Another Jeff blog post, so if you're sick of hearing about Jeff-related matters, then close this page right now.

Well. That was. Interesting. I'm far from a staple of Gamespot's site, I know my blog fanbase isn't quite as rabid as I would like it to be ;) But I thought this, and my following decisions were worth blogging about for the few of you who do read, do give a **** about what I have to say or happen to know me in another community and want one place to find all my opinions on the matter.

Here's the first, and largely, the most important sentiment:

"What the ****."

This whole scenario is messed up, basically, and I don't want to spend my time on a site that is so easily persuaded by marketing dollars. When I joined Gamespot, this site was far and away the best. Then Greg Kasavin left... And Carrie left... And Rich left. If Jeff had left of his own accord the tone of this blog would be very different. It would be one of great disappointment.

Whether you agree with Jeff's reviews or not, the fact is, he was a massive... MASSIVE part of this site. A mainstay of almost all their video content, and one of the highest ranking staff. Whoever has to fill his shoes will find it mighty hard to do so.

But this isn't disappointment. This is... Anger. For years I've used this site under the impression I was a member of a videogames community that cared about rating and discussing great games and poor games. Aiding buying decisions, supplying us with news, all UNBIASED. For months, the System Wars goons have been telling us Gamespot is biased in one way or another. Unfortunately. They were right, to a degree. And it's worse than anyone thought.

In the wake of this, what is the average reader to do? Well, it looks like I'm finding another site.

I love video content, so, I'm leaning towards Gametrailers. Probably going to start browsing NeoGAF more in terms of forums.

In unrelated and coincidental events running alongside this pandemonium, I've actually got a little job as a writer at a videogames website now. It's an unpaid thing that I'm doing, for the experience of doing it. And, if any of you are wondering, the reviews I'll be doing for them will be quite different to my Gamespot User Reviews. My user reviews here aren't thorough enough and are simply my opinion on the games. The reviews I'll be doing for this new place will definitely be more professional.

The site is undergoing many changes and right now we're trying to get content up for all the recent games to fit with everyone's busy schedules. I also have a blog there which I'll be writing in, so if you REALLY love me, or if you're leaving Gamespot and really don't want to go anywhere else and want somewhere entirely new, you could do worse than pointing your browser towards www.game-spectrum.com.

So that's it then. We've had some good times (E3 live broadcasts for hours, Gameplay marathons, Zelda 8.8) and some bad times (when my addiction to videogame news has kept me here and away from more important matters (like school)).

To the remaining Gamespot staff that I respect as reviewers and purveyors of delicious internet video nuggets, I wish you the best of luck in Post-apocalyptic Gamespot. To the few friends I've made here, I'll see you on Xbox Live, on NeoGAF, on GameTrailers and on Game Spectrum.

Farewell.

So. I haven't written much. To be honest, I just haven't been playing many games lately at all!

So this isn't a real update, I just have one thing I want to share with you.

I'm in a podcast! It was the first time in a podcast for all of us, the second podcast for a videogame website called Game Spectrum.

Anyway, here's the podcast if you wish to listen:

Click here for the page with the podcast on (If you want to right click and save as, go here)

Or, Click here if you just want the podcast to just play in your browser. You'll need quicktime or something though.

The Podcast is about an hour long, and we discuss such things as E3 and the ESRB ratings system, aswell as give opinions on the latest trailers and demoes of games like RE5 and MGS4.

If you can't tell who the one British guy is, I'm Adam.

Enjoy.

E3. Is. Over.

Personally I think it's been pretty interesting. :)

The new format hasn't excited everyone, and many have said this is the death of E3... Maybe, but I have a feeling we'll see it again, in some form.

Anyway. I'm sure most of you have been tuning in, like I have, to the masses of live coverage. Here are some of my impressions... What I liked, what I didn't, what was cool, and what I discovered.

Ok, so. Microsoft kicked off proceedings with their press conference. A lot of people hated it but I sure enjoyed watching it. Peter Moore playing Rock Band was one of the funniest things I've seen in a while. I can't help but laugh every time I think about it. CoD4 was looking mighy impressive (And did again later on Gamespot's stage) and we got to see some Halo 3.

Most are underwhelmed but I enjoyed the trailer. Graphically it seemed to lack polish and as trailers go it wasn't very well put together... But the gameplay on display certainely looked fun to me. There was also "Halo: Arms Race"... A beautiful short from Neil Blomkamp, and apparently there's going to be more of those, like a series. Good stuff.

Microsoft also delivered the goods to our Xbawks three sixties in the way of demo's for Blue Dragon, Ace Combat 6 and Stuntman Ignition, and trailers of just about every 360 game under the sun. I found Stuntman to be difficult but kinda cool, Ace Combat to be... Well. Ace Combat. Pretty fun. And Blue Dragon really surprised me. I usually hate JRPG's but it was pretty fun going around and just making my dragons kick people's *** all over the shop. Especially the big dude at the end of the fortress level.

Nintendo went up next with their press conference. Holy hell, was the first 15 minutes boring. It took them 20 minutes before they started SHOWING GAMES. Having said that, the Res Evil and Ghost Squad games looked nice. Mario Kart Wii is a cool addition to the Wii library I believe. I'm not really into the direction they're going with Wii Fit and the like but... If that sells their consoles.... Good for them.

Sony rounded out the press cons with their press conference, which many hailed as the "best" of the three. I dunno. It didn't do anything for me personally, but I guess I'm not into what the PS3 has going anyways. Killzone 2 looks better graphically than I expected, but I don't think it lives up to the CGI trailer. And I think gameplay wise it looks relatively lackluster. Aside from that, we saw more of Home... Didn't do much for me either, and I've spoken on my feelings about Home in the past. On the plus side they referenced the Riiiiidge Racer joke. That was good. When Chewbacca came out it was all a bit too crazy and strange. MGS4 showed another good looking trailer, though that game personally isn't for me either. It was certainely a better E3 for Sony than last year. At least it was until they announced no price cut for any PAL territories and the 60gb is being discontinued in America. That sorta destroyed all their hard work getting back on their feet.

We saw a TONNE of games on Gamespot's Live coverage, with some truly awesome stage demos.

Mass Effect was just incredible to me.

"Wow that's huge...

... Oh they zoomed out. That's REALLY huge.

.... THEY ZOOMED OUT AGAIN!? HOW BIG IS THIS GAME FFS!?"

And from then on it was pretty much drooling at the prospects of the game and the pretty graphics. Story confirmed to be penned by the guy who did the story for KOTOR 1 so it should be a good'un with plenty of memorable characters.

I'm more psyched for the game than I've ever been.

Other stage demo's were impressive too. I thought Fracture was looking good... World in Conflict made a good showing, CoD4, as mentioned earlier, was impressive, though I'm not entirely sold on it. I mean, I don't like the idea of stealth in a CoD game. Or the idea of "Capturing people alive" in a CoD game (Noted from the trailer). Also... 16 player online with no controllable vehicles seems a step backwards to me. Even Treyarch managed 24 player online with controllable vehicles.

Warhawk looked pretty good on stage I think, Crysis was beautiful as ever, and Hellgate: London was intriguing. Assassin's Creed, Mercenaries 2 and Burnout Paradise all shaping up nicely. Stranglehold was looking fun as ever. God of War on PSP really impressed me. For a portable game, fantastic graphics. Bioshock and Rock Band stood out on final day, I believe. Rock Band is something I'll probably never buy but it's fun to watch and makes for interesting E3 coverage.

Aaron Thomas has been video bloggin' it up. Good stuff to watch. And also we've seen some stuff only in the blogs that hasn't been reported as news. One of the hardware guys got the new 360 controller colours and "chatpad" in the E3 blog. The Chatpad has a date of September the somethingth and a price tag of $29 attatched to it. That seems to spell well for how much it's going to cost over here, and I can't wait for it.

So. Yeah. Overall, I'm fairly satisfied with this E3. I've said it before and I'll say it again. This E3 has been unsurprising in terms of new announcements, but still, somehow, fulfilling.

My review of Shadowrun is up. I said there'd be one, so I wrote that earlier. Shame it's so late, I think most people have decided whether or not to buy it by now.

In other news, Teamxbox has some great hands-on previews of upcoming games up, including all the bits in the Half Life 2 Orange Box (Which looks kinda cool, you should go check it out). However, rather than HL2:TOB, I found myself strangely attracted to another hands on preview they did recently.

Puzzle Quest.

Puzzle Quest has been something of a sleeper hit for Nintendo DS and PSP, and now it's making it's way to Xbox Live Arcade. I've never played one of them before. But... I'm excited. They sound cool. If it comes out this wednesday I'm going to need to buy some more MS Points.... Hmm.

Anyway, just that little quick update. More later.

Nab's Thought: Where the hell is that Xbox 360 Text input device? I want it.

I was expecting by now, to have recieved one copy of Shadowrun from Amazon.co.uk. I ordered it on the 7th. It's still not here. I'm sure they can't have sold out, so what's taking them so long? I paid for first class postage and everything. It wouldn't be a problem if the videogame stores on the highstreet weren't such rip off merchants charging full price for it. Anyway, all this means is I can't play it and/or review it just yet, but I'll review it sometime... Maybe.

In the absence of Shadowrun I havn't been doing all that much. I tried some demo's of old XBLA games I never tried before, including Joust, Bankshot Billiards 2 and Smash TV, aswell as the new offering as of today, Band of Bugs. I have to say... Smash TV is awesome. How did I never discover that before? I have 400 or so points to burn, so I may well purchase it. It'll be good for a laugh.

I can't help but notice that there's something strangely wrong with gaming lately. I mean we've had some bad gaming news recently. Whether that's small things such as the Halo 3 achievements being seemingly really bad (I'll write more on this some other time) or Team Fortress 2 being announced as having no cross platform multiplayer, or Epic games saying they're not going to announce Gears of War 2 this E3.... Or whether things are slightly worse and spilling out into the public domain and the world of media spin.

A few days, maybe a week or two ago now, Sony got into something of a scuffle with the Church of England, mostly for using the Church of Manchester as a locale for a gun battle. Most of us here know that this was massively overblown. I mean. Resistance was hardly true to life. World War 2 soldiers were fighting aliens in not-too-distant-future... I can understand the position the church took, and why many of Manchesters citezens may have been angered somewhat, especially those who've been victim to gun crime, but I think it's fair to say the media made it into a much bigger thing than it needed to be. I mean... It was top news story some nights. C'mon. It's only a game.

Starting to stray into area in which there is much disagreement between games, is the banning on Manhunt 2 in the UK and Ireland and it's recieving of an AO rating in America. Manhunt games are certainely brutal, and if any popular game were to be banned you'd probably expect it to be this one. Personally, I believe that Rockstar knows that controversy sells their games. They know it all too well and they play to it, and the little rats of the media follow Pied Piper Rockstar straight into the Rockstar money pockets. Resistance I'm sure had a fantastic boost in sales from it's coverage. As soon as something like this happens, every kid around 12 wants in on the "adult forbidden fruit" game. Unfortunately for Rockstar they may have overstepped the mark here. It's a shame because I do believe Rockstar have the game design talent to make fantastic games, and if you ask me, they squander it while pandering to their ideal audience of kids who're too young to play their game but Rockstar knows are going to find a way to play it anyway. I think if GTA4 has online multiplayer this will be revealed. You'll bump into plenty, plenty of kids.

Perhaps the most despicable or "darkest" thing to happen to gaming this week is something I only found out about myself, and am frankly quite shocked at. Law and Order: Double or Nothing, a game released back in 2003 containing images from CCTV footage of Jamie Bulger and his killer. For those who don't know, Jamie Bulger was a 2 year old who was snatched away by two ten year olds, who tortured and then killed him. It's considered a truly horrific murder, and still remembered today. For the makers of Law and Order (Legacy Enterainment and Vivendi), this is a VERY poor move and in more bad taste than I can believe. I mean. It is SICK. What were they thinking? Sometimes, we're made to be ashamed to be gamers, by the media or our peers... We definately don't need people like Legacy entertainment villifying us for us too. It's. Just. Baffling. It doesn't even make sense why they would do such a cruel and heartless thing and I think most of us are agreed it's terrible. I hope that this serves as a lesson for any developer in the future stupid enough to not think about the real world when they're making their games.

In somewhat brighter news, while waiting for Shadowrun I've managed to get into the top 1000 on the Uno Single Player Leaderboard. Worldwide. Go me. And in the brightest news of all, it is now only 20 days until E3! Hurrah!

The excitement of E3 is certainely built up within me already. Last years stands out as being pretty awesome for a variety of reasons, and this year I intend to be watching the press conferences, watching the E3 live coverage as much as possible and definately checking on the System Wars forums whenever possible. Should be a good one.

That's all for now. I'll probably update again soon, either when I've had some time with Shadowrun or when I decide to write about the travesty of the proposed Halo 3 achievements. Until then.

- Newnab

After a delay of a few hours and some very frustrating download errors, I finally got my grubby mits on the Shadowrun demo. It grew on me like wildfire.

While there are aspects of the game that definitely seem like they could've used an extra month of development, the game is, as far as I can tell, a very fun game to play. I went and immediately bought the game off Amazon.co.uk. I'm constantly thinking up new strategies and ways to use spells for better effects and it's something I intend to be playing a lot this summer!

There's a lot of bad blood on the forum(s) and general internet about Gamespot's review, with many noting that according to the achievements, Jeff didn't even play all the maps or win a game with every class... I guess at the end of the day, Jeff just didn't like what they'd done with the Shadowrun license or wasn't a fan of the game. I URGE people to try the demo and decide for themselves, because personally the game has a lot to offer. He was totally right about the ladder animation though... That's stupid.

My copy comes sometime soon, and a few days after I've got it, I'll post my own review up on Gamespot. Until then, look for me online, gusting your grenades back at you.

The release of Shadowrun, first game under the Windows Live Games moniker (Unless you include Halo 2 Vista copies which're already on shelves, breaking the street date) is looming, and it has many people in many minds for two reasons.

First a foremost of a few older Pen and Paper RPGers and SNES owners is the fact that this is a multiplayer FPS based on a deep RPG. Another is the issue of Xbox 360 and PC owners playing against each other, with many believing the PC version will be deliberately ruined to make it a fair match. Others simply don't like the idea of an FPS with magical abilities and the stigma attatched to such games since the infamous rise of World of Warcraft among videogame "nerds" such as ourselves.

But the issue I want to talk about specifically, using Shadowrun as an example, is "How much is a game worth?". If you're in America you'll be paying $60 or so whereas us English will be spending £50 (Or £40 if we use the internet like any sane shopper). Let us say that for an average game we all agreed these were good prices. I know many dont, but for the sake of the debate we'll say these prices are acceptable.

Now.  Shadowrun is multiplayer only. Ordinairily this wouldn't annoy me. I mean, many are prepared to spend full price for a single player only game, and I get much more play out of multiplayer than I do out of single player. However, problems arise when the said multiplayer isn't FULL enough.

Shadowrun has nine maps, two gametypes, no clans, no customization and no custom matches, I believe.

Compare this to say... Halo 3. You'll pay the same price if you don't desire your own Master Chief helmet. Halo 3 has a full single player campaign, a conclusion to a storyline many are interested in. It has multiplayer, which I'm sure will have at least 8/9 maps at launch. Clans. Custom matches. Customization. Countless gametypes, probably too many to count.

It is VERY difficult to say that Shadowrun is a full game. Because it doesn't seem to be, at all.

And yet beta impressions of SR are so fantastic. Almost everyone I've seen or spoken to who was in the beta loves it and is going to buy it, with some even saying it's the best thing they've ever played. The SR beta ran for about 5 months with only one gametype and one map I believe, yet people didn't get bored. Halo 3's beta already has some people bored, with it's three maps and multiple gametypes and playlists. Can the gameplay in Shadowrun truly be so fantastic as to justify the lack of content within?

I guess we'll find out when the demo comes out, but what are your thoughts?