I just couldn't help it!

I have been holding my tongue for so long about the crap that sony are doing, that I finally had to write something!

So I sent Sony customer Services this:

To whom it may concern,

I have been gaming for twenty years.
I have also been a loyal Sony customer since the introduction of the first Playstation model. I have always bought PS products first and others second. Even going as far as to go to Playstation exclusively when deciding to stop PC gaming.

I have spent alot of hours defending your brand and as a rule I cannot find complaint with your services. However, recently I have found it hard to keep my faith in your products.

Firstly, the constant flurry of online service outages.
In what is fast becoming a bi-weekly occurance, the taking down of the PSN/SEN is starting to make being a Sony customer a painful experience.
I understand that sometimes these are done for security issues, but I do not understand why we can't see a changelog when this happens.
We are not asking for your blog managers to translate it for us, instead, we would like to see the changelog and if it matters that much to us, we can look up exactly what it is you have changed. I believe that this needs to be done by your company so that we can actually see that there are reasons behind the taking down of the system.

By continuation, as an IT Professional, I do not understand why server and service updates cannot be done on a rolling basis, stopping disconnection, en masse, from the SEN.

Secondly, the PS branded wireless stereo Headset.
I recently spent almost £100 on your wireless stereo headset. I have been using the standard PS Bluetooth mic for many years and with the release of Battlefield 3 in October last year, I needed a better solution for communicating online. As I stated before, I have been a loyal Sony and Playstation customer and as such, I went with the (what I thought would be) much superior Wireless PS3 Headset (Model Number PS398085)
This piece of equipment was spectactular. Allowing me to communicate flawlessly with other players online without them hearing my game on the microphone.
That is, until Firmware 4.10 was released early in February. Now, as much as my team can hear what I am saying, so can I. The online community was hoping against hope that when Firmware 4.11 was released, that it would fix the problem. But alas, it didn't.
I am now left with a £100 piece of equipment that does not work properly. Battlefield is almost unplayable when trying to use the headset, and I couldn't take advantage of the voice commands available in "Binary Domain" because I was having to listen to myself through the headset.

Lastly, Twisted Metal
I watched the Sony conference live at E3 in 2010 when Twisted Metal was unveiled.
I, and a large part of the gaming community here in the UK jumped for joy at the thought of finally getting a Twisted Metal release on PS3.
Then it was taken from us.
We have had Twisted Metal delayed in the EU for regionalisation. So your delaying the game, AND cutting it, all to the tune of "Twisted Metal never had a big fanbase in the EU" I am sorry, this is wrong. I, and several friends, have imported the American version of Twisted Metal, not just because we want to play it when it was supposed to be released, but out of fear that it will just not be released here (The game is due this week and so far there has been zero marketing for it in the UK) and it has to be said, that considering the game is due a BBFC rating of 15, that cuts are completely unnecessary. I have seen far worse in 15 rated games and if the BBFC think a 15 rating is suitable, why is it being cut?
I would think, that the completely non-functioning multiplayer component of Twisted Metal would be a bigger issue than cutting a few scenes of FMV and changing the way a weapon acts in game.
As a franchise, Twisted Metal is more likely to not have a fanbase in the EU because the multiplayer doesn't work properly in a game that is designed with multiplayer in mind over single player.

Please understand that gamers, as a community, are a loyal breed.
If you treat us well, we will stick around for a long time and give you as much of our money as you can possibly afford. But if you continue to ignore us, and leave us feeling like we are nothing more than walking cash machines for your company, we will look into other options for our gaming fix.

Hopefully you read this and take it as it is intended. As a plea to you to not forget the people that spend money on your products.

Yours Sincerely

Andrew Brooker
(SEN ID: TroubleMaker411)

troublemaker411

Not that I think a single thing will happen, or that I'll even get a reply

But you gotta try aint ya?

I'll update if I get anywhere!

Laters

Jeez!

Another year almost done.

Another year where my Game of the Year was the polar opposite of everyone elses (I had to go with Deus Ex: Human Revolution)

Another year where I spent more on games than I did on my car.

Another year where the quality of games can be iffy, while the quantity is higher than the last year.

And here's to another year like it in 2012.

Merry christmas everyone.

Here is hoping you all have a great one, and a fanny-tastic new year.

It's finally over.

The usual explosion of winter games has finally died down. And thank God! My wallet can finally breathe a sigh of relief!

The scary part is, there is another one on the way, and I'm not sure that My bank balance can handle it!

Over the last couple of months, publishers have been going overboard with their releases and it seem that every year is crazier than the last! I know that it's all about the marketing but my god these guys need to spread out the releases a little. October and November are a prime time to release games. It's obvious. The nights are drawing in, it isn't the time of year where we all go to barbeques, picnics, concerts, festivals etc. and we are looking for ways to occupy ourselves in the evenings. But these publishers don't sem to realise that we would all game, no mater what the time of year and I'm just asking for a bit of a break on my bank balance before the Christmas shopping season kicks in!

Since October, for me, the count is:

• Rage
• Battlefield 3
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
• Assassin's Creed: Revelations
• Need for Speed: The Run
• Saints Row: The Third
• Batman: Arkham City

Seven games. Over eight weeks. Three of them came out on the same day!

A bit of shopping around and your looking at £30 a game. £210 in 2 months, just on games! and the list doesn't include the games like Uncharted 3 that I didn't want, and the games for Xbox that I didn't need because I got rid of the console. But if I had it, Forza and Gears of War 3 would just ADD to the numbers!

Gaming is probably my second biggest hobby, behind movies, but it is definitely my most expensive and with the flurry of games we already know about next year, I'm considering taking out a mortgage just to keep me in games.

Summer was wierd this year. As usual, the drought kicked in and I spent the best part of 2 months just picking up games to play through again. I don't mind obviously. If I didn't want to play them again, I would have rented them!

Then, Deus Ex: Human Revolution came out.

I was in two minds about Deus Ex. I am a massive fan of the originals, but the one console port of the first sequal was so bad, I wasn't sure I wanted to go through that again. On a whim, I bought it just for something to do on a free weekend I had coming up and I'm glad I did.

I loaded mearly 70 hours into it, got the Platinum trophy and am calling it my Game of the Year! I absolutely loved it! If it had come out during the winter rush, I never would have touched it!

DX:HR aside, I would really like to see game releases spread out a little more. In the new year, we get a month off and once february kicks in, it all starts again. I've got around £250 of games pre-ordered just covering between February and April.

The beginning of next year, for me includes:

• SSX
• Twisted Metal
• Starhawk
• Syndicate
• Darksiders 2
• Prototype 2

And a couple, that shopto.net have listed for the same time but I am not sure about the actual release dates

• Theif 4
• Spec Ops: The Line

Again, this is not including games that I haven't decided on whether or not I'm going to buy them. Several HD collections, Catherine and the darkness 2 all fall into that list.

Obviously next year, we're getting Assassin's Creed 3, Call of Duty 9(!) and whatever we have revealed at the VGAs and E3. I have to admit, I'm a little scared as to how much I am actually going to end up spending by the end of the year!

Fingers crossed for a decent lotter win. Because we are coming up to the time where the next consoles are revealed and released, and they'll just be adding to my expense!

Please, gaming gods, be good to me!

:D

This is pretty painful for me to write.

And swallowing my words like this is not something I do regularly.

But, I feel like I may have to apologise to every single Call of Duty fanboy that I have thrown abuse at for the past year and eat a little humble pie in the wake of finishing the Battlefeld 3 single player story.

We all know that Battlefield is a Multiplayer game. Of course it is. It has been built from the ground up with the help of the PC community over ten years to bring us probably the best multiplayer there is. On PC or Console.

But I'm a single player gamer.

I love a great story, I love a range of characters that I can connect woth and I love to feel like I'm part of the action. And Battlefield 3 simply had none of those things.

***MILD BF3 SPOILERS***

The entire single player, all 4 hours of it, was just a grind from one area to the next. The interrogation clips between resembled "Call of Duty: Black Ops" way too much and the end was completely anti-climactic. It was a four hour slug fest to just plough from one firefight to the next with no real story being laid out while you play. The cut scenes between missions were the only story elements and they were pretty useless at setting tone or telling story.

The bouncing around of characters, the wierd way the timeline was delivered was just flat out confusing. Like the three people that were working on the story decided to grab a few elements from the Call of Duty playbook, chuck them into a blender and just leave us with the mess that was left.

And it was missing one important thing.

EMOTION!

Maybe this is just me, but Call of Duty, rag on it all you want, has a fairly well put together story. You can feel an emotional toll being taken on characters as you go through the story. You feel panicked while you're trying to protect Captain MacMillan in Modern Warfare 1, you cringe after Punching a dude in the face when he has a mouthful of glass in Black Ops, and I was genuinly gutted when Ghost was killed in Modern Warfare 2.

These are just a few example of the things that gives Call of Duty a powerful feel to it's story. No matter how short it is, the single player campaigns in each Call of duty game have me wanting more. They have me screaming at the screen because I couldn't control the death of my character. They had me feeling the same way I do at a well exectuted movie, which is what I want out of my games.

Battlefield had none of that. Battlefield 3 had all these little bits that you could tell were SUPPOSED to be emotionally affecting, but I wasn't invested enough to care.

While I may never get into Call of Duty's multiplayer, the single player stories are absolutely phenominal and I hope that DICE take a few lessons from the complaints that their game got in the reviews and bring us a far superior ALL ROUND product next time.

Hey, You never know.

This time next week, once I have played Modern Warfare 3's campaign, I may be eating a whole new set of words!

So, game number two has arrived.

Last week, Warner interactive announced that the heavily marketed Catwoman sections of Batman: Arkham City are going to be locked behind a one-time use code.

Catwoman's section represent around 10% of the single-player experience. If I have understood what I have read correctly, then the Catwoman sections of Arkham City are not only part of the single-player, but drastically alter the story's narrative. This is yet another unacceptable use of the online code, in my humble opinion of course.

I am curious as to the point of this.

Developers and publishers tell us (without EVER showing profit and loss numbers) that the online code is used to retrieve lost revenue due to used sales. Now if this is true, someone needs to explain to me how any revenue is regained when suddenly a deal appeared with Gamestop giving buyers of used copies a one-time code printed upon their receipt.

So besides the glaring flaw in the argument for reteiving lost money, what else is there?

For starters, this is an extremly busy time of year for gamers. From here to Christmas, I can count AT LEAST six games that I want to play. I think it's perfectly feasible that there would be a game that I want to rent. Especially one that comes out a week before Battlefield 3, a game I have been excited about all year and plan to lose weeks to the online. So now I can't play all of the single-player for a game because I have to save a little cash leading up to Christmas and decide that this is the game I'm going to rent?

Not to mention the people that don't have internet. Or what happens if, for example, the PSN goes down again.

Unacceptable!

Just as a sidenote. I was positive that the rules for games on XBox were that it should be possible to 100% a games achievements without the used of codes and paid content? Surely taking access from a playable character, who's skills are required to go hunting for puzzles, violates these rules?

So I went the pre-owned route and bought Rage on E-Bay, and even managed to get one with an unused code :)

I will be trying for the same with Batman: Arkham City. I honestly cannot believe that publishers are doing this and more amazing to me, is that gamers are allowing this to happen.

It seems that the majority of gamers, even those that appear to be against these disgusting practices, will still be buying the game new on day one. I, for one, will not be. The same way I wouldn't visit a cinema that expected me to dance around a few fires AFTER paying my entry, otherwise the sound will intermittently cut out.

The gaming community needs to stand up and be heard!

Would you be happy with putting in a DVD that you rented, only to be given half the film? Would you accept buying a car, new or used, to discover that you had to jump through hoops to get the passenger seat installed?

We shouldn't accept this as the way forward. However, that seems to be the way gaming is going.

It's like they are screaming for piracy!

Who else feels like the online pass situation is getting crazy?

When I first heard about project $10, I didn't care too much. To be honest, starting with the EA sports games wasn't a big deal to me. The few EA sports games that I buy, I tend to keep. And the same can be said for most of the people I know that play them. In this country, FIFA is a big deal and the people that play it don't trade it in. the same can be said for MADDEN for me.

I didn't even care when it hit Battlefield: Bad Comapny 2. The online pass hidden within the "Limited Edition" simply meant that without it, you were stuck to the standard on-the-disc multiplayer. You could still play the game online if you wanted to, it just meant you took a large size $10 kick off the server when the online pass maps were played.

the online pass was created to make sure that game publishers (NOTE: Publishers, NOT developers) can take a piece of the pre-owned market, under the guise of "making sure game creators are paid for their work even when a game is sold on".

I have more than one issue with this.

For me, the biggest problem is the complete lack of honesty from these companies. It doesn't matter how you feel about EA as a company, but I would rather they came out flat and said "you know what, we want a piece of the trade-in pie" But instead, we get a load of waffle about developers hemorrhaging money because of the slow down in sales. Some of the greatest deveolpers appeared and grew during the PS2/xbox era. There was no online pass,there was no control over trade-ins, but these developers still thrived. Back in those days, I was an apprentice, earning a pittance, so trading in my games was a great way to save a little money

My other problem, really, is the lack of quality in these games.

Don't get me wrong, we have had some truely brilliant games in the past couple of years, but we have had more than our fair share of absolute rubbish. And the problem is, it feels like these developers are subsidising their income by adding this $10 fee to games that they are fully aware are sub-standard and are more tha likely to be traded in.

Let's take "Homefront" as an example.

Personally, I thought it was a pretty cool game. But it was painfully short. I mean, a sub-4 hour game should not have an online pass attached to it. the multi-player in that game, I thought, was something special. the problem is, no-one knew it because they didn't bother with it. Those that did, that bought it used, got to play the MP to level 7 before they got the $10 gamer tax added to their price.

I mean seriously, Medal of Honor 2010 was the same. It was a mediocre game. But some of us bought it, and activated our online pass, with the promise of access to the Battlefield 3 beta test phase. But come on. 2 days early access to the completely PUBLIC beta. This is not a reward for buying the game new. This was nothing but a cheap attempt at getting us to buy the game new instead of pre-owned. Further proven by the severe LACK of additional multiplayer content that anyone got. Whether or not you bought it new or used.

Now, every game with a multiplayer component has an online pass. and only the occasisonal multiplayer gem in the piles of boring rubbish are actually worth spending the money on.

But it gets worse..................

Rage developer id recently announced that the multiplayer in their game would not be the target of the online pass.

Instead, gamers that buy Rage used will be locked out of parts of the single player game. This, in my humble opinion, sets a dangerous precedent for the games industry. If i buy a game used, or rent a game that I am not sure about, I am fully aware that the MP is not accessible to me most of the time. But I can stll 100% the Single player if I want.

While I aint sure who's idea it was, both id and Bethesda are culpable as far as I am concerned and when it works, who's to say Skyrim isn't next?

I can really see this turning into the day of the paid demo. With Rage's new found boldness for taking away the single player elements from me because I tried to save a few notes in this ass of an economy. How long is it really going to be before you get to hour 3 in your game and a pop-up box appears saying "ACTIVATE AND BUY YOUR ONLINE PASS NOW" ?

So, instead of buying used, I am going to have to go the other route.

Bargin Bin my friends.

While there are games that I can't help but buy on day one (Battlefield 3, I'm looking at you) but you know what, BF3, and possibly Assassin's Creed: Revelations, will keep me happy long enough to go out and buy Rage, Need for Speed: The Run and Resistance 3 all once they hit the under £20 mark. Sure, I wanna support the developer, but I simply can't be part of the daylight robbery that we are all simply sitting back and accepting.

If once, just once, all the people I see screaming "boycott!" actually found the balls to boycott just one of the many games that are finding new and creative ways to rip us off, maybe the publishers responsible would sit up and pay attention to the very large, but generally silent, gaming community.

I would love to hear how others view this idiocy, and how they feel about it.

I am a fairly angry person.

I find I get wound up quite quickly and fly off the handle at a seconds notice with no real thought for what happens after I come down.

I was kicked out of 2 schools because of it. 1 college (UK college, not University) and lost one job because I was happy to tell my boss where to stick his tight fistedness!

Because of these things, over the years, I have learned to keep my temper much to the improvement of my blood pressure. I do certain things that relieve stress in a big way most days after work (i go gym, to MMA training, anything that I can work the anger through)

But over the last few days, I have found that gaming and it's offshoots are beginning to get on my nerves. So, I thought, it's time to let them out on here!

It's all about the stereotypes.

Every non-gamer seems to see the gamers of the world as childish people with no social interaction, living in their parents basement just waiting for the next installment of Call of Duty to come out.

It's a stereotype that doesn't usually bother me. I'm not like that in the slightest. I have a wife, a decent IT job and a scheduale that allows plenty of gaming if and when I aint out with friends or the family.

Recently though, it seems that this stereotype has been compounded more by certain things happening.

Firstly, the release of the long awaited Duke Nukem: Forever

I have been a fan of Duke since he was a side scroller back in 1991 (well, it was 1992 that I played it, but you get my point)

Duke's persona was always the crazy loud misogynist a-hole that fell straight out of an 80's action flick. But, as we saw from the terible reception "The Expendables" took, we simply won't accept that as an audience anymore. that film, and DN:Forever, were aimed at people like me. Of this I am sure. People that are old enough to remember the "good ol' days" of games and movies without being so old as to fall out of the key mature demographic for most mature games. People who think the 4th Rambo movie was a decent throwback to old movies while being OTT enough to be fun.

But like I said, we just don't seem happy to expect that anymore. After i got the very cool, echo of "Come Get Some" over the mic in DN:Forever, and I had realised that even the kid in me thought throwing crap around was just stupid. And after the child inside had used the whiteboard to draw some of the best graffiti genitalia ever seen. I started to feel offended that even game companies are starting to treat us gamers like the stereotypes. Dick and fart jokes may be fine (to a point) for a 90 minute movie. But they will not hold up a 8-10 hour game when that is all you are offering. Apparantly, Gearbox, and 3D Realms back in the day, seems to think that we as gamers need nothing more than digital boobs to keep us happy. Not true. At least, not as far as I am concerned.

Second, the recent and ongoing hacking issues.

It's not the "hacking" that gets up my nose. Well, unless it means the PSN is taken down for "maintenance". But it's the way these events are covered in the mainstream press. Seriously. At least one story in the Times last week wierdly ranted on gamers calling us all nerds and geeks etc. somehow because we had our personal details stolen from the codemasters website. I am not sure how one relates to the other, but when a ...ahem.... respected UK paper like that is saying those kind of things, then the general public is never going to be able to shift the stereotypes they have of us gamers.

Lastly, the gamers themselves.

I honestly do not mean gamers as a whole. But I do mean the gamers that really don't have any kind of outside social interaction.

I see it all the time on this site. I see it in the comments section for articles and reviews constantly. And it's the main reason my brief stint of spending time in off-topic stopped. Complete narrow-mindedness.

It doesn't matter what the topic, if someone has a different opinion, they are in for a lot of abuse. especially if they work for gamespot. Take Tom McShea's Infamous 2 review the sheer amount of hate aimed at him after that was tremendous. I admit I made a comment on there, but I like to think I was pretty polite and done what the comments section is there for. Commenting. I gave my opinion. And pretty sarcastically said that I believed that Sucker Punch may have wronged him in someway. All pretty light hearted I like to think.

But there are comments on there questioning Tom and his job and throwing straight up hate at the guy for just doing his job. That's simply unacceptable.

And don't even get me started on the comments that appear anytime Carolyn Petit does a review.

I feel disgusted just reading the comments people write. comments on her voice, her gender, saying she should hide in her cubicle away from the public. I really feel ashamed and embarrassed to say that I am a gamer when so many people act like that.

It's the "one bad apple" effect. If one person decides to openly rip into someone because their opinion difers from theirs, or because they don't like the way someone talks, and especially if someone says something so deeply offensive that it makes us regular gamers cringe, then we are all painted with the same brush and we all look like narrowminded fools.

Would you lay into someone who did a review because they were black? Would you dare write in the comments section of modern Warfare 3's review that you have been put off of this game because "the reviewer is asian and obviously has no idea what a good game is?" of course not.

Keep your disgusting comments to yourselves and stop making us all look bad. People can't take gamers seriously when some of us obviously haven't been trained in standard social discipline.

Anyways, that's my opinion and my rant. Feel free to abuse me. I can take it :D

The news just couldn't be better.

I woke up this morning, and there it is, everywhere, THE PSN IS COMING BACK ONLINE all around the world.

I could barely contain my excitement as I switched on my PS3 and saw that for the first time in a month my PS+ subscription's auto-download had found something and it had dragged down the new update and was ready to install.

So, it took a few more hours for the network to reconnect, and it took even longer to reset my wife's account password because I do all the downloading and she doesn't, but it was a sight I was glad to see once I hit "Trophy Collection" and saw that sync bar.
I killed a few games while the PSN was down and my only fear, the fear that beat the million to one chance of my credit card being used, was that my PS3 would die before I got to sync the 40+ trophies I got while it was offline.

But all is good, so far.

The store should be back soon, I can play my games online, I can see and chat to my friends again. I feel like I have finally been digitally reconnected with the outside world.

See you all online!

Only one word can state how things have gone in the fortnight since the PlayStation Network was shutdown.

WOW!

However, it takes two words to describe the reactions from users over the issue.

HOLY CRAP!

I mean, come on. When the PSN first went down, I like everyone else was annoyed. I had just bought Portal 2 and was looking forward to doing a little co-op puzzle solving. But i thought "hey, screw it, I'll take it online tomorrow"

All together now, panto style

"OH NO YOU WON'T"

No, I wont. On the sofa co-op has been the way to go for my portal MP experience so far. I don't mind, it's great fun either way.

I've missed my online gaming, don't get me wrong. I was just starting to do pretty well in Killzone 3's multiplayer and was working on the MP trophies for Crysis 2. But the thing is, after i raged for a few minutes, mainly at my poor, but very understanding wife, I just kind of sat down and decided that now would be the time to crack on with my Single Player games that I haven't touched in a while! And it's been great. No morons cursing me out every time i frag them, no server DCs half way through a great online game. No rubbish P2P servers moving at the slightest online glitch. Instead, it's all game, all the time.

All I have read over the last couple of weeks, falls in somewhere around 65% rage about no online gaming, 30% screaming about the security or lack thereof and like 5% support for Sony.

I understand the anger about not being able to play online. I really do. But it's getting to the point where people like me, who have a life outside of our PS3s and Xboxes are looked at like lepers because of the way people are reacting to not being able to play modern warfare 2 online. At least here in the UK, the outage has covered two absolutely beautiful 4 day weekends. Even the most hardcore of gamers that I know and work with found the energy to go outside and enjoy a good pub meal, or play a game of footy, or even getting some food and beer in for a barbeque!

Next issue, the security.

Sure, Maybe the PSN servers (and the Sony Online Entertainment servers since) were not as secure as they could have been. But if people can hack into the Pentagon, how are the PSN and SOE servers safe? Is it cheap servers and cheap firewalls because Sony don't charge for their online and "you get what you pay for"? Or is it that someone actually has a vendetta against Sony for one reason or another. Whether we know the reasoning or not. Whether it's a group we have heard of or not. This attack seems, at least to me, either directed at Sony to try and make them suffer, or directed at us the consumer and they are going after our saved details. None of which, by all reports, have been used yet. Personally, it seems like it may be the former. If you went to steal our details, you would be using them for something wouldn't you.

That brings us to the third thing in my list, supporting Sony.

Surely even the most immature and idiotic of gamers can realise that the best thing to do in a situation like this would be to prevent all access to a compromised system. Surely, even after two weeks of Black Ops withdrawal, peole can see that the best thing all around is for Sony to get everything throughly tested before they hand access back to the users and more potential hackers.

I work in IT. I have had servers crash, I have had firewalls broken through, and these have been in small companies with only a few servers. The Sony server farm must be running into the triple figures. Just try and imagine the work involved in bringing those back up.

I am dying to get my PSN back. Just because I have XBL doesn't mean I don't miss my PSN. I am dying to try the PSN/Steam crossover on Portal's co-op. But there are plenty of other things to do until it does arrive!

And hey, we're all getting free stuff when it comes back. I say, take your time Sony, the safer the better. Especially when I put my credit card back onto my account!

It'll be back eventually. I don't think we are too far away from the first signs of life. And once that happens, we ca all crack on with our games. Until then, please, understand what Sony are doing for us and stop making all us gamers look like paranoid, no-life, basement dwellers!

*******MEDAL OF HONOR 2010 SINGLE PLAYER SPOILERS BELOW*******

A few days ago, I posted a blog about re-purchasing Medal Of Honor (2010) and how on second view, it didn't seem as bad as I had previously thought.

Only probl;em was, at the time, I hadn't touched the single player component of the game.

Now I have.

And I gotta say, it's excellent.

A lot of people will disagree with me on this, and maybe I am in the minority, but I found the single player excellent.

Sure, it's short, and the difficulty is pretty easy. But i found that it was so much fun to play that half the reason I found it short was because I didn't want it to end. I remember alot of reviews slating the fact that you bounced around the playable characters and it was impossible to get into the story. Not true. I could follow the story from start to finish and when the end finally came I found myself really wanting to carry on. The fact that the only character to die is the one guy that carries a lucky charm really seemed to put a lump in my throat at the end. The guys at EA LA (Danger Close) really took on board a lot of the mythos about the armed services and gave us a great story.

I have to say, I really enjoyed it, and the only thing stopping me grinding for the platinum trophy is teh sheer amount of games coming in the next few weeks!

I am really glad i picked this game up again, and it's something i will definately revisit.

It's even better now that Danger Close have confirmed they are working on a sequel. I, for one, cannot wait