YAY!!! Between now and xmas us gamers are spoilt for choice at what is shaping up to be one of the busiest game release quarters of all time, and I have been fortunate enough to play most of these games after attending GAMEFEST.

I've always been a fan of all genres of games with my favourites often being either immersive single player experiences (atmosphere and story thumbs up!) or 'absolute random multiplayer carnage' where I can play with my friends and the outcome is not purely skill based. I do not hate certain publishers, developers, game franchises, genres, or consoles. I love them all. So I was the perfect audience for GAMEFEST 2 weeks ago and tried as many games as possible, sat in on as many demonstrations as I could, and talked to as many other gamers as time would allow.

3 IS THE MAGIC NUMBER

Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, Uncharted 3, Gears of War 3, Resistance 3, Mass Effect 3, MAx Payne 3, Diablo 3, and Saints Row The Third. Ok Diablo 3 and Max Payne 3 weren't there but the others were, and with playable demos.

A RAGE OF AWESOME

Heading over to the Bethesda section I was keen to see what they were showcasing for Skyrim, easily my most anticipated game coming out in an awesome line-up of awesomely awesome games! Somehow I missed the prey 2 presentation (gutted!), I had already seen all of the skyrim footage online so nothing new.. but did get to try out ID's new title 'rage.' AND OMG RAGE IS AWESOME. Surprisingly out of all the games I tried (and I tried alot) Rage was the best. Seriously.

PROTOTYPE 2

The MW3 presentation consisted of a live demo showcase of 2 areas, the new york level from E3, and the 1st ever viewing of a section of a london level. The game looks impressive but I was really hoping to see a presentation like they do at some of the bigger game expos - with someone telling us about the game not just letting us watch 30 mins of live demo. I figured I'd check out another presentation, the last one of the day, 'prototype 2.' Wow. Please check this game out. Some of the team behind the game had flownin from Canada and they really put on a show, got the crowd going, showed exclusive footage, took time to explain features, answered questions, and most of all WERE EXTREMELY PASSIONATE ABOUT THEIR GAME. Sadly not that many people bothered going to the prototype 2 presentation yet the MW3 one was filled.

QUEUES

The queues (or lines for my American friends) were stupidly long for usual suspects MW3 and Battlefield 3. I didnt bother with them. While in the line for RE: Operation Raccoon City the girl queuing in front told me she had waited 2 and a half hours to play Mass Effect 3. I said " was it worth it?" She replied "of course it's Mass Effect 3!" I avoided waiting longer than 40 mins for anything, and in most cases played straight away. I came to the following conclusions:

- I suck at street fighter X tekken
- Dark souls looks identical to Demon Souls
- Using the move to play a FPS is ridiculously hard (Resistance 3)
- You can move while shooting in RE: Raccoon City
- Sega have the least memorable names for games (binary something, anarchy something, and nightmare something)
- People will queue without knowing what they are queuing for
- Halo Anniversary seemed identical to every other halo game
- Turtle Beach headphones are amazing
- Batman Arkham City needed more than only 3 consoles to play demos
- F1 (racing) is crazy popular

FREE STUFF

Driver San Fransisco soundtrack on... wait for it... Vinyl!!! How cool is that? (Very cool). Saints Row had turned their sealed off booth into a VIP bar with purple carpet, leather sofas to enjoy while playing the new absolutely awesome Saints Row 3. I grabbed a bottle of water from the bar. It was called Saints Flow (the small print on the bottle said trademarkedby the Saints so F**K OFF). Little details helped prove that Saints Row love what they do. I love what they do too!

I went to Gamefest to check out new games coming out. It seemed most people went to get as much free stuff as possible. The Rage guys were kind enough to give me a MASSIVE carry bag to put stuff in. It said RAGE on one side and SKYRIM on the other. Guess how many dumbasses asked my where I got the bag from? Lots. But how many people followed that up with - do I have to play the games or can i just get the bag? All of them. What is wrong with these people? I thought we were there to play games!!!

Oh and Uncharted 3 gave me a free tshirt. Yay! Thanks for reading, my next post will be what I got to see/play at the Eurogamer Expo in London which happened the following week. =) x

It struck me as odd the other day that for the first time I don't have a huge list of games that I am looking forward to due for release this year. All the 'big games' have been released over the last 6(ish) months. Here are a few:

FPSs: Bioshock2, COD:MW2, Wolfinstein 3, AVP, Stalker: CoP
Co-op: L4D2, Borderlands, Army of Two, Halo3:ODST
RPG: Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age, Torchlight, Demon's Souls
Action: Uncharted 2, Assassins Creed 2, The Saboteur, Batman Arkham Asylum
Smash stuff: Darksiders, Bayonetta, Dante's Inferno, Wet
MMOs: Champions, Star Trek, Global Agenda, MAG
Strategy: Solium Infernum, King Arthur

I've probably forgotten quite a few trying to cover a range of different titles. My point, however,is that whatever your genre most of the top games are out. Let's say you want a beat-em-up. Tekken 6, Street Fighter 4, MK vs DC - these are the latest versions of these series without near future releases planned. Sports? All the 2010 versions are out now. Management - Sims 3 is out and just started with expansions. Party - DJ hero, Beatles rock band, anything on the wii. Survival horror - the latest silent hill games are out (shattered memories, SH5, origins), RE6 is years away so RE5 still is relatively new and shiny, and dead space looks better than anything planned for the near future. I was even looking forward to SAW (which is now out). Within the next few months we can hopefully add Heavy Rain, FF13, Ruse, Metro2033, Supreme Commander 2, Mafia 2, God of War 3, Napoleon Total War, and Alan Wake to the list of released games, then there won't be much left to get excited about.

This isn't a complaint. For me this is good news. There are still games to look forward to but there are also so many great games out already. We have a great selection available to us. Now I have some time to hopefully play through some recent cIassics without getting distracted by new releases (I'm easily distracted!).

And to add to the fact that so many great games are out now, many developers are focusing on DLC. Most of my favourite games within the last few years have extra missions or maps. It's brilliant! I still play TF2 and its constantly updated with free maps, weapons, and achievements. Last year I spent more time playing battleforge than any other game. It hasn't even been out a year and already had 2 large expansions (for free). There are so many good examples of DLC and expansions keeping older titles fresh. And for PC we have mods too! I now have more games I want to play then I will ever have enough free time for. I can't help but think this is good.. even if it means I will miss out on some titles :)

If you're looking for a new MMORPG to play chances are you've read up on Age of Conan. If not then maybe you should. I'll be honest I don't play and MMOs, but I've been reading up on age of conan and I'm tempted to start. So I'm surfing the net, looking for some info on AGE OF CONAN (only) and find this little gem in the telegraph (UK newpaper) - "Computer gamers have staged a revolt after the gravity-defying breasts of characters in a popular game were suddenly reduced." Turns out that the maximum breast size had been reduced in error during a programming alteration carried out to fix other bugs.

Check out the difference for youself:

"If this isn't fixed in a reasonable amount of time, ie a day or two, I will be un-subscribing," one player, calling himself Dusk, wrote on the game's official forum. Wow.

Developers Funcom have announced a statement confirming that "some of the female models in the game have had the size of their breasts changed. This is due to an unintended change in data that was introduced in an earlier patch, data which controls the so-called morph values associated with character models and the size of their respective body parts."

"We are working on a fix for this and your breasts should be back to normal soon." - Funcom

For anyone wanting to play the game who is now 'put-off' don't worry; Funcom have since fixed the problem. Can I just make it clear that when i found this story I was surfing for AGE OF CONAN and that was it. Think I may have to get Age of Conan for its big... quests.

How important is the spec of a games console? How about the games released on it? Pretty important right? Are they the most important things? Yeah? Well maybe not. I believe that Sega ended up exiting the games console market mainly through bad BUSINESS decisions. Let's go old school and remember the days when Sega had it all..

Can you remember the days of SNES vs Mega-drive/Genesis? Nintendo and Sega were in such a powerful position in the games industry it was hard for competitors to enter the market. Sega's next-gen console, the Saturn, was deemed the future and had no immediate competition from Nintendo. How could anyone screw this up? How about these 3 key mistakes:

1) Delays

The Saturn was delayed well over a year. What many people don't realise is that this delay was business influenced. Sega were doing so well in the market with the Mega-drive/Genesis and its add-on hardware that the release of the Saturn 'so soon' was not a profit maximising option.

2) Loud and Proud

Sega had announced almost everything about the Saturn 3 years before the release. They were beaten by PlayStation hands down due to Sony keeping extremely quiet about their games console until nearer it's release date. This also helped build hype near the release date, not 2-3 years before like for the Saturn (very early marketing). By the time the Saturn was released it already seemed old news. Sony were also able to find out way too many details about the competition so early in their own development of the PlayStation.

3) Underestimate the competition

Hearing of Sony entering the market should have worried Sega much more than it did. They may had found out later than they had liked about the PlayStation, but should have responded by releasing the Saturn AT LEAST 6 months before, ideally a year, such as Xbox 360 has done to the technologically superior PS3 enabling the 360 to dominate through an early start and being able to get it's "later wave" of games for the console out that normally annihilate the launch games. This could have countered Sony's 'keep quiet' marketing.

In UK the Saturn's launch was a disaster compared to the Playstation. This hopefully shows how important the right business decisions are to even a dominant player in the games industry. I've read so many games console comparisions of success revolving around specs and games that I thought I'd try something different. Thanks for reading, please add your thoughts and comments.