It has been some time since I've posted onto this website of mine but I feel I have good reason for it. For one, I have been visiting a few friends of late and they have kept me reasonably distracted. For two, WoW still has me trapped within its glorious embrace with assistance from Guitar Hero. For three and for finally, it's because I have rediscovered my enjoying of bashing people up in a ring with a pair of boxing gloves.

When I pre-ordered the 360 all those many years ago, I picked three titles that I deemed had the honor of being the first 360 games I ever played. One of those was Perfect Dark:Zero, another being Kameo:Elements of Power and the last one being Fight Night Round 3. Perfect Dark:Zero lasted a long time while Kameo:Elements of Power lasted all of one hour, but Fight Night Round 3 still sits proudly in my collection. I meantioned in a previous post that it is a game that you can pick and play anytime and still get enjoyment out of it. As you can imagine I had high expectations of Fight Night Round 4 and boy, I have not been disappointed.

FNR3 was a very beautiful game. Everything was rendered very nicely and you could see the damage each punch you gave and received did. FNR4 has taken it up a notch. Everything looks fantastic. The sweat dripping down the body, blood splattering onto you boxing gloves, skin rippling as you throw a right hook straight on the face. Everything in the ring looks better than I could possibly imagine. The physics are greatly improved and many of the clipping issues that plagued FNR3 are gone. The best part is that all of this is done with no chugging of the frame rate. Everything is smooth and clear and crisp, you know, what a 360 game should be.

One of the best things I liked about FNR3 was the right stick controlling how you threw your punches. It was a simple and elegant design choice and worked brilliantly. FNR4 has kept it again for this time round and whilst it has had a slight modification, the changes are for the better and are just as comfortable to use as the last one.

Other elements of the gameplay have changed, some for better, some for worse. The invisible wall between two players in the ring has gone so you can really get in there and punch if you're an inside fighter.

Getting up from a knockdown is made easier with you having the balance yourself with the left stick and then stand up with the right stick. It works beautifully and allows you to get up even if you have gotten knocked down a few times. It does slow to a crawl if you get knocked down too much so don't think you're guarenteed to get back up when you get knocked out. The only downside is that if you get knocked down more than four times your guarenteed to lose but I suppose thats realism for you.

Counter punching also plays a much greater role as the damage done to the opponent is far greater and stunning or knocking out the opponent is more than likely to come from a counter. It has been made much simpler to pull it off by reducing the blocking to simple up and down. You still have to time it right but you don't have to worry about the direction so you'll quickly be slamming the opponent with a right hook and make them regret throwing that straight right.

Legacy mode has also had a dramatic change. There is a lot more information available to the player now and also has a strong growth element in which you watch the years go by as you organise fights and train. But all of this is unnecessary. What it all boils down to is that you schedule a fight, train for that fight, fight the fight, and then scheulde your next fight. It's quite repetitive but thanks to the fights usually being a decent length (at least for me), it does break it up somewhat.

Speaking of the training, the changes they have made are one of the very few things where what the developers should have left well enough alone. The activities in order to improve you stats are impossible to do at the start, when your stats are low. You get no benefit from trying to them yourself. Fortunatly the game does provide you with an auto-train feature that does the training exercise for you. You only get a maximum 50% of the benefit you could have gotten but its more than what you would have gotten if you tried to do it yourself. But on the flip side, in order to beat those people rank one or two in the world you're going to need to get your skills up fast and there is no real way to do this. The only way to get to the top is look at the stats of your opponents and pray they around the same level as yours. And why is it that I am only allowed to train once or twice before a match. Surely boxers do more than that before going into a fight.

You also don't get to choose a trainer or a promoter which I find quite unusual considering such elements are a huge part of the boxing world. The commentators you get during the fights are entertaining enough albeit a little repetitive.

Simply put. I love this game. I think its fantastic. Fight Night Round 3 will sadly be put away, likely  to never see the light of day again, but it can be proud to be replaced with a brilliant successor.

Therapist Wants In-Game Treatment for WoW Addicts

Youngsters addicted to World of Warcraft get so caught up in it that they sometimes play as much as 16 hours a day, neglecting school, social activities and other aspects of their life not directly associated with the game. Yet those most affected by the game don't exhibit conventional warning signs, said psychiatrist Dr. Richard Graham, and as a result traditional approaches to intervention and treatment won't work.

The solution? Treat them from within the game. Graham wants to begin providing in-game therapy to WoW-addicted kids by the end of the year. "It's already clear that psychiatrists will have to stay within the parameters of the game. They certainly wouldn't be wandering around the game in white coats and would have to use the same characters available to other players," he said.

"Of course one problem we're going to have to overcome is that while a psychiatrist may excel in what they do in the real world, they're probably not going to be very good at playing World of Warcraft," he added. "We may have to work at that if we are going to get through to those who play this game for hours at end."

The doctor called on Blizzard to "waive or discount" fees for psychiatrists and therapists who play the game so they can "more easily communicate with at-risk players in their preferred environment." He also suggested that therapists might recruit existing players with a greater knowledge of the game to serve as "peer mentors," helping to identify addicted users and facilitate their decision to seek help.

"Those affected don't exhibit the same outward warning signs as most teenage anti-social behavior issues do because they're in their bedrooms most of the time, seemingly out of trouble," he said. "Because of this we can't get through to them in the traditional educational environment or intrude on their actual bedrooms. We need to turn to the internet itself to tackle these problems."

Source: Telegraph.co.uk