So my Epic wait for broadband is nearly over, December 30th is the big day. The day my broadband gets switched back on and I can start to play on Xbox live. As some of you know I've taken to writing my blogs in work too make up for the fact that I can't blog at home, which has worked up too now.

I now face 2 problems stricter controls in work may mean I can no longer blog here, now on its own this isn't much of a problem since my internet will be on in 2 days but my big problem is this the ISP just sent me an email confirming delivery problems in my area and Royal mail (the UK postal service) have confirmed that there is a chance my router won't get here for about a week.

RAGE i already waited 1 month for this don't make me wait longer!!

So if you see me blogging on Wednesday again I will either have broadband at home or work missed the fact that tons of their bandwidth gets used on this site, either way wish me luck.

One last thing if I get on Xbox live on Wednesday i am holding a poll for the first multiplayer game to play please comment below with whichever game i should dedicate my first day too.

The choices are

Left 4 dead 2

Modern warfare 2

I'm now officially sick , brought down in the prime of life with the man flu. the worst think is all the shops are closed so i can't even get beechams or a lemsip so i'm completely bunged up and my head is spinning.

if you have any home remedies for the cold please write them below and send all get well soon cards too the usual address :P

Everyone else did it so here is my full Xmas Haul first of all I will cover the presents I opened and used before the big day

I got a blackberry 8130, but because I had no phone I had to get it early December

Fragments__ also bought me DJ hero but because I had such a bad day she let me open it

Now all the stuff I got on Xmas from Santa :P

I got 2 new games Left 4 Dead and Modern warfare 2(my original disk broke when Xbox fell over)

I got a Babyliss itrim so I can trim my facial hair easily and this shaver is absolutely amazing took me about 2 mins to do my whole face and the hair is nice and even ,I would recommend this to anyone looking for a trimmer.

I also got the zone 40 the wannabe Wii I spoke about in a previous blog

And finally I got an iPod touch 32gb(third generation) 2 free apple TV downloads and a £50 iTunes card which I used to by the following games for it, I also bought some songs as well

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition

Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid

Real Racing

N.O.V.A. - Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance

F.A.S.T.

I've only played Rolando before playing this but so far I have had so much fun with that and for my next purchase I'm going to get the zombies COD game for it.

I got a bunch of gift cards for various games stores the only problem is none of them come to the full value of the game and they are all for different game stores, honestly its almost like they never got together and spoke about this :P common family!!

Anyway I'm planning to use these to get bayonetta, darksiders and mass effect 2 for cheap which should be nice.

Oh and to the people who bought me the black shirts …thanks it was just what I needed 3 black shirts :roll:

for anyone as excited about mass effect 2 as i am below i have placed links for all the ****s reveal videos , unfortunately gamespot have yet to get them all so i will pass these out until they do

Vanguard

infiltrator

adept

sentinel

engineer

soilder- no teaser trailer yet but his special ability is the adrenaline rush , where he goes in slo mo and can get shots in easier

My new year's resolution for 2010 is too finish the projects I started a this year which unfortunately due to some technical issues(broadband being turned off, computer breaking and long work hours) I have been unable to finish.

The first Project is a flash game that I started and never finished because I lost all my work when my old PC died and the second project was a story that I was writing. Now I would like to get the Gamespot community involved on this as I actually never came up with a name for either project.

The Game is designed to look 8bit and is designed to be very old school in the way that it plays. In the game you play as one of three wizards each with varying **** of play and difficulty, the game is set in a single screen maze into which enemies pour in. Your task is simple kill the enemies using your spells and stay alive as long until the timer expires. I have included below a picture of the three wizards.

The fire wizard is the easiest to play. His mana pool is limited but it recovers quite quickly over time. His ****is quite aggressive his three spells are listed below

Fireball - the basic attack spell kills enemies in 1 hit

Fire blast- an AOE spell that kills all enemy in a relatively small area around the wizard, completely drains the mana pool designed as a last resort

Barrier- a bubble of fire is projected round the wizard, negating 1 enemy attack this spell costs a small amount of mana over time and has a long cool down before it can be used again.

The ice wizard is more difficult to play he has a larger mana pool but it will only regenerate when enemies get frozen by his spells. The ice wizard plays a defensive game

Ice bolt- A frozen shard shoots from wizard it has a 50% chance to kill an enemy if it fails the enemy will be frozen.

Ice storm- Freezes all enemies within a moderate area around the wizard costs no mana but has a moderate cool down, great defensive manoeuvre but is primarily used to regain mana.

Frozen skin- the wizard's skin turns to ice granting the wizard temporary invulnerability and he gains the ability to freeze enemy on contact, this will drain the whole mana bar and should only be used in an emergency.

The necromancer is the hardest ****to play as he does not have a mana pool rather he uses a system of soul energy which starts out empty and must be completely filled before enemy can be killed. The necromancer must be played strategically in order to complete the levels.

Siphon- The basic attack tags the enemy gaining the player soul energy as long as the enemy stays alive, the more enemies tagged the faster the soul gauge fills.

Dark destruction- once the soul gauge is filled the player can unleash the soul energy accumulated all enemy tagged with siphon will explode killing themselves and all enemy within a very small area around them. This will empty the soul meter.

Demon pact- the player turns into a demon for a short period all enemy stop moving for 1 second, the player will move at a slower rate while transformed but the soul gauge will increase at a higher rate. If demon pact is active when dark destruction is used the explosions from tagged enemies will be slightly bigger than normal.

Below I have included a shot of what the game might look like minus the enemy which I haven't designed yet :P also the map is actually one from bubble bobble on the NES but it's just to give you some idea of what I'm aiming for.

I hope to have a proof of concept flash game ready for about mid February.

The second project I have been working on is a short story, it's kind of embarrassing but I really like the idea behind it and I was inspired by the rift in our own society about video games, so here is the general overview for it.

The people of the planet are very spiritual, the deities live amongst them and each individual person is assigned into their own caste for instance the religious caste is made up of priests and elders those who are closest to the deities and they wield power using religious artefacts to enhance their own peoples psychic abilities, you have the common caste, ordinary people who have normal lives divided between prayer and work , this caste has a very basic physic ability and finally the slave caste an almost drone like people who have lost their psychic ability and are forced to work the menial tasks below the ordinary people, their lack of any psychic talent is seen by the other castes as a sign of disfavour from the gods and because of this many people avoid those from this caste.

The story that I am writing basically involves a very low clergy member with extraordinary psychic ability the story will take you through his quest to find a relic of the gods which in his society is how you gain advancement.

Then later the gods start to disappear from the planet, it will follow his story of his investigation into the matter and the emergence of a race of people whose goal it is too conquer the planet using their advanced technology.

I don't really have much on this I'm still trying to sort of finish the story arc and decide where I want to take the story.

Anyway if you can think of any names for the game that would be awesome as I am completely stumped and if the game works out I'm thinking of joining XNA creators club and taking it onto the indie games.

If you recall my editorial from yesterday I covered many of the problem gifts given to gamers by well meaning but ill-informed family members. Far be it for me to expect any more from my own family, the irony stick has struck me hard as I received what can only be described as the world's worst Wii knock off.

Rather than simply dismiss this gift as a January return I decided to bust it out and give it a whirl. Here it is the offending item.

The zone 40 is a wannawii that features over 40 games ranging from fencing to a Pacman clone called cat and mouse, surprisingly its control pad is actually quite good it reacts well to motion and quickly translates the movement on screen the main problem is that the graphics in the games belong in the 16bit era and the controller only recognizes one motion "the waggle". That's right in the games you either press a button or waggle the controller so for fishing if you want to cast you waggle if you want to reel in you waggle. this thing is beyond bad!!

The worst thing is this console cost my relative almost £40!! That's a third of the price of a Wii I could get a preowned PSP or DS for this.there isn't enough exclamation marks in the world to showhow bad this is :P

If you also received a less than thrilling product as a Xmas gift post it below, it doesn't even have to be game related or if you have had a good year post your worst gift ever.

I for one am worried, its Christmas time again and the shops are filled with offers and present ideas, now that the video game industry is worth around 11.8 billion dollars worldwide every shop and supermarket now stocks video games and their respective peripherals.

In this editorial I will cover many of the problems associated with buying a present for a gamer and try to show you as a gamer why you shouldn't blame this on the present giver.

Problem gift number 1: The accessory pack

What stores like Game and Tesco's have started to do is market Wii accessory packs complete with depictions of accessories with the Wiimote attached not only does this lead parents and grandparents to believe they are buying a controller for little Timmy but this also justifies for them the high sales cost of around £20 for a bit of plastic shaped like a tennis racket, steering wheel or nose hair trimmer.

Take for instance this house of the dead hand cannon, it's boxed in such a way that you cannot see that the inside of the gun is actually empty and it does not say clearly on the front of the box that this is the case instead the box has many vague sentences like "for use with the Wii controller" or "designed to work with house of the dead overkill" none of which make clear that you actually will need to buy a Wiimote separately and for the price of £15 you certainly can see how this can fool people.

This hand cannon certainly isn't a one off here are some other products that even get around the fact that their packaging is opaque by including a replica of a Wii controller handily covering that empty space

N.B I got these images from Amazon, these products where more reasonably priced online and they did also include notes on the accessories stating that the Wiimote is indeed bought separately which I felt was very responsible

Problem gift 2: the budget game

If you have ever entered a game store you may have noticed that they tend to have a prominent section which houses budget titles, relatively old games which they want rid of so prices have been slashed to around half of that of a new release, there is nothing wrong with this, it's a great way to pick up quality titles at a low cost. The Problems start when a relative see's a multiplayer game that they think you will like. Let's take for instance a game that I could have played if there was someone to play against. Quake 4, I was mistakenly bought this last year I got it from a relative who shall remain nameless and is well known for their miserly ways, Quake 4 was an ok single player experience but the meat and bones of Quake has always been its multiplayer, the problem was the only time I could get a match was when one other guy was online, he would host and I would join eventually it got boring and quake went in the pile only 1 day old never to be played again.

This was pretty bad but imagine this with a multiplayer only game like Socom or battlefield, these older games are all but useless now yet stores offer them at attractive prices in a prominent position.

Problem gift 3: the wrong version

With the last few years being the biggest ever for sequels and franchise games with similar names, gift buyers are bound to run into some problems with picking up the wrong game. Ask for modern warfare 2 and you're as likely to receive modern warfare or even Battlefield modern combat. Another problem is that parents a lot of the time won't know which console it's on leading to embarrassing ps3 games for your 360 scenario.

The big problem is that stores are not very helpful when it comes to choosing a game, here is a scenario I have seen play out many times between store clerks and parents.

Parent: hi there, I wanted to buy a game for little Johnny, I think it was modern something??

Store Clerk: is it modern warfare?

Parent: yes that sounds right

Store clerk: it's over there

Parent then proceeds to move in that direction and picks up the first game with modern in the title regardless of the console.

Problem gift 4: the replacement product

This is by far the worst crime against gamers ever, these products are not only designed to look like the product they are meant to replace but are generally marketed as having the same attributes even though they are inferior in every way, leading many ill-informed buyers too believe that they are saving themselves money on the product you want.

Some examples of this are:

Jakks Pacific Ultimotion

TVisports interactive

and thismonstrosity

these problems are too widespread so this year I'm going to take all my unwanted gifts and make them into some artwork which I will proudly display In my home office as a sign too all too be more cautious as too what they buy me and I hope my fellow gamers will join me in my new year resolution to not hold it against these gullible people who only want you to be happybut instead offer your advice as too what would have made better alternatives.

Until next time don't hate the player hate the game stores :P

Today I haven't been doing a lot, I just sat around staring at my TV screen this is because I just found the XBLA compilation disk that came with my replacement Xbox and contains a gem of a game known as Pacman Championship Edition.

Now I won't get into it too much as I also done a player review which you can check out here. Pacman CE is essentially an update on the retro Pacman game, it adds a bunch of new features and is focused on scoring as much as possible within a set time.

I can't stop playing it, every time I thought about putting it down to write my blog I thought to myself "just one more go, hit that high score when you're still on form" I pressed the start button and away I went one-more-going it until my eyes bled form all the neon goodness.

Anyway that's a bout all I've done today but in about 5 hours time I'm heading to watch avatar in 3D which I can't wait for and we'll be holding our own mock Xmas dinner which is just the icing on the cake for me .

I did try to upload some videos of me playing Pacman but Gamespot wouldn't accept them no matter what format I converted them into so I'll just leave this link so you can watch what is essentially the best run I've ever seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy0J27k1Z5E

leveled up finally, now im toobin'.

i loved that game i hope they remake it, proper blog coming later i just wanted to throw this out while im looking at some videos

I finally got snow, i can't believe it after so many days of all the american users boasting about their snow fall ireland gets its own snow!!

me and fragments__ had a bit of fun with it

First of all i got excited so i blogged about it in the snow :D

:shock:fragments__ got super excited

And finally i wrote her a big message in the snow with my foot,it was so big you could see it from space...

well at least you could see it from the office...

on other good news my broadband gets turned on DEC 30th so i'll be back playing games online at this time.

merry xmas folks (the snow got me in festive mood)

Today I had a little adventure into the world of online services, I let my curiosity get the better of me and I decided I was going to click on adverts online and follow them until I found something fun to do.

I went to Google typed in a few random words and off I went clicking on adverts and banners when I saw them checking out everything from buying ink for printers, right down to playing little flash games to win prizes I clicked them all.

The strange thing is I actually had fun doing this, it was a little more exciting than my usual sessions of clicking and scrolling and here is the kicker when I was just about to finish for the night and come back here to Gamespot I clicked on a little Google ad which promised to do wonders with my pictures for free.

I lost the name of the site unfortunately but on the site you can convert photos into iPhone advert style pictures, ASCII art, vector graphics and even cartoon style, I had so much fun going through my photos on my pc that I spent about 2 hours on there.

I posted an ASCII art version of my photo in my images for you to check out.

What I wanted to know from whoever reads my blog is what little treasure have you found on the internet that you would recommend to myself?