'Nuff said.

Wow, gotta say I'm really struggling to find the time to play the myriad of titles I've been buying recently! With the 360 being a couple of years old now, there are many games that are for sale in 2 for £20 or 2 for £30 offers, and I'm snapping them up, only to struggle to find the time to play them!

Add to this the great DLC's that are here (I'm currently working my way through The Lost and Damned), and that leaves me with even less time! I really want the Fallout 3 DLC's too, think they'll be my next purchase.

Oh, and by the way, The Lost and Damned is REALLY making me wanna go and get myself a motorbike again!

Ok, so in June this year, I took my girlfriend Natalie to Rome, and popped the question in front of the Coliseum. It all went perfectly to plan; romantic meal, a couple of drinks and a beautiful city.

Ok, now call me shortsighted, but I never thought as far ahead as the wedding itself! It is so damn expensive, and I have no money! For instance; the venue itself is going to cost £2040 for one day's rental. ONE DAY!!!1 Do you realise the car I could buy with that?

Her dress is going to cost around £1200 (and we have to pay for it ourselves). My wallet is shrinking deeper into my pocket just thinking about it!

Anyhow, wish me luck. I am entering probably the most financially scary point of my life so far. But she's worth it! (man that was soppy!)

I simply could not get to sleep last night. No matter which direction I pointed my mind, I could not turn it off.

After lying there listening to the traffic for a couple of hours, I started thinking back on games I've played over the years, and how they made me feel. One of my earliest gaming memories is playing Super Grand Prix on the Master System when I was about eight. I always used to look at the city that was shown in the distance during a race, and think "wow, how great would it be if the game let you drive through the actual city!" I can also remember being blown away by Zelda: Link's Awakening on the ol' Game Boy. This is the first time that I ever played a JRPG, and I recall being blown away by the size and scope of the game world, and that I could just wander off and chat to the world's inhabitants.

Its kinda weird now to think of how much for granted we take these things. To publish a racing game nowadays that only featured the occasional roadside lampost or tree would be inexcusable, but back then was the best we could get. And as for open world game arenas, I think I would have died from joy if you showed the ten year old me GTA 4 or Zelda: Wind Waker.

It also got me thinking; what should we expect ten years from now? We are now four generations of console on from my old Master System (still going strong, btw!), and game quality and immersion levels have gone up constantly, as have development times. Its not uncommon now for a big name game to take two or more years to be developed. The lifespan of consoles is widely cited as only five years. Could we end up with titles that take longer to develop than the lifespan of the console it is developed for?

Bloody hell, time for me to shut up! Incidentally, I never finished this train of thought last night. It sent me to sleep;)

Wow, the last boss on Dead Space is hard! I rattled through the last three chapters last night, only to fall at the final hurdle :cry: Anyway, think i'll gear myself up for another crack at it tomorrow, then finish & post my review 8)

I've also been playing Little Big Planet some more (actually was a Christmas present for the missus), and I've gotta say its slowly growing on me! The graphics are very polished, and the online works great. I have to say though, the loading times are a little... Exhuberant!

Also, I got an email from BT, saying that I'm nearly at my ten gig download limit for the month! Man, gamespot must really suck the bandwidth!

Well, I feel about a stone heavier than I did two days ago! I've had a great Christmas, and am looking forward to new year (me and the ol' ball and chain are off to a hotel in the Lake District on the 31st)

I've been playing Little Big Planet, and I have to say, I'm a little unsure of what I think. My girlfriend loves it, but then again she is a casual gamer, who rarely dabbles in modern gaming (except for Viva Pinata). LBP just seems a little... empty... compared to other killer apps like Gears, Dead Space or MGS4.

I think its time to break out Silent Hill Origins and give that a whirl.

Hope everyones ok, and that you all got the toys you wanted from Santa :-)

For those of you who don't already know, the second season of The Leet World has begun! If anyone hasn't seen or heard of it, go and check it out at www.theleetworld.com, its awesome and hilarious!

Is anyone else up late tonight watching the UK champonship snooker? Right now its 9 frames each to Shaun Murphy & Marco Fu out of first to ten. A real nail biter!

I really felt in the mood for Silent Hill 2 today, so I popped it in my PS3 for a quick spin. To my surprise, though, a message came up telling me that my machine was not compatable with PS2 software!

Is this fixable? I thought there was limited backwards compatability on EU models, but this message suggests that there may be no compatability at all!

On a plus note though, I've finally been able to get hold of a copy of Silent Hill Origins for the PS2 today! The collection is complete!:P

Finally I've done it! Playing gears on insane is the only way to do it - I find it really makes you play the game the way it was designed to be played.

I can crack on with Dead Space now - excellent game for use with headphones. The sound design really comes into its own when beamed directly into your ears!

By the way, has anyone played Left for Dead? I've read a few reviews, but really can't make my mind up on this one!

The Playstation 3 Home application has been long awaited by the Sony gaming fraternity for some time now, and with the arrival of the Beta on 12th December, the world finally has a chance to go home. At least, that's when it'll let you connect...

On the day it was supposed to arrive, there were reportedly several issues that came up whilst they were trying to make the application available for general installation. This resulted in some extremely hot forums across the online gaming media, and some very defensive Sony fans. I finally managed to download it at around 2am, which one could argue is no longer within the 12th December release date that was promised, but I won't be that petty.

Once the icon was available, I then started doing what most people will spend most of their Home Beta experience doing - staring at a blue square with 'initialising...' written across the bottom of it. This is then followed within two minutes or so by an error message with the code 'C-931'. Now, I personally found this to be a tad dreary, especially the fifteenth or so time through, but I guess some people must enjoy it, or Sony wouldn't have put it there. Perhaps it's a Japanese game. Curse my Western ways!

Seriously though, connecting to Home is the computing equivalent of the 'Mr Myagi attempting to catch a fly with chopsticks' thing. I ran an experiment (because I have too much time on my hands) to see how many times out of 100 attempts to sign in, I was actually able to. The extraordinary answer will be revealed later on...

Anyway, once I had walked on water and managed to actually sign in, I was faced with creating my avatar. The system is thorough, yet not too baffling (although there were some face dimension sliders that I swear had no discernable effect). There then followed a tutorial, then they finally let me loose in Home!

I won't talk about the apartment, as they are all pretty much standardised, instead I'll concentrate on the experience itself. Wandering around the world is enjoyable enough, but when approached by anyone who actually wanted to talk to me, I found myself vainly trying to type "bugger off", because I find using text as a way of communication in a real time environment is slow, clumsy and extremely irritating. Instead, I resorted to dancing to distract them, before running away and hiding behind a palm frond until they went away.

The bowling alley is an interesting and pointless addition. Why do I have to wait until a game is no longer full for me to play? Surely the whole point of having bowling in a gaming environment is so I won't have to queue up for the experience! The same goes with the pool and chess, why wait? Why can't it just be a sub-game that pairs you up with somebody at random to play with? The one thing that didn't annoy me in the bowling alley was the arcade machines - genius. These let you play demos of games, and is a great way of making games accessable.

The shopping Mall is an insulting experience. They want you to pay for everything, even (I am informed) for branded items! Surely the whole point of branded items in Home is to demonstrate new clothes designs (for example a Diesel codpiece), so that we may be inspired to go out and buy them in real life. Sony will surely be getting paid a truckload of money by companies wanting advertising in Home, so why do we need to further line their pockets by paying for virtual items? It's ludicrous! Oh, and Diesel - you just lost yourself a codpiece sale, son.

The cinema is boring - you wander in, find yourself a screen, and wait five minutes whilst a trailer for a film is loaded. To try the system out, I thought I'd view the watchmen trailer, so I found a screen with watchmen posters on either side of the door, and went in. Five minutes later, and I'm watching a trailer for the Frost/Nixon film. Did I miss something? Ahh... Maybe its another fun Japanese loading game.

So, all in all, I am not impressed by the experience. Whilst I am aware that it is only a beta, I can't help but feel that the whole idea is too cumbersome to ever be practical. I just prefer the plain old Xbox Live menu system.

Incidentally, I have been writing this blog entry for around 40 minutes now, and have been continually trying to connect to Home. I have, thus far, been completely unsuccessful, but there was an update... which had given me a new ...

Error code! D-5027! I think I'm beginning to enjoy the new Japanese error code collecting game!

By the way, out of 100 attempts to log in, it worked six times. Nice work Sony. Keep it up ;)