The game name references what it does to your social life. Most of the reviews are truly spot on - you do don’t play Oblivion, you lose yourself to it. I dreamed about it last night for crying out loud. The settings, story, and sheer amount of stuff to see and do in this game is just mind blowing. Finally a bitter fantasy MMO hater like myself gets to taste many of the good elements (massive world to explore, endless quests) without the negatives (dull combat, griefers, endless travel, unengaging story).

Oh for crying out loud. Swingin’ Ape had added multiplayer, seemingly finished much of the rest of the game, and now Blizzard pull this. Maybe I’m just desperate for them to release a new game that isn’t WoW but Ghost surely now rates second only to Duke Nukem Forever on the delay charts, and at least 3D Realms are now being up front about what happened there.

I hope, if it’s ever released, we don’t get another Warcraft 3 - repeatedly revamped, visually polished but ultimately average.

Dear Valve,

Thank you for taking two extra years on this.

Hugs and kisses,

Pixel Kill

It just finished, sadly not much new info. The inevitable Zelda DS was announced and they think their emulator classic game download service will be top. Did I miss something?

At least Sony finally announced some solid PS3 details - the guaranteed 60GB hard drive is a major strength as is the fact that it’s supposedly easier to code for. After their previous efforts (with both PSP and PS2) I can only imagine the network service being garbage again though.

Commandos: Strike Force currently sits at position 18 in the charts, it’s probably only headed downwards from there. I’m getting a Hostile Waters flashback here - brilliant game, terrible sales. But then this sort of self-co-op game is very much my sort of thing.

Best moment so far: the Resistance have setup a crashed lorry to act as a road block. The spy has slowly dealt with half the German troops by applying piano wire to neck. A German General pores over a map while a group of soldiers stand nearby. The sniper peers down his scope, takes a deep breath and pulls the trigger. The crack of his rifle shot is my signal to switch to the spy and cut the rest of the soldiers down with machine gun fire. Maybe you had to be there but it really felt like one of those classic gaming moments somehow. Top game.

Apologies for the lack of posting recently, our router blew up last Sunday and the new one (cheers Aaron!) is taking its sweet time arriving. Things should return to normal (whatever that is around here) in a day or two.

Word of warning - EuroPC (no link for you, EuroPunks) a) Take forever to send your item out b) Don’t email you purchase or shipping confirmation c) The item purchase doesn’t even show up in the relevant section of your web account! What a rubbish system - at least their phone number connects straight to a real person but they weren’t much help either.

Update: It’s here, but they sent me the wrong one! Unbelievable.

For the most part I hate virals. They’re mostly insultingly blatant adverts and a marketing trend that needs to die. Now.

This, however, is a clever viral. Buggered if I can tell you what they’re advertising though so they fail on that front, even the website it advertises doesn’t make that terribly clear. Computer controled colour changing room fittings and furniture or something? Er.

Suddenly my ship designs look very pathetic indeed. More impressive efforts here.

Fan of the telly series but can’t be bothered playing the reportedly naff game? Problem solved!

I’m surprised today’s big gaming news took this long to roll around. Most people assume they’ll do a fantasy MMO with new IP (seeing as they can’t do D&D), though there are the options of a) buying Fallout Online rights from Interplay (unlikely) or b) stealing the Star Wars license (unlikely too but one can dream) c) trying the rarely visited space/sci-fi setting, maybe even tying it into Mass Effect. Or it could just be a Dragon Age MMO. I just hope they try some really new gameplay ideas rather than simply rehashing Everquest like most (even WoW) do to some degree.

Every time I hear something new about these guys I like them even less. Most recently they linked to a torrent of Galactic Civilisations II on their forum as some kind of “why you need Starforce” statement. Unbelievable.

Terra Nova recently covered a “textual world” (presumably a MUD) which has quarterly wipes. Everything goes. It sounds harsh but there are benefits here. I think the strongest is that things can finish. Imagine if PlanetSide could have an ultimate periodic winner instead of a tiresome, unending tug o’ war. Imagine a full story arc in an MMO with a start and finish, bringing things closer to being a “proper” RPG. There are downsides of course, all covered in more detail at Terra Nova. (Spotted this on Alice’s del.icio.us feed)