My irrational, impulse spending spree will continue this evening as i am just about to go and buy a DS. It will be my third DS in as many years (or there abouts) and i swear to myself that this time it will be different, there are many new RPGs that i would like to own now and i feel ashamed to admit this but i'm slightly addicted to my girl friend's copy of Brain Training...

Suggestions for potential game purchases are always welcome, at the moment i'm thinking that i'd like 'the world ends with you', mario kart, brain training, final fantasy IV, Pokemon (not convinced about it at the moment but it's a possible purchase...) and dragon quest IV... i've also heard good things about soul bubbles but i have no idea what it is... so yeah... any suggestions for good ds games? (any genre, any game -except maybe that Pony game...)

Because my job has been pretty hectic of late i have very rarely had the chance to spend money in my free time so i have been limited to buying things online of late. I now have a rather large pile of graphic novels to read and a surprising pleasant amount of cash left in my bank.

I've been in desperate need of a haircut for a few weeks now but i can never face going into town to get it done....

So... I go to town to get my hair cut + i have money in the bank= Trip to Gamestation!!!

I've bought Mirror's Edge (£20) - I've now discovered that this is even cheaper elsewhere! I'm looking forward to this game, despite the lukewarm reception that it has received.

PGR4 (£5) - I've bought it for the online multiplayer but i don't really know what to expect with this as racing games are a bit of an unknown genre on me.

Lost Odyssey (£13) - I bought this on the day of release and for some reason my xbox didn't like the idea of playing it and it froze a lot so i took it back. I'm hoping that now that i have XBL i may be able to get around the problem (if it was a patching issue).

Prince of Persia (£25 in HMV) - I thought this was a bargain at the time but then i saw it for sale in Asda for £20... oh well. I had a little go of PoP in Gamestation and then had a full-on geek chat with an 8 year old who was watching me play, he was awesome.

Hellboy: The Science of Evil - (£25) I know that this is not a bargain, and that it is not a good game; but i love the Hellboy graphic novels so i'm holding out that it will be at least decent (it has been scripted by Mike Mignola so it must be ok, surely).

So i may write reviews of these games at some point although knowing my tendancy to wander off in a tangent they may not be the most proffesional and efficient reviews on GS.

The topic of this entry says it all really... It's a Friday night and i'm staying in, lurking around on GS and planning a night of Nazi Zombie killing with a good friend of mine.

I was supposed to be meeting my girlfriend tonight but she mentioned that a couple of her friends were going to be meeting up for a few drinks. I, being the noble soul that i am, immediately told her that she should meet her friends and that she shouldn't feel bad about cancelling our quiet night in....

But really i was thinking 'Yes!!! Xbox Live all night baby!!!'

I think that does make me a bad boyfriend.

I'm suffering a crisis here because i don't feel like a bad boyfriend, why must i feel guilty because i have a hobby that i love? I have gone to great levels of personal torture to prove to my girlfriend that i am interested in what she likes, for example, i haven't been to an Everton match for around 2 years because i know how much she loves me to carry her shopping bags for her on a saturday. I've also stood (and drank, heavily) through a number of rubbish gigs of bands that i didn't really want to see because she wanted to go. So why is it that if i suggested to her that she joined in with me in a 2 player co-op of Left4Dead that she would pull her face and more than likely leave my house in a rage?

I've tried to bring my girlfriend into my hobby, I bought a Wii and left it in her house so whenever we had a quiet moment we could have a bit of Mariokart fun or a sedate spot of tennis. That didn't really work out, it gathered dust in her front room and i eventually sold it in despair (after seeing the release listings for new games) to some (i'd imagine) porky housewife who had read about Wii fit in the Sun or something like that.

So i bought a DS for her, i had one and i knew that she loved Pokemon so i thought that i'd be great. So we both played Pokemon for a while, but there is something sad and lifeless about sitting in a room with the one you love and staring intently at a screen that only you are privy to. We tried Animal Crossing (which she loved and i found pointless) and i perservered with that for a while.

I made a bit of progress with Portal, she loved it which surprised me to be honest. But once you have completed it there is very little to go back to. So i thought... hmm... maybe she'd like Braid, it's got a sad story and a fair bit of platform and puzzle action going on... she didn't like it.

I decided that she probably wouldn't share my new found respect for Fifa (i was always a PES kind of man, WAS being the key word) so i've never asked her to join me in a co-op league or cup, although what says 'I love you' more than 'I know that you just got Yakubu sent off in the first minute of the cup final for kicking a defender that was no where near the ball, but i still think that we can win this because i have faith in your dynamic wing link up play'???

So yes, here i am, on a Friday night, alone. For now, but in a few hours i will be screaming to my best friend to 'retreat and fall back to the safe room, this area is lost' and we shall ensure that the number of undead Nazi's will have been reduced in the virtual world in which i enjoy some of my finest hours...

I am a bad boyfriend, but she is worse at Beautiful Katamari...

I've decided that i quite enjoy writing lists. So here is another one, but maybe a little bit less structured than my now famous 'Best Games of 2008'....

Gears of War....

I don't understand it. I'm gradually developing an appetite for violent shooty type games after a pretty long period of PS2 based RPGs and generally 'happy' games (that sounds strange doesn't it?). I can now appreciate why stabbing a camper and disappearing like a ninja is one of the best feelings that a man can have without taking drugs but i still don't understand why Gears of War is so popular. I'm not going to take the snobby approach and say that it's too.... gah i don't know the word... too... stupid (i was hoping for something more Oscar Wilde-esque, but stupid will do).

I've only had an XBox for around a year now and I immediately bought the games that appealed to my senses when stood in Gamestation with money to burn... I bought Dead Rising (sated my need for some Zombie killing fun inbetween Zombie killing on Timesplitters and the time before Left4Dead), i bought Pro Evo because i foolishly hoped that it would still be good (it wasn't) and i picked up Blue Dragon because of the FF connection. After such a hattrick of mediocre games i started to look into the reviews of games a little more carefully instead of being coaxed into buying things simply because they had exciting looking boxes (well dead rising did, the other two were pretty basic). None of my friends owned XBoxes at the time of myself buying one so i had very little to direct me in my choices (like the littlest hobo i had drifted from one console to another but i had never sniffed around Bill Gates' erm... gate (strange analogy...)) so therefore, for at least a month or two i was lost.

And then i started noticing Gears of War everywhere, it's like that feeling when you hear a new word or phrase for the first time and then you hear and read it everywhere; you suddenly wonder how you have been so blinkered and immediately have to know more. So i bought Gears of War. And i played it up until the bit, very early on, when you have to fill the big-evil-monster-burrow-hole-things by throwing a grenade into it... I died a few times, felt a bit stressed, died a few more times and then gave up. And that was that, until i started at a new job and everybody there (well, not everybody) seemed to be obsessed by Gears of War 2. So i went to a friends house and played on it, died a few times, felt a bit stressed and confused, died a few more times and then went home. So my conclusion from that experience that Gears of War 2 confuses me more than Gears of War, primarily my confusion being 'why is it so popular?'.

The MGMTs....

I don't understand them. They're not very good are they? Come on... I'd go as far as to say that they are awful. I'm sick of online shops recommending the album to me whenever i go onto their sites simply because i once bought an album that someone else bought who so happens to have had the misfortune of buying the album. I haven't heard their album, so that is why i have not entitled this section 'MGMT's album called....blah' I have however seen them live; they supported someone else and i genuinely wanted to like them (as i do with most support bands, with the exception of one band called Mo*Ho*Bi*Sho*Pi, i hated them immediately, they wore visers on stage and played like Nirvana without the tunes) but they where seriously bad, many people in strange clothing and bad haircuts at the gig clearly disagreed with me and were having a great time... and good for them... not for me though thanks... When i think of the youth of today (my god, i am old!) i don't think of 'chavs' running around beating up pensioners, i don't think of strange sallow faces lingering in doorways smoking bad dope and sporting even worse t-shirts... no, i think of the last time i followed my girlfriend into Topshop and observed a fluorescent hell of stick thin, androgenous...beings... i'll never understand them and i don't think i mind any more, but these day-glo and zany fashionistas listen to things like MGMT and they dance!!! My god do they dance... It's enough to make a man embrace corduroy and musicians with sturdy and solid names like Crosby, Stills and Nash!!!

So yeah, i don't understand MGMT.

Fable

I don't understand Fable. Despite being engrossed in my Playstation 2 at the time i knew that Fable was The Game of the moment and i always planned to get into it at some point. So i bought Fable (alongside Braid) as soon as i got onto XBox live, i then freed up my weekend (the girlfriend went to topshop alone) and dived into what turned out to be a pretty shallow pool. A puddle as it where. I know that i was four years late at the party but i still expected something about it to grab me but i found it completely charmless. I'd wanted to complete the game before i considered buying Fable 2 but i think it will stay on my 360 hard drive forever, uncompleted and goading me for not seeing what so many others did, damn you Fable.

So 2008 has been and gone.

I feel unhappy about this because now it is going to take me at least three months before I am able to enter the correct year on any forms that I fill in for the next twelve months, and lets be honest, if you have to read a basic form everyday and take down the data (that's if you are a data entry type person AND if anyone does look at forms nowadays...) then you are immediately going to assume that anyone that gets something as rudimentary as the date wrong then they shouldn't be allowed passports/driver's licences/guns etc.

So with that in mind, I am not an idiot. Well I don't think I am anyway. That is why this series of lists of the best things of last year will go down in the annals of history. Scientific Fact.

Seeing as this is a blog in Gamespot I should probably start with my favourite games...

Top Five Games Of 2008

5. Grand Theft Auto IV

I hated GTAIII. I'm not racist, I've watched Boyz in the Hood and felt the injustice of gang warfare, i've been known to breakdance (that's not true) and I genuinely hold very few predjudices (apart from maybe my hatred of loud Americans online), I simply couldn't get into the game and i thought that the storyline was very weak. I also did not feel compelled to constantly update my appearance and to customise everything (because A, i'm not a girl and B, I did not buy the Sims I bought GTA).

So when GTAIV came out i read the reviews and had a bit of a sit down. After the sit down i ordered it online and waited for it to arrive whilst still glancing wearily at the glowing reviews offered across every form of media available (even the daily mail liked it!). So when i finally fired it up i expected nothing less than complete and utter disappointment as nothing is ever as good as it is hyped up to be, well, except GTAIV.

It had a few problems such as the bizarre colour saturation that would occur at night so that everything appeared to be directed by Frank Miller, the soundtrack wasn't great and the moral dilemas didn't really matter in the overall scheme of things but it also offered an experience that was totally engrossing.

I genuinely felt upset when major characters died and during the final sequences i must admit that vengeance and madness were writ upon my face. For the first time since joining the real, "grown-up", working world i called in sick so i could plough through a couple of racing missions that had been gnawing away at my consciousness for ignoring them.

GTAIV is also partly responsible for myself discovering the joys of XBox Live, I had always been the guy in a discussion that would shake his head repeatedly and swear that online play was invented by the devil, but when i discovered that DLC would be on the way i immediately went on the hunt for the paraphernalia required to get my XBox online. I haven't actually played GTA online yet, don't really see the point, but with my trusty Broadband connection in hand i embraced the Interweb (as the kids call it) and found a new love (which also happens to be Number 4 in the list)....

4. Braid

I love this game. If it was a lady i would like to marry it (although no doubt we would break up, she'd smack me in the face with her hair and further hilarity would ensue...). I think it was the first game that i bought on XBLA and made me believe that every other game on the marketplace would be of a similar quality and then I had those dreams shattered (thank god i tentatively downloaded the demo of Penny Arcade Episode One).

The score is amazing and the little snippets of a storyline made me re-evaluate what can be done on a small bugget. I like the fact that the game firmly revisits old platform games (the little snappy things that come out of pipes) and then turns them on their heads. I think it was the moment when i realised that i had to use the table in the jigsaw puzzle (that can't be considered a spoiler surely?!?) to get another jigsaw piece that i realised that Braid was a work of genius.

I haven't completed the game though... I feel ashamed to admit it. But i'm stuck on a certain level and i refuse to seek help, one day i will return to this game and beat it.

3. Call of Duty: World At War.

Ok, so it's not as good as COD4, ok it's got a few bugs in the story mode... But it's still more Call of Duty and like Depeche Mode in the early 80's "I just can't get enough". Admittedly the cracks of the game have begun to show in my view now that everyone knows how to hide off the map on multiplayer and the day i joined a group of randoms in a spot of zombie nazi killing (which is always a wholesome hobby) and discovered that there was a glitch in it, i have never been able to kill zombie nazi's again (we reached level 17 before i left in disgust). Thankfully my second favourite game of the year allowed me to do just that (the political viewpoints of the zombies are never divulged but you can use your imagination)....

2. Left4Dead

Valve do not make bad games, it's a scientific fact (fact #2). Whenever i stomped around Racoon City whilst bored friends sat by i always insisted that Co-op zombie killing would revolutionise the world (bold opinion, but i was young). Left4Dead has finally given me the chance to answer my morbid queries such as 'how would i react in a zombie situation?', 'Would i feel comfortable hanging around with a Biker?' and 'would Matt be any good with a shotgun?'. As it turns out, i would react quite well (albeit after a little bit of panicking), Biker's are thoroughly nice people and as for Matt and the shotgun... well, he hasn't bought Left4Dead yet so i haven't been able to answer that question.

The fact that my only complaint about this game is that a few of my friends haven't bought it yet is possibly a reflection of the calibre of friends i chose to keep and a sad reality of how some games can slip through the cracks during the festive period.

Some people may argue that it had no story line, i say that you don't need a story line when Zombies are involved (as does Capcom, Boom Boom!). I can count the number of good Zombie films with good storylines on one gnawed hand! (If you're wondering, it's Dawn of The Dead, obviously, Zombie Flesh Eaters (a zombie fighting a shark counts as a storyline in my book) and The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue)

1, Fallout 3

I'm not sure where to begin with Fallout. A lot of my friends don't like the game and bought it thinking that it was a straight FPS, i scoffed at them and enjoyed the VATS system in all of it's gory magnificence. I loved the fact that one of the first things that you have to decide is whether or not you should destroy a town that offered you sanctuary and two headed cows... Naturally because i'm a bit of a soft touch i decided to save the town by reporting the evil Mister Burke to the Sheriff.

Like a kid at school that told on another pupil i followed the sheriff to see what kind of trouble Mister Burke was is.... Then one of the first of many little faults became apparent as when i followed behind the brave sheriff Lucas into a Saloon to confront Burke (and to offer support obviously) Lucas immediately died, not from gun fire, or even from a witty quip from the well-dressed Burke, he just simply died. Burke picked up his hat and walked away and i had another sit down and realised that this game that i had waited for for years could actually be rubbish.

So i had a cup of tea and thought about it a bit more and decided 'sod it, maybe it was the shock of the idea of megaton being blown up and his heart gave in' and with this i realised that Bethesda were actually geniuses.

The Sheriff's son didn't seem too cut up about the tragic loss of his father and even let me steal a bobble-head from his house!

This aside, Fallout 3 offered such a large world, and such an improvement on Oblivion that i couldn't help but become obsessed with every detail in the world. Bethesda may have exaggerated a few things when building the game up to the media (over 200 endings? i would have settled for 1 good ending!) and the ending was a let down but for sheer post-apocalyptic thrills Fallout 3 was definitely my game of the year.