Battlelines. A high-speed racing game with action-packed weaponry and destructible environments is a solid, if somewhat uninspired, concept. But in practice, not a single aspect of the game comes out feeling right, and what's left is a generic racing shooter that fails to excite from end to end. Unless you're absolutely, positively desperate for something new on the PlayStation 3, you can most definitely stay away from Full Auto 2.

Fight Night Round 3 for PLaystation Game Review

Fight Night Round 3 features the same great gameplay the franchise is known for as well as a few minor, but appreciable, additions exclusive to the PlayStation 3.

The Good

• Same great control mechanics found in previous Fight Night games  
• lots of great boxing legends to test your skills against  
• amazing-looking player models  
• gruesome sound effects make you cringe when you hear a guy get smacked in the face  
• get-in-the-ring mode offers a different, enjoyable way to play.

The Bad

• Career mode lacks structure and feels like a series of loosely related matches rather than an ongoing fight to become a champion  
• Long load times.

Fight Night may be the only boxing game in the business, but the lack of competition certainly hasn't made the champ soft. The perfectly precise and intuitive Total Punch Control mechanic, cringe-inducing knockout blows, and in-depth boxer creation mode are all accounted for in the latest installment in this fighting series, Fight Night Round 3. New to the series this time around are impact punches, a reworked career mode, a customizable boxing-style feature, and an all-new first-person boxing mode exclusive to the PlayStation 3. Admittedly, most of the improvements and updates found in Round 3 are merely incremental updates over Round 2, but they're still enough to warrant stepping into the ring for another bout, just as long as you haven't already played the game on the Xbox 360.

Fight Night is back with a fistful of leather for your pretty little face.

Unsurprisingly, the best parts of Fight Night Round 3 are the parts that haven't changed. The Total Punch Control mechanic is back, and it works just as well as it has since the first Fight Night made boxing fun again back in 2004, which means that series veterans will be able to jump right in and start throwing combos with ease. If you're new to Fight Night, you might find that the controls take a bit of getting used to, but once you know them, you won't want to go back to plain old button mashing. You move your boxer with the left analog stick and throw punches with the right stick. You can throw jabs by tapping the stick forward to the right or left, depending on which fist you want to use. Hooks are thrown by moving the stick in a quarter-circle motion toward your opponent in either direction, and uppercuts are closer to a half-circle motion. You can put extra power behind a punch by pulling the stick back even farther and "winding up" for a powerful haymaker. One new aspect of the control that unique to the PlayStation 3 version of the game is the use of the Sixaxis motion control to throw illegal blows. By quickly moving the controller forward you can throw an elbow or head butt. Aside from that, the game makes no use of the motion sensors in the Sixaxis controller.
Featured for the first time in the Fight Night series are impact punches, which are variations on the haymaker. The haymaker is the basic "swing for the fences" power punch, which was introduced in last year's Fight Night Round 2. The flash KO punch is like an exaggerated haymaker, and it instantly drains your opponent's health and primes him for a quick knockdown. The stun punch is another version of the haymaker, and it initiates a sort of reverse first-person minigame where you see yourself through the eyes of your opponent as you pummel him with punches. It's difficult to pull off any of the impact punches, though, because the windup is slow and the punch is easily countered. But that's a good thing, because it helps keep the action somewhat balanced.

Throwing a lot of punches is a fine strategy and simply flailing about will often win you a match, but occasionally you'll have to defend yourself. You can block and parry punches using the R1 button. You can use the right analog stick to determine which part of your body you want to guard. For example, if your opponent shows a left hook to the head, you can throw up your right arm to parry the shot and then return fire with your own left while your opponent is off guard. When you parry or block successfully, you can quickly and easily make the transition from defense to offense and throw a barrage of counterpunches before your opponent knows what's happening. Indeed, successfully parrying and countering is an integral part of any fight. You can also lean by holding down the L1 button, which is a good way to hold your ground while avoiding punches. Clinches have returned, so when you've taken a beating and are about to go down, you can press a button to lean on your opponent and regain some energy.
Of course, there's more to boxing than simply throwing and absorbing punches. You also have to worry about maintenance. Maintaining your fighter's health is an important part of Round 3, and it's all handled through the same training and cut-man minigames from the previous Fight Night titles. Before a fight, you have the option to train your fighter in one of three regimens, depending on which stats you want to focus on. Before you train, you can hire a trainer, and each one has a specialty that will improve your results in a given parameter.
The minigames consist of the heavy bag, the weights, and the combo dummy from Fight Night Round 2. The minigames are extremely simple timing and pattern-recognition exercises, and you'll never have a problem reaching the required point goal to achieve the maximum benefit from the training. Once you're in the ring, though, your health concerns will be more immediate, as you start stopping hard leather with your face. Between rounds, you can play a minigame to reduce swelling and patch up cuts on your boxer's face. The routine has been simplified since the previous game, and instead of four focus areas, you only need to worry about the left side and right side of the face. A small icon appears at the bottom of the screen, and you have to move the right analog stick in time with the icon to heal your fighter. If you let him get too swollen, he won't be able to see to defend against incoming punches, and if he's bleeding profusely from unattended cuts, the ref will stop the fight.

You can assign different fighting styles to your boxer, and it's fun to experiment with different styles to see which one best fits your own strategy.

While the game still plays mostly the same way, you are given a bit more control over how you fight, thanks to the inclusion of some new fighting styles, which you can assign to your fighter. When creating a custom fighter, you are given the same options as in the previous games regarding your boxer's physical attributes, but now you can choose his fighting style by setting a base style, punch style, and block style. You can give your boxer a speed-based style to make him light on his feet, a slugger punch-based style to give him extra power behind his blows, and a cross blocking-based style to provide a bit more protection. There are plenty of combinations to choose from, and the different styles have a significant impact on your fighting strategy. You can change your fighting style between matches in career mode, and it can be fun to try out different combinations to see which work best.
Fight Night Round 3 features career, play now, ESPN Classic mode, online modes, as well as a new first-person Get in the Ring mode. Play now lets you choose your fighter, opponent, and venue for a quick match. In this mode, you can pit any of the boxing legends against another, regardless of weight class. If you want to see Evander Holyfield go up against Manny Pacquaio in front of thousands at Madison Square Garden, you can.

The ESPN Classic mode lets you relive some of the biggest bouts in recent boxing history. You can choose from classic rivalries such as Ali versus Frazier, Robinson versus Lamotta, and Gatti versus Ward. Before each fight, you're treated to an all-too-brief history of the fighters and their rivalry. These classic fights could be an interesting sort of interactive lesson about the history of boxing, but they're severely lacking in authenticity and detail. Despite the ESPN Classic brand that's stamped on the game, the classic fights feel half-baked. The classic theme is ruined by modern laser lights and Dodge advertisements plastered all over the place, and it doesn't help that a lot of the fights don't even take place in historically accurate venues. You can unlock special gear by winning these classic fights, but ultimately, ESPN Classic mode fails to offer anything different than the play now mode.

Career mode has been reworked entirely, but it all still comes down to bashing random guys' heads in over and over.

For the PlayStation 3 version of the game, there's an additional mode called "get in the ring." This mode plays just like the play now mode, except you view the action from a first-person perspective. Everything you see is how your boxer would theoretically see it, so when your opponent has been tap dancing on your face for three rounds, your vision will start to get blurry around the edges as your boxer's face swells up from the punishment. It's a great effect, and the first-person mode is a lot of fun. It plays just like a regular boxing match, so once you spend a few minutes getting accustomed to the new perspective, you should be able to bob and weave, throwing punches with ease. You can also choose to play any of the other game modes from a first-person perspective, which is a nice touch. The computer-controlled opponents in the get-in-the-ring matches seem to be a bit easier than in the normal quick matches, and as long as you have any experience with the game, you'll be able to take on just about anyone. You'll also notice that these matches rarely last more than a couple of rounds, and most opponents will be down for the count after a second trip to the canvas.
Career mode returns, but it has an entirely new look and structure this time around. You can choose to create your own boxer, or you can rebuild a legend like in previous Fight Night games. Again, you begin as an amateur, and you have to fight your way up to the professional ranks. Professional and amateur, however, are the only real "ranks" in career mode. In the past, as soon as you went pro, you'd get a ranking. You'd start as the 50th ranked boxer and steadily move toward number one as you won fights. Now, there is no rank; you simply fight one bout after another. As you win fights, your popularity increases. Once your popularity gauge is full, you qualify for a special contract fight, such as a sponsored fight or a title fight. In career mode, you can become the champion of your weight class, or you can switch weight classes and go for another title. While career mode in Round 3 lacks the rigid structure previously found in the Fight Night series, the basic principles are still intact. You still sign contracts one at a time, then train in one of the three minigames, and then fight. The difference is that there aren't any clearly defined goals or progress indicators, aside from your fighter's stat increases. As a result, career mode feels more like a series of loosely related exhibition matches, rather than an ongoing struggle to fight your way up the ranks and become a champion.
The fights start off extremely easy, and if you have any previous Fight Night experience, you'll be able to cruise through your first dozen or so fights without getting knocked down once. In fact, most of the early fights will be over before the third-round bell. You can increase the difficulty at any time, but the computer opponents still tend to behave the same. The most noticeable difference in higher-level fights is that your opponents are able to absorb a lot more blows, and they inflict more damage per punch. As far as boxing strategy goes, though, you'll see the same few combos thrown repeatedly throughout the game, and before long, you'll be able to recognize and anticipate all of your opponents' moves.
Round 3 introduces to career mode the concept of rivalries. As you make your way through your career, you'll face one or more rival boxers. You have one main rival in the game, and you'll have to face him several times throughout your career. There isn't much of a difference between these matches and any of the others, aside from the ridiculous cutscenes of the weigh-ins before the fights and that rival boxers tend to throw illegal blows while all normal opponents play by the book. Aside from that, and the novelty of beating the same guy's face in multiple times, the rivalries are entirely superfluous.
There's no substitute for the bitterness and bad blood you share with perfect strangers when you fight online. The PlayStation 3 version of Round 3 has online play, with a full complement of stat-tracking features, leaderboards, and match options. The online play is smooth and lag-free. It's also easy to set up and find matches. After each bout, you get kicked out to the main online menu, which can be frustrating if you were hoping to get a rematch without going through the entire setup process again. You can play both ranked and unranked matches online, as well as take your custom boxer online as long as he has been retired from career mode. The game also integrates ESPN content, so you'll constantly be updated on sports news and scores while online. The get-in-the-ring and ESPN classic modes are also available for online play.
On the Xbox 360, Round 3 looked amazingly lifelike, with some of the most realistic and detailed fighter models to appear in any game. The graphics hold up on the PlayStation 3, with equally lifelike and technically impressive models that are slightly more detailed than on the Xbox 360. Everything from the tape on a fighter's gloves to the look of sheer exhaustion on his face makes you feel like you're watching a real bout. The heads-up display has been removed, and while you do have the option to turn it on, you really won't need to. You can judge how your fighter is holding up by the expressions (or contusions) on his face. The default camera is pulled in close, and it always provides a great perspective on the action in the ring. The knockout replays are especially fun to watch, because the face on the receiving end of a punch contorts and deforms as shock waves ripple through flesh and cartilage. All of the venues and crowds look detailed on the PlayStation 3, but upon close examination, you'll notice that the backgrounds do still suffer from the cardboard cutout look. If you have a high-definition display, you'll see an amazing amount of clarity and detail, but even on a standard-definition display, the game looks great. That said, minor issues, such as feet clipping through the canvas or a fighter's trunks clipping through his legs, do detract from the overall presentation of the game, if only slightly. There are also some very lengthy and frequent load times in the game, and they're worse on the PlayStation 3 than in the other versions of the game. The loading times are so bad in fact that they just about break the create-a-fighter mode. It's extremely tedious to make a fighter because every time you change a feature such as hair style or skin color it takes several seconds to load each new element, and sometimes they don't load at all. It makes the entire create-a-fighter mode more trouble than it's worth.
The boxing legends included in the game look accurate, although greats such as Marciano, Liston, and Foreman are noticeably absent from the roster. The animations are still somewhat spasmodic when fighters are changing up their blocks, and the ridiculous, twitching rag dolls are still in full effect, but otherwise, the game looks and moves as good as it plays. There are half a dozen venues in the game, from the Staples Center and Madison Square Garden to a warehouse and a hole-in-the-wall boxing gym. The action has been slowed down a bit from previous games, which is noticeable at first, but it doesn't take long to get used to the pace. If anything, the slower gameplay serves to highlight the differences between fighting styles, as you'll see a significant change when switching from a slugger to a speed-style boxer. The dramatic replays return, so you can see each and every knockout punch in all of its crushing glory.
For as good as it looks, there are some tremendous eyesores in the form of excessive advertisements in all three versions of the game. You'll see Dodge and Burger King logos everywhere, as if it were stipulated in some contract that each frame of the game had to have at least one corporate logo. You can even unlock the Burger King mascot to serve as your trainer, which pretty much destroys any pretense of authenticity in this game. It's just as offensive in the PlayStation 3 version of the game as it was on the Xbox 360, given that both versions retail at a premium price point as opposed to the discounted price of their PlayStation 2 and Xbox counterparts.

The first-person perspective will give you a newfound appreciation of your skull.

The audio is well done in all three versions of the game. When you knock down an opponent with a slug to the mouth, you'll hear the sickening crunch of unseated teeth and snapping tendons, followed by the thick, wet sound of spit and blood flying from his mouth. The excessively gruesome effect really punctuates each knockdown, and it makes you want to avoid being on the receiving end of such a punch. The commentary is once again provided by Joe Tessitore, and while he's competent behind the mic, he isn't very exciting. He also tends to repeat himself often. It gets tiring to hear all about the "textbook boxing style" and "well-rounded skills" of your fighter half a dozen times in one fight. The music is composed entirely of hip-hop tunes, which sound good enough, but there are only a handful of songs, and they get repeated endlessly. As a result, you'll probably end up muting the music after a couple of hours of playing.
EA Sports' heavy-hitting franchise doesn't change up its approach for the third time through, but the gameplay remains as tight and enjoyable as it has always been. So while there are no surprises in store, you can expect a great game of boxing, with a fully capable single-player experience backing up a solid online multiplayer game. Most of the changes to the PlayStation 3 version of the game are hardly noticeable, but the new first-person perspective works surprisingly well and will hopefully be a standard option in all subsequent Fight Night releases. Although it doesn't drastically improve on what is already a great game, Fight Night Round 3 for the PlayStation 3 does enough to give it a slight edge, although not quite enough to make it worth another investment if you already own the Xbox 360 version.