TIPS CARA SUKSES MENGHADAPI UJIAN NASIONAL

 Sebenarnya gambar disamping bisa kita raih dengan cara yang mudah.
Tips cara menghadapi ujian nasional itu bagaimana ya? mungkin banyak diantara kalian yang sering penasaran mencari informasi mengenai kumpulan informasi atau tips atau pun bagaimana cara paling tepat dan ampuh dalam menghadapi ujian nasional ini. Takut, gelisah, grogi,stres, mungkin itu adalah beberapa deret keluhan yang seringkali dikeluhkan oleh para siswa ketika masa-masa ujian nasional sudah semakin dekat dan merasa bahwa dirinya sepertinya belum benar-benar siap untuk "bertempur" pada waktu hari H ujian nasional nanti.

Sekarang permasalahannya begini, jika cuma mikir tanpa action ya apa artinya? benar begitu bukan? memang, bagi sebagian siswa entah itu siswa SD, SMP ataupun SMU kerisauan dan kebimbangan seringkali muncul. Bisa jadi itu karena maaf ya, "kesalahan" mereka sendiri, namun tidak menutup kemungkinan ada juga para siswa siswi yang tidak mau ambil pusing dengan datangnya ujian nasional. "Kesalahan" disini penjelasannya bagaimana ya? oke, mungkin kurang lebih begini, "malas belajar sedikit demi sedikit secara kontinyu, jadi pas sudah numpuk dan harus menghadapi ujian jadi kelabakan sendiri". Memang hal seperti ini sudah biasa terjadi, malas belajar, itulah akar permasalahannya. Apa cuma faktor belajar saja yang paling penting? tidak juga, banyak faktor lainnya yang juga ikut andil dalam sukses tidaknya menghadapi ujian.

Model / tipe siswa memang sangat beragam. Ada yang rajin,ada yang setengah rajin setengah pemalas, ada yang pemalas bahkan ada yang tidak peduli sama sekali terhadap pendidikannya. Jadi memang penanganan terhadap siswa memang harus fleksibel, tidak boleh kaku. Terkait tips cara sukses menghadapi ujian nasional memang kunci kesuksesan terbesar tetap ada pada individu masing-masing. Sebuah tips tidak sepenuhnya mampu memberikan hasil yang memuaskan jika tips hanya dibaca tanpa dibarengi dengan action yang nyata dan segera.

Inilah beberapa tips cara sukses menghadapi ujian nasional :

1. Belajar

Sudah pasti kalau yang ini bukanlah rahasia umum lagi. Metode belajarnya perlu ditata dengan baik. Mungkin kalian pernah mendengar istilah rajin belajar pangkal pandai, iya sepertinya istilah ini sangat tepat sekali. Mulai sekarang ditingkatkan belajarnya. Kalau dulunya malas-malasan segera dirubah menjadi rajin belajar ya. 

2. Belajar cerdas

Belajar yang cerdas bisa jadi pilihan. Ada kerja keras, ada juga kerja cerdas. Dalam hal belajar pun sama saja, belajar keras atau belajar cerdas? akan sangat optimal apabila kerja keras dan kerja cerdas kita kombinasikan. 

3. Hafalan

Mungkin ada yang sangat kesulitan ketika harus berhadapan dengan urusan hafal menghafal. Iya, itu dapat dimaklumi, karena memang kelebihan dan kelemahan orang itu memang berbeda-beda. Tidak bisa disalahkan juga. Tetapi jika mau menerapkan triknya, sepertinya kesulitan dalam menghafal akan dapat diatasi. Bagaimana, apa ada yang ingin tahu caranya? inilah caranya, coba baca yang ini, cara cepat menghafal dengan mudah.

4.Bagaimana dengan bahasa inggris? 

Salah satu diantara momok menakutkan bagi para siswa mungkin saja yang ini nih, mata ujian bahasa inggris. Bahasa bule memang susah - susah gampang. Ada yang bilang mudah, ada yang bilang sulit. Tetapi tenang, siapa tahu tips ini bisa memberikan bantuan bagi kamu semua. Manfaatkan kecanggihan teknologi, seperti google translate atau cara-cara lainnya kan sangat banyak. Inilah tipsnya, cara mudah belajar bahasa inggris tanpa ikut kursus. Semoga membantu ya. Perbanyak penguasaan kata dan grammar jangan sampai dilupakan. Dijamin jika kalian getol dan serius mempelajari dan memperdalam kemampuan bahasa inggris kalian, dijamin "tidak akan rugi". Ingat, bahasa inggris merupakan bahasa dunia lho. Okay.

5. Kurangi porsi bermain

Terkadang hal ini juga sangat sulit dilakukan. Padahal waktu ujian sudah semakin dekat, eh aktifitas bermainnya bukannya dikurangi tapi malah ditambah. Wah, kalau yang model begini memang jangan sampai ditiru. Tidak sedikit orang tua yang sampai dibuat pusing karena hal ini. Padahal sudah merasa berulangkali memberikan peringatan kepada anak-anaknya untuk mengurangi bermaain dan banyak belajar karena ujian segera datang tetapi tidak pernah digubris oleh sang buah hati. Hal ini perlu kalian sadari dan perhatikan. Munculkan kesadaran dalam diri bahwa apalah arti bermain-main bila dibandingkan penyesalan jika nanti nilai hasil ujiannya jeblok bahkan maaf "tidak lulus". Toh sehabis ujian bermain-main masih bisa dilakukan, kapanpun masih tetap bisa bermain. Tetapi kalau ujian, hanya diselenggarakan 1 kali dan pada waktu yang sudah ditentukan. Sadari hal ini.

6. Ikut les

Biasanya banyak sekli para orang tua yang memiliki kesadaran diri yang tinggi dengan didukung kemmpuan finansial yang menunjang banyak yang memasukkan / mengikutsertakan buah hati mereka di lembaga-lembaga yang menyediakan fasilitas les ini. Bahkan ada juga yang les privat di rumah. Nah, dengan mengikuti les ini, akan ada trik dan tips tertentu yang sangat membantu para siswa dalam menghadapi ujian nantinya. Bagaimana, apakah kalian juga sudah ikut les?

7. Matematika

Momok menakutkan bagi kebanyakan siswa peserta ujian adalah mata pelajaran matematika. Kuasai rumus-rumus dan rajin berlatih mengerjakan soal adalah kuncinya. Karena, omong kosong belajar matematika tanpa dibarengi dengan latihan. Dengan seringnya berlatih mengerjakan soal, biasanya akan lebih mudah ingat kembali ketika waktu ujian muncul soal yang pernah dikerjakan pada waktu latihan. Tidak cuma matematika, mata pelajaran eksak yang lain juga sama saja, kuasai rumus dan diperbanyak porsi mengerjakan latihan soalnya.

8. Bagi yang sudah berpacaran, harap maklum jika putus sementara karena ujian, atau sekalian putus beneran saja ya?

Bukan rahasia lagi jika ABG jaman sekarang sudah menjalin hubungan pacaran. Nah, seringkali banyak yang konsentrasi belajarnya menjadi kacau karena efek pacaran ini. Bilangnya belajar di kamar, eh setelah di cek oleh ayah ibu ke kamar, lho kok malah sms an, BBM an, asyik ngobrol via handphone. Wah, apa tidak parah kalau hal ini terjadi? lupakan dulu urusan pacaran, fokuskan diri kamu untuk menghadapi ujian. Apa sekalian putus beneran saja ya biar nggak ngeganggu? hmm kalau itu,, ya terserah kamu sendiri. Intinya fokuskan ujian lupakan dulu aktivitas pacaran.

9. Fokus 

Usahakan untuk bisa fokus dlam menghadapi ujian. Jangan selengekan. Siapa yang serius dan bersungguh-sungguh, dia pasti akan menuai hasilnya. Ingat, "man jadda wa jada".

10. Belajar kelompok bersama teman-teman

Bisa juga jika memang hal ini cocok bagi kalian. Saling sharing satu dengan yang lainnya akan dapat memecahkan persoalan yang mungkin tidak bisa diselesaikan pada waktu belajar sendirian di rumah.

11. Jaga kondisi kesehatan badan

Persiapan dalam menghadapi ujian terkadang memaksa para siswa sering melek pada malam hari, jadi kurang tidur. Oleh karena itu, kalian harus pintar-pintar menjaga kondisi kesehatan dan kebugaran badan kalian. Bayangkan saja jika sudah mati-matian mempersiapkan diri menghadapi ujian, eh waktu hari H ujian tiba justru malah sakit dan masuk rumah sakit. Apa tidak rugi dua kali namanya? ingat, jaga kondisi badan kalian ya.

12. Percaya diri

Kalian harus percaya diri ketika mengerjakan soal-soal ujian. Jangan mudah goyah karena pengaruh kanan kiri. Bisa jadi kan ada teman yang usil waktu ujian. Intinya pede saja, yakinlah pada diri sendiri.

13. Tenang saja badai pasti berlalu

Kalian harus tenang. Karena tenang ketika menghadapi masalah lebih baik hasilnya dibandingkan dengan mereka yang kacau dan tergesa-gesa dalam menghadapi ujian. Buat kondisi mu senyaman mungkin.

14. Lebih baik tidur pada saat malam menjelang ujian

Setelah sejak jauh-jauh hari melakukan berbagai persiapan yang panjang dalam rangka menghadapi ujian, lebih disarankan untuk memilih tidur saja pada saat malam ujian. Karena dengan tidur yang cukup, akan lebih baik bila dibandingkan mereka yang mengerjakan ujian sambil nahan kantuk karena malamnya tidak tidur atau kurang tidur.

15. Minta ijin dan pamit kepada orang tua sebelum berangkat ujian, bapak dan ibu minta doanya.

Doa orang tua adalah salah satu kunci kesuksesan terbesar. Jadi, minta kepada bapak ibu klaian masing-masing agar ujian kalian dapat dilewati dengan mudah. Doa ibu sangatlah manjur. Ingat, surga ada di telapak kaki ibu. 

16. Tingkatkan ibadah dan  doa kepada Tuhan YME

Pernah mendengar istilah, "manusia hanya bisa berencana, tetapi Tuhanlah yang menentukan?" iya, kalian wajib memohon kepada Tuhan YME agar senantiasa diberikan kemudahan dan pertolonganNya agar ujian kalian dimudahkan dan diberikan hasil yang terbaik.

Nah, mungkin itulah pembahasan seputar tips cara sukses menghadapi ujian nasional tersebut.  Mungkin beberapa tips yang dapat kami berikan tersebut belumlah sesuai dengan keinginan kalian.  Mungkin saja ada yang terlewatkan atau ada yang kurang, kalian bisa dan boleh berkomentar untuk menambahkan tips dalam menghadapi ujian kali ini. Oh iya, coba baca juga yang ini, cara agar cepat tinggi. Semoga bermanfaat dan semoga sukses untuk ujiannya! ^_^

Sumber : http://smilewithismail.blogspot.com/

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Trailer Transformes 4 : Age of Extinction

Los Angeles, Amerika Serikat Lama ditunggu, proyek 'Transformers 4' yang diberi judul Transformers: Age of Extinction akhirnya merilis trailer perdananya. Berbeda dengan teasernya yang hanya 30 detik, trailer kali ini berdurasi sekitar dua setengah menit.
Setelah diperlihatkan beberapa robot dinosaurus raksasa sebelumnya, akhirnya terungkap bagaimana para Autobot ternyata berseteru dengan robot dinosaurus yang dijuluki Dinobot itu. Namun masih belum jelas apakah mereka benar-benar menjadi lawan atau akhirnya menjadi kawan.

Berbeda dengan tiga film sebelumnya, kali ini ancaman juga datang dari pihak manusia yang terlihat mengincar beberapa Autobot di bawah pimpinan seorang pengusaha. Bahkan, terdapat juga pesawat raksasa yang diduga menjadi ancaman utama dalam film keempat ini. Tak hanya dari segi cerita, akting para pemain manusianya pun terlihat lebih hidup ketimbang dalam judul-judul sebelumnya.

Akting Mark Wahlberg di dalam trailer terlihat sangat menonjol dan lebih baik ketimbang Shia LaBeouf. Robot yang ada di film ini juga terlihat lebih seram dan ganas. Awal trailer dibuka dengan dibelinya mobil truk butut baru oleh karakter milik Mark Wahlberg yang ternyata adalah Optimus Prime, sang pemimpin Autobot. Tak lama kemudian, datanglah serombongan manusia ke rumahnya yang mengancam kehidupan keluarganya hingga akhirnya muncul pasukan alien yang membahayakan jiwa manusia.

Sutradara Michael Bay berjanji menampilkan Transformers: Age of Extinction dengan format lebih sinematik, dan akan banyak adegan pertarungan di luar pinggiran kota. Mark Wahlberg bermain sebagai Cade Yeager, seorang penemu yang berhasil menggali Transformers asing hingga mengundang kehadiran para Autobot.

Transformers: Age of Extinction menggandeng bintang-bintang lainnya seperti Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor, Kelsey Grammer, Stanley Tucci, Sophia Myles, hingga Li Bingbing. Film ini akan tayang pada 27 Juni 2014 mendatang. Jadi kita harus sabar menunggu. Ini dia beberapa gambar-gambar tentang autobots.

      Ini dia yang ditunggu-tunggu Transformer 4: Video Trailer dan poster Age of Extinction, film yang disutradarai Michael Bay, kini sedang dalam proses pengambilan gambar di Detroit, Amerika. Dikabarkan bakal ada lebih banyak adegan seru di dalam film action tersebut. Namun bagi penggemar Shia LaBeouf, yang menjadi jagoan di film-film Transformer sebelumnya, ia tak akan hadir di seri 4 film laga tersebut.

Pemeran utama pria dalam Transformer 4 akan diisi oleh Mark Wahlberg, sedang pemeran wanita adalah Nicola Peltz. Pemeran lainnya diisi oleh Jack Reynor, Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammer, Sophia Myles, Li Bingbing, T.J. Miller, Han Geng, serta Titus Welliver.

Untuk yang belum mengetahui sinopsis dari Transformer 4, berikut ini sedikit kisahnya seperti dibocorkan oleh Michael Bay : Usai pertarungan robot-robot Transformer di “Dark of The Moon”, maka musuh-musuh seperti Autobots dan Decepticons kabur dari planet Bumi. Namun penguasa dan ilmuwan di Bumi berusaha untuk belajar dari pertempuran antara manusia dan robot itu. Mereka, para ilmuwan itu,  ingin mengembangkan teknologi baru yang mampu mengontrol para robot transformer maupun musuh-musuhnya.

Tak disadari, ternyata musuh baru yaitu Transformer kuno (dinobots) datang dari masa lalu dan menuju ke jaman dimana para ilmuwan itu berada saat ini. Mereka memiliki kekuatan yang besar dan ingin menguasai Bumi pula. Seperti biasa, akhirnya para robot Transformer rombongan Optimus Prime akan hadir sebagai penyelamat umat manusia dari kehancuran serta perbudakan. Seru.

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XCOM: Enemy Within review

Playing with genetics always involves tubes of neon liquid.

Rest in peace, Major Evan “Mad Dog” Lahti. You single-handedly killed a Muton with a scatter laser, saving the life of rookie sniper Wesley Snipes. It’s too bad there were two Mutons, but seriously, you died a hero, and we all know that last 82 percent chance shot should have hit—that’s just total BS. And hey, you also completed a secondary objective that was really important, so we appreciate that. Sorry you’re dead.

That’s just how XCOM goes. It’s about making hard decisions as you command earth’s front line defense against an alien invasion, primarily by nurturing squads of soldiers which you control in a series of turn-based assaults on the extraterrestrials. Unless you’re using save reloading as a crutch, your soldiers’ lives are in your hands. If they die, they’re dead forever. Not only do I attach emotional value to these customized troops—usually named after my friends or actors with appropriate names—I’m invested in their skills and how they fit into a well-balanced squad. Losing a great soldier can be devastating, and sometimes you have to lose one to save another, or bad luck smacks one down with a surprise critical hit.

Sq. Lahti was killed. Not to be confused with Major Lahti. He dies later.

Improving by adding

I love XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I love the base-building metagame, I love the tactical combat, and I love the permadeath. The Enemy Within expansion adds good stuff to all of that. My biggest criticism, however—and the reason it took me forever to play the original Enemy Unknown campaign to completion—is that the number of surprises drops off steeply after the first ten or so missions. Once all the aliens are introduced, the most common kill-all-aliens missions become route exercises.

I’ve solved those missions like this: Spotting a group of aliens by advancing a soldier into line of sight contact is dangerous, because it “activates” that threat and gives the aliens a free movement turn. But the aliens won’t advance until activated, so I keep my soldiers in tight formation and use my sniper’s Battle Scanner, which can be tossed like a grenade and provides two turns of remote sight, to activate alien mobs from a distance. Then I just patiently wait for the enemy to come to me, using the Overwatch ability to take shots whenever they try to move up. It works nearly every time, but feels exploitative of the mechanics.

I try to make sure all my soldiers remain in line-of-sight of each other.

Enemy Within tries to solve this problem by adding a secondary objective to each basic mission type—find and collect a new resource used in genetics and cybernetics labs, Meld, before the containers self-destruct—but it’s just a patch. It’s still a problem that moving my squad forward puts me at a disadvantage. For instance, in one mission, I immediately sent my sniper to a rooftop. She got line-of-sight of nearly the whole map, which activated three enemy formations simultaneously. When I reloaded the mission and moved more slowly—not using my sniper as a sniper should be used—I activated the mobs individually and the mission was much easier.

So that's not well-addressed, and Enemy Within only trivially addresses my other criticisms of Enemy Unknown: the action camera is still wonky, I’m still not fond of the base interface, and I want better visual soldier customization. And yet, Enemy Within is a fantastic expansion. Instead of solving Enemy Unknown’s problems, it adds so much good stuff that it buries them. There are great new objective-based missions, new maps, new enemies, and a crazy amount of new ways to customize and become attached to soldiers, all of which make the game better.

Human on human violence

The most significant improvement is Exalt, a human terror organization which is countered with covert operations and extraction missions. Funnily, XCOM’s tactical combat is much better against human enemies than aliens, and objective-based missions are immeasurably better than the more common search and destroy missions.

A few days after sending a soldier to infiltrate an Exalt cell, you’re prompted to embark on an extraction mission. The squad you send will be joined by the operative, who can only carry a pistol, and is required to complete the mission objectives. In one type of mission, for instance, the operative begins at the opposite side of the map from your squad and must hack into Exalt Comm Relays on the way to the extraction zone. Meanwhile, Exalt sends constant waves of reinforcements to harass you.

Five enemies in sight—Exalt comes in force.

These missions generate the best of XCOM’s terrifying decisions. I have have to protect my agent at all costs, meaning that sending a soldier out as bait to draw fire is a reasonable maneuver. But in the interest of keeping my best crew alive, I want to keep them close to the extraction zone so I can get them all out after the agent makes it across the map. The alternative is sticking around to clean up all remaining Exalt forces, but the bastards are tough. They act more like I do, sticking to cover, sniping, using Overwatch, popping smoke, and healing themselves. They are much more surprising than Sectoids, Floaters, and the other extraterrestrial kin, and much scarier to confront—when one Heavy drops in with a rocket launcher, I have to completely reconsider my plan.

On the other hand, I appreciate the new alien types for the variety, but they’re as predictable as the original roster. Seekers, for instance, are flying tentacled creatures with invisibility cloaks which can latch onto soldiers and strangle them. They come in groups of two and cloak as soon as they’re spotted. Dealing with them is simple: keep your troops close and put them on Overwatch. When the Seekers reappear, everyone gets a shot. If one of the air squids manages to get a soldier in its tentacle death grip, one shot should do it in, and the affected soldier is disabled for a turn. Not too bad.

Seekers look a bit like children birthed by The Matrix's Sentinels

I like the alien design, but the fun of making decisions on the fly is lost when they follow flowchart tactics that are best countered with my own flowchart tactics. I’m especially curious as to why they almost always appear in the same groups—three Sectoids, three Floaters, three Thin Men, and so on. Why not a Thin Man riding a Floater?

That’s why I prefer fighting human enemies, though that’s not to say the standard anti-alien abduction missions are easy. XCOM remains brutally hard on Classic and Impossible difficulties—though if you don't lose any high-ranking soldiers and are smart about your research and engineering progression (I'm not...I just want everything), they can become extraordinarily powerful in the end game. Too powerful, even. Still, a streak of bad luck or a few bad decisions can cause serious consequences.

Body modifications

Many of XCOM’s toughest decisions don’t even happen in the battlefield, but in the metagame played at XCOM HQ between missions. Prioritizing and managing resources can be exhausting—with Enemy Within’s additions, there’s so much to take care of it feels like I’m the CEO of a multinational company staffed by three temps and a cat.

Here are some of the vital things I need to do: maintain a worldwide fleet of interceptors to shoot down UFOs, build a global satellite array, research technology, build new weapons, armor, and facilities, upgrade existing technology, balance my finances, seek out Exalt cells and use clues to try to guess at the location of its HQ (guess correctly, and I can take down the whole operation), keep tabs on injured soldiers and recruit new troops, and award commendation medals which come with new stat bonuses.

Could you go ahead and research up an administrative assistant?

Having that much to manage with limited resources forces decisions I often regret. Because I desperately wanted to play with Enemy Within’s new genetics and cybernetics labs, I forgot to recruit new soldiers when I was running low on healthy veterans. That led to me running a vital mission with only three soldiers, two of them rookies. One made it out alive. Oops.

The botched mission was totally worth it, though, because we brought home lots of fresh Meld with the bodies, and the genetics and cybernetics modifications which use the resource are great. If you thought you were attached to your soldiers in Enemy Unknown, wait until you mutilate their bodies in the name of saving humanity, but at the cost of their own humanity, and then send them into combat where they might die in five turns anyway. My gene-modded sniper, Lt. Lewis, is the most prized member of my army, capable of jumping to rooftops in a single leap and using superhuman depth perception to gain an aiming bonus from high ground.

New gene mods are unlocked by performing alien autopsies.

On other side of the ethical gray area, the cybernetics lab fuses flesh and machine, permanently throwing soldiers into giant MEC suits to become mechanical bipeds. Major Cory Banks volunteered to have his limbs amputated and replaced with metal, and is now a flamethrowing, jet-boosting human tank. He just can’t, you know, relate to other humans or feel the warmth of their touch ever again, but he knew what he was getting into.

Given her advantages, I naturally send Lt. Lewis to high ground. Maj. Banks and his MEC suit are my tank—I use him to draw fire and panic enemies with his flamethrower, which sends them out of cover so that Lt. Lewis can pick them off from the rooftops. I once sent just the two of them on a mission to challenge myself, and that kind of harrowing self-imposed drama helps XCOM’s basic missions stay fun into the last stretch of a playthrough. The aliens rarely force me to go outside my small stable of cautious maneuvers, but Enemy Within does more to encourage my creativity. I try new tactics because I want to tell a story with my soldiers’ strengths.

You have MEC Troopers, they have Mechtoids.

My biggest issue with all these additions is how complex my mental database has to become to cope with the amount of statistical information. I don’t count that against the game, but the mental tug-of-war it causes is worth noting. On one side, I just want to make a decision and get on with it, because there’s always the chance a lucky alien plasma round will just blow a hole in Major Lahti’s chest anyway. On the other side, I know that if I take it slow and consider each of my soldiers’ bonuses before making a decision, I might save a life. The latter is always more rewarding.

XCOM is a game of resource management and tactics more than a game of chance. I can pretend it’s the dice roll that decides who lives and who dies, but it’s my decisions. Because I decided to spend money on laser rifles instead of body armor, I had to send an under-equipped soldier on a difficult mission, and I pulled him out of cover to collect Meld for my laboratories. And now he’s dead. In that respect, it’s more vitally a game about sacrifice, ethics, and responsibility.

Enemy Within muddies up those ethical waters with even more excruciating decisions, requires more complex tactics, and promotes an even deeper connection to the soldiers I dearly want to protect. It doesn't significantly address Enemy Unknown’s shortcomings, but adds more great, challenging experiences to an already great game.

By : http://www.pcgamer.com

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Call of Duty: Ghosts PC review

Call of Duty: Ghosts will be damned if you peek away from your screen. Boredom is absolutely not allowed as the campaign pelts you with action vignettes—including a scene directly snagged from the opening of The Dark Knight Rises—and repeats its mantra ad nauseam: “Keep moving!”

I’m in space, I’m underwater, I’m piloting a dog, I’m piloting an Apache, I’m driving a tank that handles like a Lamborghini—all without ever really learning a new skill. The Apache, for instance, is magically repulsed from the ground—it’s like piloting an air hockey disc—so finesse is unnecessary. On-screen cues tell you what you need to know as you’re plunged into an airstrike: fire flares when an enemy locks on, left mouse button to fire your cannon, hold down the center mouse button to lock on with missiles. Then go to town.

It’s fun in that it’s something exciting to see and do: a theme park ride where I’m given an airsoft rifle to pelt the animatronics with. And it’s a brilliant ride. There are pyrotechnics, car chases, submarines, and drone strikes. Once scene has me rappelling down a skyscraper and shooting guards through the windows—and then the skyscraper collapses while I’m in it. It’s every action scene Hollywood has imagined for the past 20 years packed into five to six hours of super-stylish interactive montages, and wrapped up in a goofy, inoffensive story about brothers trying to live up to their dad’s super-soldier status.

Call of daddy

It’s fun, but it’s not engaging—Ghosts’ campaign is even more passive than Telltale’s recent point-and-clickers. In The Wolf Among Us, I have choices. In Ghosts, I do the Right Thing or fail. Frustratingly, even the decision to follow the constantly barked “keep moving” order can get me killed. That repeated flavor dialog should be ignored: save heroics for the scripted moments, stay crouched, and pop up sporadically to shoot at the bad guys.

Blowing up boats while remotely piloting a drone is fun and not at all challenging.

In rare instances, I was able to part from my squad, flank the enemy, and wipe them out with the advantage, but that kind of tactical planning was a sparsely present treat. It appeared once more in a jungle mission which put columns of guards between me and my squad, arming me only with a silenced pistol and sensor to detect nearby enemies. That was the only time I was given a goal and left to achieve it without explicit instructions for every action.

That was also the only time I got a magic bad guy sensor, and that’s another of the campaign’s failings: it fires off interesting ideas and then instantly forgets about them. Near the beginning, I’m introduced to my canine companion, Riley, and I can mark targets for him to quietly de-jugular. I did that once, when ordered to, and never again. Later, I get to use a remote-controlled sniper rifle to clear out a stadium. It’s a great gadget that I’d have liked to plop down on my own a few times, but it never shows up again. Both weapons are like toys that I get to demo in the store, but never get to take home.

Sgt. Shark is awfully testy today.

But we get bored of toys after we take them home, whereas if we stay in the toy store, poking at everything that requires batteries, nothing needs to do more than light up and make noise to keep us entertained. And you won’t ever be bored, because Ghosts’ novelties are brilliant and bright, full of life and then whisked away before they can be broken open and revealed to be little electronic tricks.

If you buy Ghosts just for the multiplayer, I will say that you should at least play the campaign long enough to get to the first obligatory space scene. It’s fantastic. It’s Gravity with guns. I wish the whole thing had been in space.

Call of shooty

The multiplayer is more Call of Duty® Multiplayer. It’s about flanking, out flanking, and milliseconds of animation that determine who lives and who dies. The maps are circular arenas dressed in gray military garb, pulling assets from the dullest bits of the campaign’s setting. Instead of a space station and tropical shipwreck, the maps are Busted Up Train Yard and Overcast Snowy Place.

In most modes, death nearly always comes from behind or upon rounding a corner and shooting too slowly to avoid a knife to the gut. There’s no front line, so every kill is likely to instaspawn your foe somewhere behind you, making matches a dizzying circular chase sequence.

Getting knifed from around a corner is something I excel at.

Guns are plentiful and nuanced, though every vital stat, from how long it takes to raise the iron sights to recoil and spread, is experienced in milliseconds of surprise action. Everyone swirls around the map like disoriented flies, and I either catch glimpses of their feet under collapsed steel girders, or run face first into them as our beelines intersect, reacting with spasms more often than cool tactical awareness. At pub levels, Ghosts’ multiplayer is whack-a-mole to Counter-Strike’s chess game.

An exception is Search and Rescue, which gives teams bomb and defend objectives, and players one life per round unless a team member collects their dog tag to revive them. That encourages teammates to stick together, generating group engagements at range that I heavily prefer over darting around like an armed insect.

I also enjoy, as I have in past CoDs, the Ground War mode. With bigger maps and 12-14 players, there’s more room to breathe and more teammates to rely on during firefights. It’s in that mode that I discovered that going prone is practically an invisibility cloak. I was able to camp out by a capture point picking off enemy after enemy for nearly an entire round, often after they ran right over me. It was fun target practice for me, but probably a frustration for the other team, which eventually had to run around the perimeter until it found a back to knife.

Call me maybe

Even in the modes I enjoy, I don’t want to stay for long. The “one more round” syndrome just isn’t present for me in Ghosts. In previous CoDs, the drive to unlock and try out a new weapon might have kept me going, but that’s been replaced with Squad Points. Accrued through good play, the points can be spent to unlock any weapon at any time if you save them up. I appreciate that this is more respectful of players’ time, as well as returning CoD fans’ desire to get right to the gun they’re happy with, but it nullifies any sense of accomplishment the progression system once had.

Defending a point is easy when lying down makes you invisible.

But it isn’t just the progression system, or the complex-to-the-point-of-silliness soldier customization, or the boring killstreak rewards that make me tire so quickly of Ghosts multiplayer. It’s that, like the campaign, it’s about constant forward momentum, but unlike the campaign, it never changes. The matches go by too fast to ever develop a rhythm or personality. From one map to the next, it’s run, run, run. There are no nail-biters, no heroics, and no rivalries. There are no brilliant shots that I want to run to show YouTube, unless it’s an accidental trick grenade throw. There are no moments when I pull back from my display, rub my forehead, and say, “I can’t believe I did that.” Moments like that happen all the time for me in Unreal Tournament 2K4, Tribes: Ascend, Battlefield 4, Rising Storm, and earlier Call of Duty games.

Ghosts multiplayer is a game of snap decisions, mechanics, and mistakes—"should have gone prone instead of firing, shouldn’t have reloaded after that last kill, should have turned around instead of sprinting"—and it is freakishly nuanced and can absolutely be mastered. I respect those with the drive to master it, but it’s too bleak and severe for my tastes, and feels like preparing for ritual combat more than enjoying a game.

Actually, delete my number

The cooperative Extinction mode is much better: four players versus waves of aliens, with money earned for each kill, and weapons and defenses to buy. It’s a healthy application of a formula we’re used to, but it doesn’t do anything I wouldn’t rather do in Left 4 Dead or Killing Floor, and it feels like a side note compared to the effort put into the campaign and competitive multiplayer. When I started, the keys used to buy my character’s special items—ammo crates, turrets, and so on—weren’t even bound. My options were indicated with a four-way cross which looks like it’s meant for a D-pad, and when I did bind the keys, the menu called them “killstreak rewards.”

The aliens eat sunsets. Give us your sunsets!

That doesn’t damn Ghosts as an icky console port, because my experience was otherwise well-optimized for medium to high-end PCs. I ran it fine on a mid-range build, and on a silly-powerful machine (Core i7-4950X, 16GB RAM, and two GTX Titans) the campaign ran at a silky and gorgeous 100-plus frames-per-second, with water and lighting effects that made me stop to gawk a few times (when I was allowed to). The only technical problem I encountered was sudden framerate dips in the menus, which are a just a nuisance—the same never happened to me while playing.

The netcode in multiplayer is as robust as usual, but not better than previous CoD games. There were still a few times where I swear a hit registered on me before I saw my opponent’s character model round a corner. These details have become a part of serious CoD play—some complain, but others master the nuances to gain an advantage. I’m not in either camp: I’m only bothered when synchronization issues cause frustration or feel unfair, and so far they’ve been too slight and sporadic to bother me.

In multiplayer, you have about 30 frames in which to shoot first.

What does bother me is how tired and cold Ghosts feels. I didn’t touch on the campaign’s story much, but its attempts to tug heart strings are cringe-ably cheesy, and the multiplayer seems bored of itself, changing systems just so they’ll be different from Modern Warfare.

I don’t doubt that every gun, perk, and killstreak reward in Ghosts was implemented and tweaked with a fine brush, but painting in every individual eyelash of the Mona Lisa wouldn’t make it a better painting. That’s what’s been happening to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare since 2007—little bits have been scraped off and painted over again and again. With a broader brush, Activision and its studios might stop noodling around in the corners of Modern Warfare’s greatness and paint something actually modern.

By : http://www.pcgamer.com

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Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag review

Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag doesn’t really want to be an Assassin’s Creed game, and I don’t blame it. It seems keen to shrug off the oblique, convoluted lore surrounding the eon-long Assassins vs Templar power struggle, which managed to reach new peaks of ludicrousness even after that bit in the second game when you punch the Pope into unconsciousness in order to access an alien hologram. Black Flag stuffs all that into a box labelled ‘whoops’, throws it down a deep, dark hole and sends you on third-person free-running murder missions on the high seas instead. By Blackbeard’s bushy eyebrows, that is a welcome move.

You are Edward Kenway, a rogue who loves money enough to leave his girlfriend in port and sail to the West Indies in search of a vast fortune. In the opening scenes he steals an Assassin’s hooded garb and wristblades and accidentally falls in with a crowd of Templars, a team of comedy evil caricatures led by a bearded grand master and backed up by a plate armoured man-ogre who throws axes at people. They’re searching for the Observatory, an ancient device that enables its user to see the location of anyone in the world at any time. The Templars want it because it’ll make coups easier, the Assassins want it to stop the Templars, and Kenway wants it because it’s probably the most valuable thing on the planet.

If that sounds a bit removed from piracy and plunder, don’t worry. After the two-hour hand-holding tutorial section – mercifully shorter than in previous Assassin’s Creed games – the Observatory is relegated to distant long-term objective status, and the story refocuses on the building of the pirate paradise of Nassau: a lawless little utopia maintained by a collection of criminals seeking respite from the attention of the law.

That means Kenway isn’t exactly an Assassin. He has all the free-running, jumping and killing skills of the sect – a genetic bonus, it’s implied – but his relationship with the series’ morally ambiguous order of murder monks is fractious. That keeps the plot’s severest absurdities at arm’s length and lets you just be a pirate and do pirate things. Hang out with famous brigands like James Kidd. Watch affable rogue Edward Teach become an unhinged, scenery-chewing Blackbeard. Sail across the ocean, rob ships, fight the British, take sea forts for yourself, harpoon whales, explore large coastal cities such as Havana and raid ancient Aztec ruins for treasure. All this in a beautiful tropical open world that’s at its glowing, hyper-detailed best on PC.

On land, much is familiar. Hubs such as Havana and Nassau are large, but there are no urban spaces to match the size and spectacle of Rome or Constantinople. A shame, certainly, but there’s still a huge amount to explore in scattered settlements across Black Flag’s massive archipelago. You’ll sail between stilted pier towns tucked away in rocky alcoves, tropical islands sprinkled with treasure chests and larger townships like the manicured, orderly haven of Kingston. As always, you have to climb to high perches to scout sections of town, revealing chests, stores and sidequests in the area, the latter including a welcome increase in open-world assassination missions and warehouse raids. These place targets in open areas patrolled by British or Spanish forces and invite you to solve the problem creatively.

Such missions feel closer to the original vision for Assassin’s Creed than the scripted story segments which, while much improved over Assassin’s Creed III’s restrictive and buggy offerings, are still rather over-reliant on lengthy follow tasks. To raid a warehouse, you must first scan the area for the key holder, pickpocket it off him (or rob his corpse) and then make your way to the door without being shot dead by elevated musket snipers and roaming guards. Stealth has been tightened up to make this more interesting. Pervasive jungle foliage offers constant cover and targets can be marked using Kenway’s magic ‘Eagle Vision’ mode, which lets you track guards through walls – a serious advantage, yes, but you no longer have access to the silent, ranged instant-kill throwing knives that made similar challenges trivial in previous games. Instead you have the blowpipe, which can temporarily knock enemies out, or send them into a berserk rage.

The snipers are a pain, perched on high guard towers that overlook most restricted areas. They have long-range muskets that can drop you to half-health in a single shot. The blowpipe is an obvious counter, though the short duration of its sleeping effect inspired several comical races to kick its victims back into unconsciousness before they awoke. You can also hug a nearby enemy to use them as meat shield moments before a sniper pulls the trigger – another trick carried over from Assassin’s Creed III.

With the addition of explosive barrels that can attract multiple enemies, and outhouses as hiding places, there’s some room to get creative with your approach to these open challenges. I particularly enjoyed turning guards against one another. I used guns dropped by friendly-fire victims to pick off the snipers that killed them, shoved brutes into their own tossed grenades and then scooped up their abandoned axes to butcher crowds of lesser enemies. Your foes aren’t smart, but they’re fun to massacre.

You’ll want to take advantage of the environment in this way a little more than in other Assassin’s Creeds, as Kenway’s kit has been slimmed down from previous instalments. You can pick dropped weapons from the ground and wield them expertly, but you can’t carry knives or broadswords around, sadly, which put an end to my favoured assassination technique of lobbing claymores at enemies across rooftops. Instead, Edward’s hidden blades, a pair of sabres and a brace of pistols are his go-to close combat problem solvers. Your one shot mini-muskets can be fired rapidly mid-combo to loudly thin out surrounding enemies, the rest are easily put down with brutal instant-death counter moves. More skilled enemies and brutes – easy to spot thanks to their size and their tendency to casually roll grenades into a fight – must first be distracted with a block-breaking move before being infinitely stabbed. Very large numbers present a challenge, but combat is mostly there to make you feel deadly. I’d like to see more tough fights with more precise strikes, and to get rid of the pointless disarm move, but fighting remains an effective and violent power trip.

There’s plenty to do on Black Flag’s many islands, but you’ll spend half your time on the waves, on your ship, the Jackdaw. The archipelago map operates in a similar way to the smaller city ones, in that you’re unable to see all of the available activities in an area until you’ve conquered a region’s fort. Once that’s done you’ll be able to identify whaling spots, British and Spanish convoys and sunken shipwrecks. You can use a diving bell to travel underwater to investigate these watery remains, dodging sharks to reach the treasure within.

Sailing is lifted almost wholesale from Assassin’s Creed III, with some additional concessions to accessibility. By which I mean your boat handles like a bus. Wind direction has little meaning. You can stop without dropping anchor and can magically taxi sideways into ports when docking. I say this to pop any assumptions you might have about Black Flag as an authentic sailing sim, not to suggest that it isn’t good fun. Furthering the boat-bus analogy, you shift up and down through four gear settings to determine your speed. At slower speeds your ship can take tighter turns, at its highest the camera pulls out to offer a majestic view of your vessel carving through the waves. Most of the UI fades so you can see more of the ocean, and your crew start singing echoing sea shanties. You’ll see no bloody gums or men overboard here. This is a romantic vision of piracy in the early 18th century, and no less absorbing for it.

In Assassin’s Creed III, sailing was an experimental section, quite separate from the rest of the game. Black Flag meshes naval exploration with Assassin’s Creed’s traditional free-running and combat systems to excellent effect, particularly when hijacking ships and taking forts.

To take a ship you have to first reduce it to a flaming wreck using your cannon, mortar, fire-barrels and various forms of shot. Your weapons are selected contextually based on the direction you’re aiming. Point the camera out of the sides of your ship, and you’ll deal damage with your broadside cannon using narrowing trajectory indicators that let you arc shots over the waves. Aim past the bow and you’ll fire chain shot that tears up the enemy’s sails and slows their movement. Aim rearward and you’ll find yourself throwing fire-barrels overboard, which serve as floating mines.

If you pulverise a vessel without sinking it, you can draw alongside and board by ordering your men to use grapple lines to pull both ships into a single battleground. Then you’re free to charge the enemy deck by leaping between their interlocking masts, or with an audacious Errol Flynn rope swing.

It’s an impressive technical feat, and one of the most exciting things I’ve done in a game this year. Considering the feature bloat of their recent games, it’s a relief to see Ubisoft successfully bringing formerly disparate systems into coherent events like this. From Far Cry 3’s plant collection and animal skinning to the pointless homestead-improving minigames of Assassin’s Creed III, successive sequels have shipped with additional irrelevant systems while the existing ones have gone unrefined. In Black Flag such systems, like the economics model that lets you improve the Jackdaw, are far more worthwhile.

In the latter, you improve your weapons and armour using the materials and money you earn pirating. That lets you take on larger ships, which present different challenges at the naval and close combat level. Bigger ships come with advanced weaponry, and carry captains, crow’s nest snipers and other tough enemies on board. As you commit more acts of piracy, your wanted level increases and you’ll be pursued by hunter ships, notable for their ominous red sails. At the highest level, you can take on huge ‘legendary ships’ hidden around the map. It’s a good economics system, designed to gate a series of escalating challenges, not to provide unnecessary padding.

Black Flag will try to waste your time a little bit, however. The ship upgrade system is good, but the sidequest that lets you send captured boats on missions around the world for monetary rewards is rubbish, supported by a painfully weak turn-based ship combat minigame. The near-future sections make an unwelcome return, and are more pointless than ever. The gormless Desmond Miles is gone. Now, in first-person, you wander around the smug offices of evil corporation Abstergo, as an employee charged with digging through Desmond’s genetic memories for fun pirate moments to go in their latest entertainment product, an entertainment product, it’s implied, that you are playing right now. It isn’t half as clever as it thinks it is, but these bits only take up about five minutes every few hours of main-mission progression. Far Cry 3’s crafting system has also been air-dropped in, which means you’re obliged to hunt animals in order to skin them and use their bones to upgrade your gear, or add extra pistols to your body-holster.

That busywork is easily sidestepped in favour of the dozens of available alternative tasks. Much the same can be said of multiplayer, which returns in familiar form. As in previous editions, you can take part in up-to-eight player sessions that cast players in predator and prey roles. In predator mode you have to hunt players as they attempt to disguise themselves and hide in small city-block arenas, scoring extra points for exotic kills. As prey, you take up a hidden position and hope for the best. It’s still an interesting idea for a multiplayer mode, but there aren’t enough ways to bluff and counter-bluff opponents to keep it interesting for more than an hour or so, and more traditional modes such as control-point capture are too chaotic to sustain competition. There’s a cooperative ‘Wolfpack’ mode as well, in which up to four players charge around killing labelled foes to add seconds to a rapidly expiring timer. The rush to murder enemies before your allies removes any coordination or finesse you might want to bring to each objective, which means you’re not assassins, you’re just a stabby mob. Multiplayer is a novel diversion for a few hours, but there’s plenty more entertaining action to be getting on with in the singleplayer portion.

Whatever Assassin’s Creed was trying to be in 2007, it’s now buried under generations of feature creep, but that’s no bad thing. Black Flag is best regarded as a collage of the games and technologies Ubisoft have cultivated over the past decade. There are strong notes of Prince of Persia in the platforming challenges of the archipelago’s Aztec ruins. You can put on hunters’ rags and travel the world in search of rare prey. The sailing is a great element unto itself. Some of these aspects have been bettered in other games, but by brute force, Black Flag’s varied components merge beautifully to create rich and constantly interesting world.

When the tutorial section is done, the game sets you free on the ocean and places a distant objective marker on the western edge of the map. It took me four hours to reach that marker. I was drawn into a dynamic naval battle between British and Spanish forces. I navigated a storm and looted trade ships wrecked by its water twisters. I harpooned a bull shark. I docked in a curious little cove and got into a fistfight in a bar. Forget the Assassins, the Templars and their nonsense war. Loot, pillage and steal instead. The rewards are so much greater.

Details

• Expect to pay: £40 / $60
• Release: Out now
• Publisher: Ubisoft
• Developer: In house
• Multiplayer: 4 player co-op,
• Link:Assassin's Creed: Black Flag site

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