In the past couple of days on World of Warcraft I have come to a number of startling realisations.

The first is that fact that I made the completely wrong choice in spending my Emblems of Conquest on the T8.5 chestpiece rather than the T8.5 helm. I had rationalised the decision by looking at the stats and saying that the chestpiece is a bigger upgrade for me right now rather than the helm and my chances of getting a new helm were much greater. This theory has been smashed to pieces with a VERY large sledgehammer as I have currently come to the realisation that my DKP was actually much higher in the guild than I though whilst those above me on the T8 token list were inevitably losing their DKP to other juicy goods and that I am one short hop, skip and a jump away from having claim on any tier piece that I want. This combined with the fact the guild is moving onto Freya first rather than Thorim and that Hodir has now become only a minor annoyance to down (mostly thanks to guild members getting fingers out of their asses and figuring out wtf to do) has led me to realise that I have made a giant mistake. Either way I have to live with it now and whilst the stats are still nice and everyone is drooling over it, I still have to deal with the fact that a grey/red dress does not colour coordinate with green/yellow shoulders.

The second is the fact that my guild has a large propotion of phenominal idiots. I recently noted in this blog that I was approached by a hardcore raiding guild called Nubcakes after tanking for them on their 10man run of Ulduar and I obviously impressed them by being able to fight a boss without the need for heals and being able to flip the bird at the boss at the same time. When speaking to the GM that made me a very nice offer I have to admit and was sorely tempted to leave my current guild. However the decision to stay was determined by the fact that I didn't have a reason to leave. Some may argue that a slow progressing casual guild filled with enough retards to populate a medium sized public high school is enough of a reason to leave but not for me. No, I need a guild to piss me off before I am willing to leave and over the past two nights it has come dangerously close. The reason for my slowly increasing level of angst has been caused by a couple of individuals who think they are the shit but instead they are just plain fucking annoying, and to be more even more specific, it came down to one person known as Mokuro. Over the past two nights he has done a number of stupid things, that whilst not wiping that raid, have led me to believe that his own sense of how to play was to ensure he had fun whilst everyone else had to pick up the pieces. Last night came dangerously close to me g quitting after he decided on Freya trash and mini bosses that he was going to tank to prove a point that he could tank. My belief is that if someone is going to be a tank that they should do it all the time, or more simply, you come to a raid in a role, you stay in that fucking role the entire time unless the raid leader politely asks you to switch. Changing at mid point for your own selfish desires just throws the whole thing out of whack and we didn't need a fourth tank running around trying to help the three of us who knew what we were doing to help. I put up with it for the 40min or so that we were doing the trash in but should he feel the need to do it next time, I am going to constantly taunt off him whenever he gets aggro just to try and put him in his place.But there were other reasons for my growing angst. People are still dying in fantastic fashion for no reason, endless chatter about pointless bullshit and the fact that we are progressing somewhat slowly is starting to grind on my nerves. I know my guild will see all the content this latest patch has to offer but my patience is slowly starting to wear thin and I am starting to reach the point where I would rather be in a guild that focuses on getting shit done and then moving onto achievements rather than sitting in a raid 3 nights a week having issues with bosses we have already killed because someone decided to pick their nose midway through the fight and stuff it up.

The point I'm trying to get to here is that WoW's glorious addictive shine is starting to dull a little bit. I'm still playing it on a daily basis and I'll never give it up but its slowly being worn down to the point where I'm either do some random achievement on my main or simply leveling my alt for a little bit. Any extensive form of play outside of raids is almost gone and with the upcoming array of 360 games coming out, this is only set to worsen. I suspect I may get down to the point that raids are the only thing I live for and if that is the case, then my guild may very well lose a tank. If raids are all I am doing, then I want something of quality. I want a glorious 3 screen set up with surround sound and a quad core processor with 12g of ram, not something that the Govt would hold onto for 15 years and then try to sell it off as brand new.

There seems to be a growing trend for me. Games that I don't find particularly worthwhile the first time I play them somehow magically transform into elements of pure gold. The best example I can give was Forza 2; a game that could have be fed to a pig as far as I was concerned somehow turned in a game of intense addiction in and fun after stewing in my game collection. This leads me on to the latest game in this long line of game stew evolution: Fallout 3.

Fallout and Fallout 2 were originally produced by Interplay, the creators behind the brilliant Baldur's Gate series, however during the creation of Fallout 3, they then sold the rights to Bethesda and as such, the game has taken a giant turn away from its turn based isometric view origins and wound up running straight into Oblivion. The similarities to Oblivion and others in the series really cannot be denied. The way you make your character is essentially the same; choose your name, sex and what you will look like. Some random stuff happens when you get to further define your character, more random shit leading to more character definition and then finally before jumping out into the wide wide world, you get to go back and change anything that you may not have liked. The similarities can continue to be seen through the game in the combat, landscape and your interaction with people. I'm not saying this is bad, in fact its a constant reassuring cuddle for the new player to the Fallout universe, and while others may criticise the similarities, i find the jarring change from medieval to futuristic wasteland to be enough for me to want to take a look around.

I'm going to get onto the plot at some point so I might as well do it now. The year is....I don't know, I wasn't really paying attention but either way you start the game being brought into life and then spend 19 years or so in a vault designed to shelter people from a nuclear war. Your daddy decides to go AFK into the wide universe and being his child, you insist on going out to find him as well. I can't really say much beyond that because I've gotten sidetracked so many times by the side quests that progression through the main storyline has been rather slow.

In typical Bethesda fashion, the number of character styles you can create is immense. You've got the damage soaking big guys who wield tree trunks as weapons, you have stealthy guys that will kill an enemy dead at 8 million yards, geeks, thiefs and people who can manipulate others as if they were folding a napkin in half. I myself went for a combination of stealthy and thief because I like the idea of stealth killing and being able to rob people's houses in an apocolyptic wasteland is a necessity.

The sheer depth of the game is also immense and is more than likely to scare off the first time player. The amount of items, weapons, armor and junk that you can get your hands on is completly insane and yet despite of all this, your still going to have issues finding the bullets to put in your guns. Whilst I admit that a wasteland may not be the best place to establish an ammo shop, one is desperately needed because you can really chew through your ammo if you're not careful. The problem is not so inherent at the start as I was getting enough ammo for my hunting rifle to build a small hut out of bullets but as I levelled the number of people carrying such ammo lowered drastically and I am now back to scavenging what I can until I can level my character up enough so that the baddies will start carrying ammo I care about.

And I would really like to know who decided to not give the player a flashlight, rather going for the idea of having a mobile phone strapped to your arm to provide a source of light because it is fucking useless. Wondering around the dark areas of an abandoned factory is sheer terror as turning off your mobile results in complete blindness whilst turning it on gives you a viewing distance of about 2ft which gives you just enough time for the player to grab his junk before a super mutant decides to slam your head into a wall. Maybe thats the atmosphere they were going for but I find it just idiotic, surely someone in this desolate wasteland would have figured out that a torch might be handy to have.

Another criticism I have is in the "crippling" system the game has. Shooting an enemy constantly in the same area of their body will result in the body part being "crippled" but the definition of crippled seems to fluxuate quite badly. It can generally fluctuate between a minor scratch or the whole thing being blow apart which for most areas of the body is find by me but there can and should not be any option when it comes to crippling someone's head. I must ask, "How in the HELL do you cripple someone's head without them resulting in death." Bullets to the skull = death. Not "it is only a scratch" bullshit that seems to have come about. You cripple someone's head, they go down, thats the way it always works.

On the whole these are minor criticisms and whilst their presence is annoying, it is not going to make you throw the game out. You may note I have made few positive points but I feel its so hard to review this game without the words "like Oblivion" coming into play every three sentences. Those who enjoyed Oblivion will more than likely enjoy this game and whilst those who played the previous Fallout games may find the change a bit uneasy, they can be reassured with the fact that all the story and many of the gameplay elements are still there. It goes to show that the merging of games can be done when the best part of each are taken.

When I first saw Prototype, my first thought was that it was a game I simply had to have. Now having finished the main storyline my opinion of the game has been shrunk for one I must have to one that is adequate.

Prototype follows the story of Alex Mercer, a man with no memories who finds himself with powers of speed, strength and able to change his body into numerous forms as well as being hunted by the military in New York city as a virus goes out of control messing up every man and his dog. As Alex, you fight against the military over the course of 18 day to the finale in which you do something and then the game ends. I would like to elaborate further however it is not for the typical reason of not wanting to spoil it, rather it is because I have no clue what the fuck it was all about. It was almost like a MMORPG in which you are told to kill X for cockhead Y but you don't know why because you didn't read the quest notes. However the Prototype ending is made worse by the fact that you have no choice but to "read the quest text" but I still couldn't figure out what it was all for. I suspect it had something along the lines of save New York but other than that it is a bit of a mystery. This may be a minor point but it was very disappointing for me when the story for most of the game was one of interest and stayed reasonably entertaing.

The story telling was assisted by a method the developers have called a Web of Intrigue. This operates by having Alex 'consume' a NPC and absorbing their memories. This usually leads to a little cutscene where you are fed a tiny piece of the story and this allows you to access other NPCs capable of giving you more information. To the developers credit, this is very well done. Each piece kept the story interesting as it told you about past and present events and left you wanting to find more. However finding them turns out to be a right pain in the ass for a number of reasons. Firstly they will show up at the most inopportune of times like when you are doing a mini-game event or evading the military or having your arsed carve up by a number of monsters. Whilst I can appreciate the need for having them show up during those times since the number you have to find totals at least 100, and while this may seem like a small number, they don't show up as often as you like whilst wondering the city. I don't understand why the developers couldn't have just amped up the spawn rate when you weren't busy and were just wondering the streets but oh well, can't do much about it now. The other irritating fact is that whilst those NPC will show up at the worst time for you, it will usually also work out that it is also the worst time for them. They will often spawn up in the middle of blood hungry monsters and unless you pull your finger out and rush to them as fast as electricity they can often get killed by an enemy before you get the chance to consume them. Apparently the game will have them respawn later although I don't know for sure because I didn't fill the Web of Intrigue completely and such a decision breaks the immersion somewhat but it will allows those obsessed with completion to fill all the holes in the story.

While playing this game, it is hard not to think of games like The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and Spiderman 2 and 3 because the similiarities, whilst not as simple as Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, are very apparent. It is not suprising with Radical Entertainment developing the Hulk and Activision responsible for the Spiderman series and whilst they obviously specialise in such entertainment, its hard not to get the feel of repetition. Perhaps if you haven't played the above games it might all feel fresh and new but playing those games has left me with the feeling that I was playing the same games over again, but its not all bad.

The game brings with is a unique feature in that by consuming people you are able to take on their voice and appearance and wonder around without the military batting an eye. Absorb a military commander and you'll also be able to wonder onto any military based as well as call air strikes anywhere you damn well please. It can also be a bit hit and miss because you take on the appearance of the last person you consumed and if consumed a citizen for whatever random reason and you would rather have a military figure smoking a huge cigar.

Combat was a lot of fun in this game. The game gives you 5 different way to enhance your damage each with its own pros and cons and each comes with its own upgrades and while the gigantic curve blade on your arm may appeal to many with a severe case of blood lust, my favourite quickly turned out to be the Bio-whip which allowed to reel myself up into flying helicopters and tanks roaming the ground, kill tens of people that were wondering the streets but most importantly, it allowed me to reel people in consume and kill them, which proved to be vital to my own survival thanks to a difficulty curve that goes up and down so badly that I simply had to walk away from the game on numerous occasions.

Doing missions and wondering the city hung out in the easy to medium part of town. You were able to go about your business as long as you paid attention but most bosses quickly turned out to be exercise in ass rape with steel wool wrapped around a stick because the amount of damage you would be taking would be equivalent to.....well ass rape with a steel wool stick. Most of time would spend running around avoiding damage and replenishing your health as quickly as possible by consuming any person around you only to run into the boss for a quick bit of damage on him before he smacks half your health away and you are left to get your health back all over again. And for a game that gives you two different ways to reduce your damage, you would have thought they could give have given you a way to block melee damage but this come to pass so all you can do is eat the damage and recovery it as quickly as possible. 

The developers have also followed along from their previous game outings by including mini game events and whilst the "point to point races" and "gliding events" were a lot of fun, the "consume military" and "consume infected" events were at best 'meh' and the "kill as quickly as possible" and the "war" events were a giant exercise in frustration. Unfortunately the last two forms of mini-game seemed to dominate much of the events and whilst I am not cricitising their inclusion entirely (it is perfectly valid to expect such a mini-game in a game such as this), I will criticise their dominance. I found the "gliding" and "point to point" much more interesting and entertaining as they broke up the destruction the rest of the game brings like the sherbert you'll get at really expensive restaurants to cleanse your palette between your Caesar salad entree and the steak and vegies main course. 

There is also an evolution point system that you use to buy upgrades but with the number you get from just killing things as well as well doing the mini-games, you'll easily have enought points to purchase every single upgrade before you finish the game. 

Overall the game was good. I was able to pass the time in enjoyable fashion but having finished the main storyline, I doubt I'll be jumping into the shoes of morphing Alex Mercer again. 

Since the start of the new year, much of my gaming time has been spent in the throws of WoW. The cause has been driven partly by the fact that I am in a solid 25man progression guild for the first time since I first started playing the game i.e we are actually getting through content before the next major patch is released, but mostly because there simply hasn't been anything else to play. Of course the occasional game jumps up and bats me around the head for a while, Guitar Hero: World Tour immediately springs to mind, but mostly it has been WoW.

But as we are coming up to the second half the year my expectations have brightened with a slew of new games entering the market all of which I want to get my hands on. The list goes as follows

Fuel at the end of june, Fight Night Round 4 at the start of july, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Marvel Alliance 2 in early september, Bio Shock 2 in late October and Assassin's Creed 2 in mid November. This list also doesn't take into account upcoming games yet to have a release date pegged to them like Forza 3, Max Payne 3, Crackdown 2 and Guitar Hero 5.

But the highlight of them ALL, yes even Bioshock 2 whose predecessor, which some may recall, was my 2007 Game of the Year, is the impending release of Mass Effect 2. Yes this Bioware RPG looks absolutely brilliant from what I have seen. The developers have claimed that the saves of Mass Effect will be transferred to Mass Effect 2 and decisions made in the previous save file will impact the new one and should this come to pass, I may have to go through my characters before its impending release and determine which one I want to play. That said I think I might just play them all.

Facebook, as useful as it is for catching up with people, playing games and doing funny quizzes, is also fantastically annoying when it comes to popping up with friends you claim to know.

The people on my friends list totals 42 and I'm quite content with that. It means that the people on the list are those who deserve to be there as they are people I actually to talk on a semi-regular basis and are also not a pack of phenomenal idiots. (Yes that was a compliment to all those on my friends list)

The biggest annoyance comes along when Facebook decides that just because people are best friends forever with two friends of yours, it means that they are likely to be yours as well. NO facebook, that does not work for me. I treat the world with a vile sense of loathing as I continually see cases where Darwin's Law has failed to do its job and I treat 99% of those "Suggested Friends" on Facebook with a similar feeling of disdain.

The worst ones that pop are high school people that Facebook suggests I should be friends with. Again, NO. I have kept in contact with a limited number of people from high school and thats the way I like it. I don't need to be reminded of every other twat who went to that school who, whilst didn't make my life any worse, are continuing proof that people are morons.

And while I finish on that note, I would like to point out the obscenity that comes with the number of friends people have. 394? 469!? 594?!?!? Who needs to know that many people? I'd be interested to see how many of them people actually keep in contact with but then I remember that I don't give a shit.

A long time ago, I determined that a great game would be one that allowed you to get into any number of cars and just drive. Not too anywhere, not from anyone, just getting into a virtual car and drive. Where the road networks would also be based on countries around the world. I want a game that makes me feel like I have gotten into a Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera and am driving on the roads around Europe. I thought FUEL might be able to give me a taste of my vision. And it did. It tastes awful.

When I first saw what Asobo Studio was attempting with a world record 14,400 square km game world, I was really excited and to the game's credit, the world is surprisingly well done. It has a wide variety of landscapes going from dusty desert though to forest through to winter wonderland and does all this without loading screens when travelling along. It has of course had to take a hit graphically due to the sheer size of the game but it is still pretty to look at. Driving around the world is quite pleasant as there is a full day night cycle but attempting to drive at night is painful. It seems that the makers of the vehicle you have to drive got lazy and only decided to attached a pen sized flashlight to the front of your vehicle meaning you can only see 3 inches in front of you. A dangerous prospect when driving 150km per hour on a dirt road surrounded by trees. And this brings me on to my next point.

Game developers seem to have gotten into a routine of having either "half the car taking up the screen" view, "all of the car taking up the screen" view or "attach camera to the underside of the front bumper and pray it isn't taken off by a sleeping policeman or stray rock" view. Where the fuck is the driver view. It seems that developers have gotten incredibly lazy but I don't see why. So many racing games could be so much more immersive (and they need all the immersion they can get) if they simply included a view inside the cockpit or on top of the bike. FUEL desperatly needs one because I hate having my car take up half the screen but the front bumper cam is so close to the ground that going into any sort of grassy area in this game and you'll instantly have grass taking up the bottom half of the screen so good luck seeing that tree.

We now move away from driving view and onto some truly nasty gameplay and AI issues. The AI in this game is fucked right up the arse. When choosing a race you get the choice between easy, normal and legendary and whilst they each have their respective difficulty level, they all start and end the same way. Regardless of how much better your vehicle is compared to everyone elses, you will always start in last place and the AI will always get 500m ahead of you in the first few seconds of the race. In the last 500m, the AI will then slow down enough so that if you have managed to get into fourth or fifth place you might have a chance of chance of catching up and winning. And this happens every time. The only difference between easy, normal and legendary is how far a head start they get and how far away from the finishing line they are willing to slow down. I want consistency in an AI opponent, not one that insists of having nitro in their engines for the first few seconds and then feels sorry for me at the end. They are also complete idiot drivers, blocking your path and slowing down when it isn't necessary and just making your life difficult when your trying your best to win.

Vehicle handling can also be crazy at times, and you can easily slide over a cliff if your not watching what you are doing and the respawn system for when you destroy your car or get stuck is also a load of bollocks as it normally have you facing the wrong way or at the bottom of the cliff where you destroyed your car, totally useless when the checkpoint you need to go through is 50m back up the cliff.

And why is it that a car that is completely crap off road instantly slows down to 80km per hour when it touches a single piece of ground that isn't asphalt. I'm not criticising the fact that accelerating while on grass is a bitch because I accept that to be the case in real life, but I'm almost certain that momentum is going to keep me going 100km per hour plus when travelling over grass if I hit it at 150km per hour for at least 10 seconds or so, not slow me down so fast I believe that some trickster has tied the rear axel to a power pole with cable.

Loading times are also a bitch. Most of it can be attributed to the game world being so massive but still. Its at least 10 seconds worth of waiting and thats after I installed the game to my hard drive. It would be hard to imagine what the bastard would be like if it was always reading off the disc.

To the game's credit, there is a large variety of races available with your standard lap race, checkpoints and endurance along with a few others and the challenges follow the same line. But I feel it is my duty to point out how unbelievably stupid the chopper race is. The premise itself is quite interesting. You have a vehicle and are racing a helicopter from point A to point B, but the thing that breaks the race is that fact that throughout most of the race, you are restricted to being 150m behind the helicopter. 150m exactly!!. There is no getting ahead of that chopper until your near the finish line at which point the chopper turns off its force field preventing you from getting ahead of it and allows you to win. WHAT THE FUCK?!? How could the developers possibly think this is a good idea?

But the developers have also managed to extract some good ideas from their brains and realised that,whilst a massive game world has great marketing potential, driving across such a world from camp to camp would take longer than the average gamer would like so they have included a helipad system allowing you to port from place to place quickly.

But what has probably annoyed me the most throughout this entire game is the complete lack of music. The only thing your going to be hearing while you blast along dirt roads is the engine. This is unacceptable. A game likes this needs music, particularly when you are driving from camp to camp because you feel taking a helicopter ride from one to the other is a sign of weakness. I'm thankful my Xbox is parked next to my computer because it means I can have my music playing through headphones and then game noise through the speakers which creates a noise similiar to what I experience when I am driving my own car.

But finally I will say this. The game world that the developers have created is too big for itself. The sheer size of the game and the repetiveness of the races will discourage many players from playing this through until the end. Not enough time was dedicated to the gameplay once the environment was finished and the game really suffers as it had such great potential. In the end I feel such a game format would be better used for a game based on the Transporter films. You have 4 or 5 cities scattered throughout a large game world and then you are required to take on jobs to take objects from one city to another or to a farmhouse way out in the middle of nowhere. A game where the joy of the game comes from driving around and enjoying the game world, not just trying to beat the AI and get to the finish line first.