It seems like every time I turn around a new first-person shooter is hitting the shelves, and it’s getting hard to tell many of them apart. Catching my interest takes more than just another flashy gore-fest -- to meet my bar, a game has to offer a storyline that will keep my interest for more than one or two levels. Shogo manages to do just that. It’s designed in an anime (Japanese animation) style. You play Sanjuro Makabe, a Mobile Combat Armor (MCA) pilot in the United Corporate Authority (UCA) Security Force. The UCA is involved in a protracted war to control the planet Cronus, the source of Kato -- the energy source that makes space travel possible. OverviewAnd Shogo: Mobile Armor Division will follow close behind. Developers Monolith have taken all the elements that have staled the single-player first-person game and replaced them with simple storytelling and ingenious scripting. Widescreen Patch is a mod for Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, created by Wobak. This is Version 2 of the patch. It makes the game work without any stretching regardless of the aspect ratio. Features:-The FOV is Hor+ (the larger the aspect ratio, the more is seen) and can also be set manually. Download Games Shogo: Mobile Armor Division Cracked New Released. You will know the true power of giant robots!Anime-influenced graphics and gameplay designFight on foot or pilot a giant mech in both open and urban environmentsAn interesting storyline with two possible. A rebel group known only as The Fallen has taken control of large portions of Cronus, and your mission is to infiltrate their positions and take down the mysterious rebel leader known only as Gabriel. As you make your way deeper into enemy territory, it becomes obvious that your commander is keeping information from you, and you must decide how to use the information you uncover. Your simple penetrate-and-destroy mission will rapidly become much more complex. The love you thought you’d lost forever is still alive, the friends you thought gone begin to resurface, and those you count on most start to turn against you. It’s up to you to decide who you can trust and who is only going to stab you in the back. Gameplay, Controls, InterfaceMost first-person shooters on the market start with a dark opening video clip that features lots of blood and explosions set to a pulsing rock beat or Goth-style dirge. Shogo has the explosions, but its Japanese-style pop music intro is a breath of fresh air -- it’s almost manic in an upbeat way, and it provides a very different feel to the game right from the start. That theme continues throughout the game. All the characters and cut scene animations keep true to the feel of classic Japanese animation titles like Robotech or Akira. You start the game in your MCA, but you won’t stay there. As you move throughout the wasteland and cities on Cronus, you will have to get out of your huge battle armor to get a little more personal with the bad guys. Most levels where you drive your MCA are slugfests -- that’s what the armor is designed for, and the game designers took that into account. But when you hop out of your armor, you’ll find yourself in levels that require a much more stealthy approach -- running in with guns blazing gets you killed a lot faster. The game's plot is conveyed through an almost-constant stream of communications from the other characters in the game. Even during play, the other characters are talking to you and each other. The speaking character is highlighted to make it easy to follow who is saying what. Between levels you get sections of story in cut-scenes that are generated using the game engine in real-time rather than as prerecorded movie clips. Level design is often what makes or breaks a first-person shooter for me. I’ll spend a lot more time playing a game that doesn’t look quite as nice, rather than wandering around a pretty game with boring levels. Shogo’s levels are among the best I’ve played. The cityscapes are detailed, allowing you to wander over a large area. You can even climb up to the tops of buildings to get a bird's-eye view of things. The interior levels are also well-designed. Too many games have floor plans that don’t provide the feel of being in a real building. Shogo’s buildings feel like they were designed for real use instead of just for laying down a challenging path through the game. Like almost all first-person shooters currently available, you can easily modify Shogo’s control setup to match your controllers and play style. I prefer to use a mouse/keyboard combination, and had the controls tweaked in just a couple of minutes. The option to smooth out mouse control really helps reduce the jumpiness some games suffer from. One major drawback in Shogo is the broken AI -- in the release version, enemy soldiers will just stand around waiting to be shot, making play more than a little dull. Fortunately, Monolith has released a patch that fixes this problem. GraphicsShogo is the first game based on Monolith’s new Lithtech game engine. Since the engine is new, there are a few rough edges on the graphics, but overall they are top-notch. The effects for explosions are particularly nice. Realistic smoke and bright flashes from the explosions can make it tough to track opponents at times, but then that’s the way it should be. Visually, the outdoor levels in Shogo look best, with detailed sky and horizon effects. While the Lithtech engine is not a huge leap over other game engines in use today, it does offer solid performance and support for lots of video modes and 3D cards. My one complaint is that, while in the MCA, many things didn’t seem to fit the scale the huge armor was supposed to have. People not in armor are to the correct scale, but some damage to walls like bullet holes are not scaled properly. This was particularly evident when you blasted someone not in armor -- it would have taken an entire slaughterhouse to provide enough blood for some of the splatters. AudioShogo's soundtrack is dynamic -- as the action on screen changes, the music changes subtly to match. The sound effects are clean, strong, and appropriate throughout the game. The explosions rumble with deep bass, bullets ricochet off stone and metal, and the voices of the characters are clean and easy to understand. The speech really brings the characters to life and serves to drives the plot throughout the game. System RequirementsWindows 95/98 , 32 MB RAM, 4X CD-ROM drive, Pentium 166 and 3Dfx or Direct3D compatible 3D accelerator card (Pentium 233 or faster required for the software rendering version) Bottom LineWith Shogo, Monolith has proven that it can do first-person games right. Shogo not only provides the action, it does it with a plot and an artistic flair not often seen in today's games. If you’re looking for a great game that gives you something different from all the others on the shelves, check this one out. Anime fans will love the feel of the game, and there’s plenty of action for FPS junkies. I can’t wait to see what Monolith comes up with next.
Overall rating: 5
SHOGO is Monolith's forgotten shooter, and nothing demonstrates this more aptly than the fact I have discovered it twice. The first time was a few years after it released in 1998, when I found the CD case in my game collection and decided to give it a shot. Weirdly, I have no recollection of buying it or borrowing it. It just appeared in my house, like a MacGuffin that unleashes an evil spirit in a horror movie. Anyway, after being initially put off by the anime stylings of the cover, because I didn't know what anime was back then and thought it was a cartoon for babies, I played it and enjoyed it far more than I thought I was going to. I then promptly forgot about it for ten years, until news circled around that it had been re-released on GOG. At this point a small and dust-covered trapdoor was unlocked in my mind. All the memories came flooding back, and I resolved to play it again. It took a few years before I got around to doing this, but now I have I can't believe that I forgot about this game. Not because it's a fantastic shooter, but because it's such a fantastically odd shooter that's as broken as it is brilliant. SHOGO makes a ridiculous number of mistakes in its execution. It's janky, it's thematically confused, and its ambitions stretch way beyond its capability. Yet somehow it still ends up fun to play. SHOGO is a strange game from the concept up. Influence in game-making between Japan and the West has crisscrossed over the Pacific since the days of Donkey Kong, but SHOGO is a specific and unusual variant of that, namely, an American developer making a game directly inspired by anime. SHOGO rides a wave of Western interest in anime that arose in the mid-90s, commencing with the release of Ghost in the Shell in 1995, and culminating in the release of the Matrix in 1999. SHOGO itself takes inspiration from mech-tastic Manga series such as Appleseed. In and of itself there's nothing wrong with this. The problem is that SHOGO is also the debut game for Monolith's LithTech engine, which would go on to power visually groundbreaking games such as F.E.A.R, and is still used today in Shadow of Mordor. Back in 1998 however, Lithtech was basic even compared to contemporaries like Unreal and Thief, with blocky environments and character models that are straight out of a Lynchian nightmare-scape. When you've got a Western developer with an early and experimental 3D engine aping a highly stylised Japanese artform, the results are predictably catastrophic. SHOGO looks nothing whatsoever like anime. In fact, it looks like every other FPS released in the mid-to-late 90s. Worse, the bits which do resemble anime really stick out, from the skimpily dressed anime girls adorning the game world on posters and vending machines, to the exclamation marks that appear above character heads when they spot you. Perhaps the worst thing is that, when a character speaks, their portrait appears in the top left corner, which shows you what they should look like. ![]() The LithTech engine causes other issues too. Characters seems to skate around the environments when they walk. Enemies react strangely when they see you, shifting instantaneously from inaction to bloodthirsty rage. Weirdest of all are the gibs. Enemies don't break apart when they're hit by a rocket or a shotgun blast, instead, their corpse seems to suffer from abrupt rigormortis, then bounces around the world geometry spraying blood everywhere, before finishing up by glitching halfway through a surface. It's one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen. The gap between artistic ambition and technical limitation even impinges upon SHOGO's main gimmick, which is that you alternate between fighting on foot and fighting inside a gigantic mech. Think Titanfall, only the pilot bits and mech bits are separated between levels, and you're mostly there. Unfortunately, there isn't enough differentiation between how you move and how your mech moves, while the restrictions upon level size means that the sense of scale is a bit off. Hence, you feel less like a mech stomping through a city, and more like you've gone on a trip to LEGOland. Yet if SHOGO is so beleaguered by flaws, why is it so enjoyable? Well, partly for that very reason. If SHOGO is partly a car crash, then it's a Wacky Races car crash, the results being more amusing than horrifying. All the glitches and technical faltering fit oddly well with the absurdities of its action. It helps that SHOGO is played rather tongue-in-cheek, filled with daft interludes such as helping an old lady rescue her cat from a nearby pumping station, and one-liners such as when your tactical advisor warns you the enemy know you're coming, and your character Sanjuro responds 'Great, then they'll know who killed 'em!' This leads to another point in SHOGO's favour, narratively it is surprisingly ambitious for an FPS, with a branching story that lets you choose your approach at several points during the plot, and multiple endings with different levels depending on which route you choose. SHOGO also bears shades of later, more lauded story-driven titles like Deus Ex, featuring a war where the conflict is not as black and white as it initially appears, and a large cast of characters who all have hidden agendas and plausible motivations. You even have a brother who turns out to be working for the 'enemy', and tries to persuade you to do the same. Unfortunately, there's a bit too much going on for SHOGO to handle in its traditional FPS structure, and so you end up being thrown big dollops of information in level-bookending cutscenes that are hard to digest. Still, it's an admirable effort, with decent writing and voice-acting to back it up. From the next Mario to fan-favourite indies, a list of every confirmed game and release date. ![]() In the end though, it isn't storytelling or its amiable stumbles that save SHOGO, it's the strength of its gunplay. SHOGO sports a delightfully destructive arsenal, and there's clear distinction between how the mech sections and the on-foot sections play. Inside your mech, you're a juggernaut of death, crushing tanks and puny humans underfoot as you blow other mechs to smithereens, Your weapons are as weird as they are powerful including a gun that fires spider-mines, and a cluster-rocket launcher with the rather unfortunate name of the 'Growler'. Outside your mech, however, you're far more squishy and vulnerable, fighting in complex, mazy environments where enemies await to ambush you around every other corner. These sections can be extremely tough, as Monolith rely on enemy placement rather than AI to make the combat interesting, and your opponents react with merciless speed to your presence. Sanjuro's guns aren't as interesting as his mech's more eclectic weaponry, but they are just as satisfying, especially the assault rifle. Special mention also goes to the Kato grenade launcher, which fires hovering balls of energy that literally blow enemies into their own shadow. SHOGO's legacy is tough to trace, as it didn't make the splash Monolith hoped it would. Even its own expansion packs were cancelled due to lack of sales. But perhaps that's ok. There are more than enough games with a list of sequels as long as your arm, that have flogged the horse long past its demise. Sometimes it's nice for a game to be one and done, to be of its time in all the best and worst ways. For my part, I'm happy that SHOGO is a game I can occasionally forget, because it means I can keep remembering it with that same surge of fondness. Sign in Connect with Facebook Parts of the plot in the first Original Generation segment of Original Generations is derived from the animated, so as to follow continuity. This Twin Command, unique to each character, takes SP (Spirit Points) from both characters in the squad, and is generally more powerful than the other Spirit Commands available to them. This makes Original Generations the first game in the franchise to break the six Spirit Command limit. Changes and additions [ ] Original Generations is primarily a remake of the two previous Original Generation games, replacing them in the official Original Generation continuity, thereby the Game Boy Advance stories. Super robot taisen original generations iso download free. New in town? 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