It disturbs and upsets me that after spending considerable time playing through, balancing up and writing out a thought through, snappy and legible user review, that no matter what I always seem to get more negative than positive feedback. One recent prime example of this is with Blue Dragon. Anyone alive should be able to work out that the game has pretty serious issues and faults. Yet despite this rather obvious revelation, the mere mention that perhaps it's not the greatest game in the world in my review is met with cries that I don't have a clue what I'm talking about with an abundance of negative feedback. Are these cries from a bitter development team perhaps? Some wise old sage in the mountain who owns every game known to mankind? No. They almost always originate from some juvenile, illiterate 13 year old who was more than likely still working out how the toilet works when the real 'classics' of the genre were released. Fair enough maybe the game is fantastic to some pre-pubescent rapscallion who's never seen this form of game before, but the fact that I am in my mid twenties means I have seen this genre plenty of times before and that I've also seen it done a hell of alot better. I was expecting there to be similar people to me on this rickety gamespot boat. However as of late I'm starting to have trouble finding such people. One dubious Blue Dragon user review from (what I assume) the pre-pubescent age range rated the game as 9.5 but then went on to list an abundance of problems. Finally to top it all off, iced the stupidity cake with saying he'd only played the demo 'but still how cool the actual game must be'. It's that kind of retardness that really gets on my **** Don't they explain anything to kids at school these days? Do they understand how reviews work? Don't worry that kind of thing will be ignored they say. But instead it gets a bucket and a barrow of positive feedback. I'm hoping at least some fairly rational people can get something from my game review opinions. But it seems as if the vast , vast majority of users take one look at your final score and then yay or nay. I think it'd be a good idea to ask users who feedback on reviews to publically explain underneath why they agree or disagree. Then you could really tell if they're valid or not.

Recently, I've noticed that everything on my Xbox360 takes an excrutiatingly long time to load or do anything. Especially when it loads up at the start, looking up user profile info or switching dash panels. I don't know if it's because I've been playing alot of crappy games recently but for some reason there seems to be slowdown occuring in everything too!

Also in nearly a week I've yet to find one single match of Fatal Fury online. I don't know if it's broke or if it finds games based on regional locale? Eitherway, it's pissing me off that I paid for something that doesn't work properly.

I'm starting to think it might be something to do with the maintenance that happened the otherday?

The Sly Cooper games sold terribly. None of them reached platinum status despite being better (in my opinion) than pretty much 90% of the games ever released on the PS2. As far as platform/adventure titles go it was at least in the same league as the Rachet & Clanks, Jax & Daxter's & maybe even the mighty Psychonauts. It was original, a great game mechanic and a great script with real likeable characters.

While obviously it's hard to sell the 'stealth' concept to a under 15 audience in a platform game. With the higher age userbase of the PS3 surely you'd imagine Suckerpunch to berabid at the mouth at the thought of how much cash they should be raking in if they pushed one more time with the franchise.The crystal clarity that the 1080p display could provide for their cell-shaded genius would make it visually amazing.

But no. Instead they'd rather release what for all intended purposes looks like a Crackdown rip-off. Hardly a stellar game to draw inspiration from. If Suckerpunch are intent on going out of business great for them. How many times have you heard 'Infamous' mentioned the last 4 months? You haven't? That says it all then.

Maybe, just maybe the PS3 would fair better if it fell back on it's strengths rather than trying to up one up MS's exclusives? Look how much interest the new Ratchet & Clank game is getting for a prime example. It's turning into a system seller. Sort it out Suckerpunch, nobody wants Infamous. They want PS3 platformers, you have a great franchise, don't be a fool!

Having already bought this game nearly a week ago now I'm still awaiting a review from gamespot (more out of curiosity than for any factual information).I realise that it isn't yet released in America or AU(and everyone is playing Bioshock anyway) however IGN have already reviewed it (for what that's worth) and there'sthe whole UK GS staff who couldn't have /all/ gone to Leipzig. Considering this game has been hyped so much over the official Xbox newsletter for the last 6 months it's shocking that there's no review.

So what's the deal there? Aren't the UK staff allowed to review the A grade new releases? destined to review nothing but ICC cricket, FIFA & Pro Evo for all eternity? Or is there some unwritten rule which states Greg Mueller has to review every single RPG now that Kasavin has gone?

Maybe 2K games are paying a bit of hush money so no-one plays/buys anything but Bioshock till the end of the month?
Either way a bit of a cock-up there Gamespot!

Space giraffe is amazing.

First of all I had no clue whatI was doing, nothing seemed to make sense and my score ratings were pathetic. Looking on the leaderboards pretty much everyone I knew was the same. This led me to think the game was just too damn difficult for it's own good. So I played through the tutorial once, then twice and ZING! all the pieces suddenly fell together. 10mil in tutorial level, a piece of cake!

3 hours later this evening I'm hooked! (and upto rank 250 by level9) I did buy Blue Dragon today(not Bioshock which no doubt will be in a million pre-owned bins this time next month) but I didn't even give it a second glance.

It's my opinion Space Giraffe is better than Geometry Wars and takes the title of best XBL game as of yet. I heard a reviewer atOXM gave the game 2/10, what a bloody idiot. As I've mentioned on a previous blog post, that magazine would have done everyone a massive favour if it'd stayed as trees.

Today I traded in my Wii at Gamestation. Amusingly they couldn't take it off me fast enough as I traded it in for nearly 10 Xbox360 games. A year earlier that would have probably set me back about £400 (but now them being pre-owned it cost next to nothing). They say cars lose their value quickly! Obviously they don't know the games market.

Overall the Wii was a huge disappointment for me. I believe the reasons the SNES worked for Nintendowas because of 3rd party support, amazing first party titles and lack of competition. All these factors have slowly slipped away and now all that's left is a machine selling on the premesis of a gimmick.

I hope someone out there has more fun than I did with my Wii. As a gambling man however, I'm more likely inclined to bet that in a year or two everyone'll be rushing to do what I did before the consoles value plummets.

It seems that;

• GTA IV
• Naruto: Rise Of A Ninja
• Kane & Lynch

Are all out on the same day October 19th. This means that I can enjoy neither game as I'd want to be playing one of
the others at the same time! Not to mention my poor poor bank balance!

What a lame release schedule. With all the other games I want to get;

• Stranglehold
• Halo 3
• Assassins Creed
• Beautiful Katamari

Looks like I might get about a week a title to finish them!

So nearly 2 weeks later I've still not even been able to send my 360 off. Despite 3 phonecalls.
Sure they agreed to fix it for free, but due to a catalogue of errors I'm yet to even send it off.

1: Address labels don't turn up at my address.
2: After agreeing to Email them to me instead, the return address on them is completely wrong.
3: I receive an Email informing me my system is on the way back to me (despite not even sending it off!).
4: When phoning to inform them of this no-one answers after 20 minutes.

Therefore as it's been 2 weeks I've decided to try my luck with the store instead.
Luckily I still have the receipt so it should be fine.

Microsofts support is a complete joke.
They need someone who can speak & understand English.

Yup. Happened to me today which no doubt means weeks of trying to get Microsoft to sort it out and no gaming for me :(.
From what I read 8 months is actually pretty good going. Still ridiculous though. My PS2's coming on 7 years old and never had a problem, neither my Dreamcast or my Gamecube ;p.

Finished Hotel Dusk this evening. Very enjoyable game easily on par with the Phoenix Wright series. Maybe could have been fleshed out a little bit more in terms of interactivity. But in terms of it falling under what I term the Noveau-Adventure genre it does it very well indeed. I'll try and write a user review about it when I have some free time away from FC Guitar Hero 2.

Crackdown is a different kettle of fish. Some things it does well, some others not so well.
I may also write a review of this however the feedback i've been getting is that when I give a game a not so great rating it doesn't bode well with the readers. That said I received a message praising my Just Cause review which was nice. Although I doubt i'll ever get the kind of feedback I got from Urban Chaos again. But they may well be because I received a promo of the game before Gamespot did :p doubt that'll repeat itself. Infact I haven't been sent any promo's of games into my store for forever. I guess they realised it wasn't exactly boosting sales of said titles.

On a side note I really hate seeing people who give games 9.9 and so forth. A game to get such a perfect score for me would be one in which I never got bored of playing, maybe a life changing experience, never finding anything I thought could be better fleshed out and so forth. I guess the general age group of this website doesn't allow such literal thinking as that and they just chase whatever the big trend or excitement is of the moment. It's unfortunate.

Laughably it's probably these exact same people who write the reviews for official xbox360 magazine. I don't know how they can keep a straight face with some of the biased incorrect BS they churn out month after month.