I saw the trailer for the new Burnout: Paradise earlier this afternoon when it was released and from what it shows it is clear to see that the franchise has now truly gone next gen. Burnout Revenge on the 360 was not really a next gen title in my opinion it was basically the exact same game you got on the PS2 and original Xbox with a total sound overhaul which did improve it but lets be honest it wasn't in need of fixing in the first place and the visuals had a slight bump up but it isn't too much different things are mostly alot more shiny and if you look closely you do see the cars have more polygons and do look better than the original versions.

Paradise however immediately you can see it has been made ground up for the 360 and PS3 and it does look awesome, if the interviews are to be believed aswell it should be a whole new Burnout experience for the next gen era. It's enough to get me interested if nothing else, I am a long time Burnout fan having played all the games from its humble beginnings on the PS2 and all the way up to Revenge on the 360, time will tell on this one how good it will really be.

Well it has happened, again, I can't stop playing racing games on my 360, Test Drive Unlimited and Forza Motorsport being the main games of choice. I am sure PGR3 will be thrown into that mix aswell soon enough. This does happen from time to time but then again I love racing / driving games anyway and would go as far as saying it is my favorite genre of gaming.

I can not wait for this game to be released, here in the UK it wont be out until June 8th now which I am pretty gutted about as originally it was supposedly going to be released at the beginning of May... Reguardless I am placing my pre-order on Amazon.co.uk very soon and am hoping that the demo will be available over XBLM very soon! Then I can finally stop playing the original Forza Motorsport on my 360 which is buggier than hell on the sound department and finally sink my teeth into the next gen version.

It has finally released, I have been watching LOTRO pretty closely over it's development, I got a chance to try it in beta and liked it alot. Now it is in the mail direct from the US and should be here within a week or less, I hope this game remains as good as it was when I played it a while ago as Vanguard didn't work out exactly as I had hoped, it is a fantastic game but even on a good system it runs poorly, almost constant hitching eventually gets annoying and the lag issues can occasionally cause more trouble than it's worth. I am sure soon that game will be truely great but it has the "beta in a box" feel right now and is in need of TLC from Sigil. So for now I will move onto LOTRO and see how it all works out from there.

I managed to find a copy of Chromehounds in a bargain bin at a local store yesterday, I have been wanting to get that game for some time and whever I was going to get it something else came out and took presidence over it. Now I finally got it and I wish I didn't put it off as much as I did as it is a superb game. Very indepth and complex at first but I like the hardcore mech simulation thing and have played the Mech Warrior series back in the day aswell as some of the Armored Core games and enjoyed them all, Chromehounds follows that same trend and with the expansive emphasis on online play and team combat I am well in my element and have a bad feeling that I will get pretty hooked on this one for quite a while.

OH YES! Guitar Hero 2 was so worth the wait, what a fantastic game. I played it for around 10 hours straight after I got it at 9:45am this morning. Played it so much I had to stop because my hand was cramping up from the fret buttons, thats pretty hardcore IMO. I have finished the game on easy and I have unlocked Stone Henge on Medium but it gets pretty tough really fast and that in many ways is a good thing as easy is a tad too easy to be honest. All I can say is if you don't own this game on PS2 or X360 seriously go amd get it as soon as you can, dont miss such an amazing title.

Guitar Hero 2 is now on it's way from Amazon.co.uk, £65 dropped but heck I aint gonna whine none about it. Now I just sit and wait until it lands on my doorstep Thursday morning and then I can make with some kick ass rock! Or more than likely get my ass kicked by the game as I am a GH newbie :) it's all good, I am just glad I managed to get a copy at all.

I went to my local games store this morning highly anticipating heading home with a copy of Guitar Hero 2 for my 360 and discovered when I got there that they had none in stock what so ever and wont have until the end of the month!! How on earth can that be right, the game was released yesterday 6th April here in the UK and from what I can see most stores dont have any available apart from Game which is a bit out of reach for me where I currently live. So alas after holding off on getting GH2 for my PS2 and waiting for the 360 version to be released now I am left waiting even more and I an seriously gutted :P :(

Thanks to trying to get Vanguard running right I have now kicked my RAM up to 2GB which has made a huge difference to all around system performance as would be expected and also I have pulled my Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio and replaced it with a Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS which even with it being an older card it blows the X-Fi out of the water. I strongly recomend anyone stay clear away from the X-Fi Xtreme Audio as it isn't true 5.1 and does not run EAX as it should nor does it have true hardware acceleration which puts a great strain on your CPU and game performance suffers for it greatly. Now I have got the audigy in place all my games run superb and Vanguard plays flawlessly after a few minor INI file tweaks and performance in my other games has also noticably increased which is always a great bonus.

Where to begin with this one, lets start with the major issue, I heard this game was a system hog but I didn't even see this coming. This game will chew up your comp and spit it out the other side laggier than hell, even with the visuals set as low as can be it still wont run smooth, that is however until you disable sound then BOOM smooth as you like. I know the problem and I was warned in due course and am prepared for it. If you intend on playing this game ENSURE YOU HAVE 2GB OF RAM!!! The requirments state it will run with 512MB, believe me when I say it wont, not a chance in hell. It barely runs with 1GB but with sound disabled you can turn the graphics up a fair bit and it looks very nice and minus some occasional load lag as new items spawn in it is very playable. Of course I have ordered another gig of RAM to boost my system performance I had intended on doing so anyway but now I have a valid reason to do it :)

As for the game itself, the UI is pretty much a WoW rip off with EQ2 elements, the games visuals are slightly similar to EQ2 as far as the landscapes are concerned but the characters look really nice. They dont animate as well as you see in WoW but even so it is a nice game to look at. Sound I cant say much on right now obviously as I play with none which isn't as bad as it may seem or not for me at least as I am usually in voice chats with friends anyway and turn the game sounds way down.

So far though even with needing to get a comp upgrade I like what I have seen and I do think this game has alot of potential to turn into a truely great MMO.