If you downloaded the Game room recently from your Xbox dashboard but haven't bought any games for it yet then this blog is for you. Game room is a very exciting application that was recently launched as part of the Xbox Community service on the Dashboard, what's truly exciting about it is the fact that game companies can no longer charge us 800 points for a simple conversion of an old arcade game.

The problem is that although all of the games have some nostalgic appeal not all of them truly stand the test of time and you will find your money like the recently purchased title a thing of the past.

So which games truly are worth the three bucks?

This is a list of games that I have found that keep me coming back for more. I'm also going to list a few quick tips to help new players get a high score and get some gold medals collected.

If you click the name of the game you can also watch a YouTube video of some gameplay.

Shao'lins Road

The excellent follow up to Yie Ar Kung Fu, Konami changed the formula a little bit to make it a little less street fighter and a little more platformer, this kung fu kick fest is a truly fun game to play, you beat up waves as enemies as they spawn and every second wave you are also tasked with defeating a boss character. As the game progresses the enemies gain further abilities like fly kicks, flying headbutts and even throwing knives.

There is a genuinely fun arcade experience to be had from this game and as you progress further the added difficulty from the enemies increases the challenge and although your move set is very limited it has never been more fun to kick an enemy in the head.

Scoring tips

a fly kick is worth 500 points so it's well worth doing this for every enemy, this can be difficult to do from close range however if you press the both buttons at once the jump animation will skip allowing you to fly kick from the ground.

If you hit multiple enemies with one kick you get a bonus of 1000 points you can manipulate the enemy into making themselves group up by changing levels and running underneath them as you do they will drop down and move towards you in a group making for some easy points.

Finalizer

Finalizer is a top down arcade shooter much like games like twinbee or 1940, the premise is that you are a wonder ship that can turn into a robot by collecting the power ups that are launched from the ground below and your mission is to kill all the aliens who are flying within the earth's orbit.

Probably the toughest game in the collection, this game is pure fun. Everything from the ship upgrades to the power ups you can collect provide players with many tactical ways to complete the game, the enemies are relentless so the big challenge is staying alive long enough and using the power ups effectively to maximise your score.

Scoring tips

The easiest way to make up points in this game is to use the power ups effectively, if you shoot the ship upgrades you can change them into power ups for you to use, the crash power up which is represented by a flashing F is the best one for points as for 5 seconds everything you crash into will score you big points starting at 500 you can chain it together so each ship will get you 8000 points.

These are my top two picks from the release day collection and you have my personal guarantee that if you spend your hard earned cash on these you'll get a lot of wear and tear out of them. However if you were looking for a few more titles to fill your time with I have a few honorary mentions that you should consider.

Crystal Castles – A nice little Isometric platformer that sees you in the shoes of a honey loving bear that loves to collect red pellets. The game is very much like a Pacman in how it plays but there a few twists in there as you progress level to level you will go through a very basic story and if you get all the way there is actually a proper ending to be viewed. The game definitely suffers from the lack of a trackball but overall worth your time.

Road Fighter- It's no Gran Turismo but this engaging little racer sees you balancing speed and fuel as you race across 6 stages avoiding the traffic on the road, collecting the bonus cars and racing against your sports car driving opponents.

Super Cobra- the follow up to scramble improves on the formula by adding in a helicopter and more challenging environments, seriously hard to master but it's addictive. My favourite bit is at every stage the game tells you that you have travelled 1000 miles, it seems distance was measured more loosely back in the 80's.

Well that's it my pick of the crop from the first batch of games, I haven't picked any of the Atari 2600 games or Intellivision games because quite frankly they just don't hold up these days and after 1 or 2 plays you will likely never look at them again.

Today's blog will be a mega blog, in which I will cover all of the stuff I have been thinking about since last time I posted something decent, I've faced a few ups and downs this week and I'll cover that too.

Firstly my Xbox 360 is on its last legs, I know this because it has recently become choosey about which games it plays. Its inability to play CDs and the weird noises it produces when you ask it to do anything other than just stay switched off.

Number 4 as I call it, being that it is my forth Xbox since launch day has fought a valiant fight, surviving its long hard battle against death for well over 13 months and faced the terrible rigors of having to do the things that it was designed to do.

May it rest in peace and I speak for us all when I say roll on Johnny 5.

Throughout my desperate struggle with the Xbox disk drive I have managed to get dragon age origins to work sporadically and have clocked up almost 10 hours of gameplay on its expansion pack Awakening.

Dragon age: Origins Awakening first impressions

When the game came out first time around I bought it because it was a Bioware RPG and I love my swords and sorcery, the original game was a Lesson to other developer in how to make an RPG, it had its flaws but the combat system and programmable AI routines went a long way towards filling the hole quitting World of Warcraft left me with.

The expansion is essentially a where are they now look at the Darkspawn following the events that unfold in the main game, the story is set in a completely new area and all of the companions are different although you still see one or two of them briefly this time around.

You can choose to continue playing as your original hero in the game but I chose to start as a brand new hero simply because I played through as a rogue and I wanted to try my hand at something new this time around, the new character was then instantly levelled to 18 and got some decent gear to start off with so I wasn't disadvantaged at all, only my lack of experience at tanking with my new born warrior held me back at the start.

One of the biggest problems in the original game was the overpowered mage ****that could kill an entire room without breaking a sweat and thankfully this time around the ****s have been rebalanced making all different ****s relevant in a party and I love how they did this rather than nerf the mage they gave the enemies much more HP and the other ****s all got significant bonuses and new abilities to use to create damage by the bucket load.

The rogue who before was useless in more than a one on one fight now gained a few abilities that allow him/her to reduce incoming damage and increase evasion when necessary, they also gain abilities that increase damage the enemies take from all sources and a brand new AOE attack which is incredibly powerful and crazy to watch as they bounce from target to target.

If I were to choose one ability in the game to keep it would have to be second wind, this ability new to the warrior tree is the single greatest ability regardless of the type of warrior you build , it refills an empty stamina bar to allow the warrior continuous use of his abilities. A two handed warrior for instance was never as viable as a duel wielder because the abilities cost so much stamina but now they can swing that big two hander all much more handing out damage by the bucket full, the tank however benefits from this move too because a lot of the sustained abilities reduce the stamina bar by a good amount, with second wind you can activate the ones you need without having to compromise one or two for the extra stamina.

The mage is still as great as ever but I do have a few gripes, they never fixed the shapeshifter tree so it remains as useless as ever and secondly the new spells and abilities do not merge with any other spells to create super spells like in the original game.

The characters in the game have been criticised by reviewers for not being as interesting as the previous companions and I found that to be misleading, coming into the game I was expecting the worst but the characters are still great and assuming the writing stays as good as it has I don't expect that opinion to change.

So far I'm thoroughly impressed though the cover price was a bit steep.

Lastly I wanted to talk about youtube, I used to be a big fan of youtube for one simple reason, lots of gameplay footage and decent commentary of multiplayer action. Recently though the site has been annoying me and that is for one simple reason...

MACHINIMA

It is now virtually impossible to find a decent gameplay/commentary on that site now that isn't some machinima whiner that complains for 10 minutes about how they are sick of fanboys, youtube, the game that they are playing and then asking me to download some toolbar so they can make money or asking for donations because their console broke.

They slate every single new release with some high and mighty attitude and I for one am sick of it.

Thats pretty much it for this one guys, my next post will be about the game room games and which ones are worth your time and a few tips I picked up during my time with it.

Hey guys just a quick post for anyone living out on the west coast, I hope the earth quake hasn't affected you all too badly.

For my own selfish reasons I also hope the Gamespot offices remain unaffected so we can get our games news and videos without delay.

Ever since the day I played Street Fighter 2 on my friends Super Nintendo all those years ago the street fighter series has kept me enthralled, every new release of the game has been treated as a blessing from a higher power from the hyper edition that let us speed up the game right through to the amazing current gen street fighter 4.

In my 18 years with the game there is one thing that has always eluded me and that is the little details that make the multiplayer so good, sure I can hold my own against my real life friends who are no more clued up than me but take the game online and I can guarantee myself a rather sound beating at the hands of someone armed with the knowledge gained with months, weeks even years of practice.

When I recently bought HD remix, I game which I thoroughly love to play on my own or with my aforementioned clueless friends I stumbled across a button that said "how to play" for a few giggles I decided to check it out expecting it to have one paragraph about pressing the buttons and wiggling the stick but actually the little button introduced me to a world of street fighter that I had no idea about.

I'm going to list a few examples just to give you an idea of what I am talking about but doubtless some of you are probably more familiar than me with this.

• Cross-ups – essentially these are attacks which strike the opponent on the back and allow you to switch sides, making it difficult for your opponent to guess where to block and outing you in a close position opening them up for a throw or combo.
• Hit stun- after an opponent is hit they are unable to perform any moves for a few frames, the player can take advantage of this split second to execute another move and maximise the damage dealt.
• Links – moves that take advantage of the aforementioned hit stun by connecting together 2 moves directly after each other skipping the animation frames usually associated with the 2 movements, an easy example of this is a kens crouching strong punch followed up with a crouching roundhouse sweep though there are several more effective links.
• Combos – stringing together several moves from the characters repertoire that when performed in a sequence are inescapable. There are several different types of combo including the aforementioned link combos, super combos which enter into the characters super and chain combos which chain together several of the characters regular attack.
• Interrupts/cancels – the player interrupts his normal move with a special move allowing the normal move to hit and immediately enter into the special, the one example I could get was Guile's close standing fierce XX Fierce Sonic Boom combo. There are even several different methods you can use to do this.

There are most likely a lot of different techniques available within the game and I am making it my mission to learn these and also put them into practice.

However I have had difficulty coming to grips with these techniques through reading about them , what I am looking for is a video tutorial or even just some basic tips, if you can offer anything just leave a comment with the link or your own advice.

A lot of things happening this week, not a lot of releases across the consoles so it was a great week for catching up with those games that have came out over the past few weeks.

I have now finished just cause 2 and I wanted to share a few tips I picked up along the way.

The enemies in this game are dumb but the elites can hit a fly in the wings from two miles away so to avoid becoming a bullet riddled corpse the easiest thing to do is to use the roll button, during the roll animation you becoming invincible, so if you find yourself in a bit of a pickle you can roll continuously until you recover your health.

Enemies will not follow you into a building but rather congregate around the door, if you are in a situation where you feel outgunned , run into a nearby building if one is available and throw a grenade outside to thin the numbers.

Don't waste your money buying needless things from the black-market, you will find yourself quickly running low on funds, rather save the money for when you are desperate like an ammo refill for that rare gun you are using or for explosives like grenades.

Never dual wield 2 of the same gun, you do not increase your ammo count and it depletes twice as fast, I found a good combo to carry the submachine gun for groups and the sawed off shotgun for finishing enemy who get close.

Make the first gun you upgrade the SMG, it's the most common gun amongst the various enemies you will face and you will find yourself using it most often

Incapacitate enemies when you are facing many guards but don't bother trying to aim what your tethering them too because while you're trying this the enemy will be shooting you relentlessly rather just tether and go.

I hope these tips help anyone who is playing , they are pretty basic but I found them really helpful in many of the later missions, I have also wrote a review for the game which you can find here.

It's also been a great week for me here in the Gamespot community, I got the member spotlight for last week, which was awesome and I also took part in the community game night and had a ton of fun playing battlefield bad company on the 360 with Chris Watters and Shaun McInnis so I would like to throw out a big thank you too all the Gamespot staff for organising such a great night and to the other community members who took part.

On a last not don't forget to check out today on the spot not only is the episode hilarious but you also can get a sweet new emblem just for watching and commenting.

I wasn't going to write this tonight, I figured the time I had put into the game was insufficient to really get a good look at what the game offers but just as I decided to save the game I noticed my current play time was somewhere around four and a half hours .

This time warp phenomena is something the original Just Cause did well and the sequel hasn't lost that touch, the main reason for this is the over the top action, everything from driving a car to grappling around the environment can be combined in the game to allow the player a sense of freedom usually reserved for Eagles and rocket powered super elephants.

Straight out of the gate you're thrown into some political intrigue and immediately you will want to skip the cutscene due to its delightful use of ethnic stereotypes and terrible voice acting. Rico himself is a fiery Latino pepper and if you mess with him he will "Keel you like a pig dog" the other character are just as bad or worse, its grating but just cause is about more than the story.

The emphasis is placed firmly on the action and the exploration and for the most part the game gets it right, the way to stay alive is to keep moving, using your grapple hook, the roll ability and the environment so that the enemy never has a clean shot is the best way though heavy weapons and a big smile will get you through at times. The problem however is the targeting system, it isn't bad at what it does locking on to enemies when you point in their general direction happens automatically but the targeting system holds a grudge (that's the only way to describe it) when you point at a group you might decide you want to get rid of one guy but the targeting system will continue to stay locked on to another and regardless of what you do it won't let go until that guy is dead.

Exploration is a mix of foot, wheel and wing on foot your uncanny ability to dodge and zip around on the grappling hook makes you feel at times like a superhero or if you need a little more grunt under you the ability to jack any car, helicopter or plane that you see comes in extremely handy, having trouble getting into a base hijack an armoured car and smash the gate or just grab a plane and aim it at the guards before jumping out and parachuting down to the base.

From time to time you will need these vehicles just to get around because the world of Just Cause is massive and the vehicles are simple to use, you can easily fly a chopper without needing a degree in aerial manoeuvres(Battlefield :P)

The missions so far have been fun with several requiring you to protect other AI characters and assault large military installations, others ask you to destroy high value targets or recover sensitive data. Even when you're not in a mission you will be on the clock destroying government structures or causing chaos will increase your standing and unlock different missions and support available to you.

The enemy AI isn't smart by any standard but they come at you in bunches and are quite effective, when you throw an elite in with the grunts the battles become much more exciting, these elite soldiers are a great new addition to the series, demo men will throw explosives at you and are heavily armoured and worst of all when they die the drop a load of C4 at their feet which you have to avoid like the plague, others will require you to get a headshot and many have heavy weapons which are devastating to your health.

To sum it up fans of the first will be happy to get a great looking sequel that retains the same charm as the original and fans of open world exploration won't be disappointed, however a few of the niggles may put a lot of people off the game, definitely try the demo if you are undecided.

I don't feel like my words do the game justice so I have included a link to a great video below.

Review coming some I think

great Just Cause video

The merest glance at a gaming related websites forum will reveal to even the most casual observer that there is a massive split in the community between hardcore gamers and their precious consoles and the usurper of their favourite past time the casual gamer.

The forums are a wash of slurs and insults thrown at those not able or interested in buying every new release and toiling away for hours every day trying to find every little hidden object in a game and this elitist attitude is somewhat ruining the game experience for many.

I have always been reluctant to box myself into the category of the hardcore gamer, truth be told I fit in there nicely I play upwards of 30 hours a week and buy a new game pretty much every week, I've been doing this for roughly 20 years now since the early days of home consoles and right through the golden age of the arcade but I'm hesitant to just say "I'm a hardcore gamer" because I don't want to be associated with the aforementioned nastiness.

I see the benefit of the casual games market, it allows companies to increase their profits and in turn hire more staff or put more time into those big AAA titles the Hardcore gamers so thoroughly enjoy, even the casual games themselves can come be fun, Wii sports is as casual as they come and that game is worthy of purchase by anyone.

I look at these games as gateway games, if I can get someone to sit down and play Scene-It or Guitar Hero and they enjoy the experience, it shouldn't be long before they try Mario Kart or castle crashers and eventually they may even play Halo or Metal gear solid.

Worst case scenario they may play a few games a month but at least you have someone who is willing to talk about video games with you.

So let's all embrace these new found gamers and let them enjoy their own introduction to gaming, we all got into at one time or other and until Nintendo introduces the new iteration of the DS that plugs into the womb no one is born a gamer, so let's do our best to make more of them, then we can all get back to just being gamers.

In the past I went on record as saying Microsoft's game room was the equivalent of being mugged by a rich man, I even went as far as designing a logo which involved a classic cartoon burglar carrying two bags of swag.

Needless to say I was upset at the pricing scheme which listed games available for $3 and rentable for a single play session at the lower cost of $0.50, since the time of that post I have had somewhat of a change of heart.

Today was my first chance to check it out and instantly on loading the game up something came over me, a wave of nostalgia that hit me hard enough to part with 1200 of my hard earned points, Already I bought 5 arcade cabinets, Asteroids deluxe, Lunar Lander, Shao-lin's Road, Crystal Castles and Battlantis, I still plan to buy Millipede and The Red Baron.

The games themselves are faithful recreations of the originals, when you place a purchased game in to your arcade you are treated to a full 3D render of the original cabinet and that cabinet will be yours too play forever more, that's not all though each game has 3 different medal challenges.

The buster medal rates your score, the higher your score the better your medal, the second medal is the survivor medal which in order to obtain you must stay alive, the longer you survive the better the medal the 3rd medal is for the total playtime of the game, just keep playing and the medal will be yours.

There are a lot of problems with the game however, asides from the aforementioned pricing, the actual community side of the game is under developed at best and unfinished at worst. Challenges are a great idea, however when you send a friend one, they have to actually go into the main menu and select challenges and play the game from there, any play from within the game simply doesn't count.

When a friend visits your arcade, you will only know they have done so by reading your messages, they will not appear in the actual arcade itself.

Lastly you can use 5 tokens to buy a play of any game for free, you start off with 20 and can obtain more but of course it is very difficult to do this, each friend that visits your arcade and plays a game will contribute 1 token to your total and for most of us this means we probably will never obtain any of them.

The last thing I want to mention is the Intellivision games because the games require a keypad the control scheme is difficult forcing you at times to press a button to bring up an onscreen keypad and use that while the game continues playing, making them frustrating to play.

To sum it up Games room is a great idea, poorly executed at a price that is beyond most of us, however on the other hand it's a great way to make a Retro compilation of your favourite few games at a lower price that you would pay for a Disc based compilation such as Atari Anthology (XBOX) and Intellivision Lives! (GC).

Personally I can't wait to see where Microsoft take it from here, with almost 1000 games coming in the future there is bound to be a few Gems in there that most of us can appreciate and with 1000 gamerpoints up for grabs its worth at least trying it out.

Part of EA's marketing campaign for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was their Battlefield moments and I kind of wanted to share a few of my own, I don't have a capture card so today I will be sharing them through the medium of words.

Moment #1 - I spawned as a defender on Nelson Bay, choosing the recon class I through a few C4 down on the ground in front of the house which contained the M-com station. The other station was under attack so I through down a motion mine on top of the C4 and ran too help my comrades and as I got there I hear the beeping of the mine. I hit the c4 for a nice triple kill and bonus points for a base defense.

Moment #2 – Grabbing a tank I made my way to the enemy base, an orange triangle appears on the horizon and I take a quick pot-shot in its general direction, I got 100 points for a M-com station destroyed and 3 kills by destruction 2.0. Clearly I missed my target and destroyed the house which contains the target and killed a few of its inhabitants. Good times

The next one is a little different, it's kind of embarrassing.

Moment #3 – defending I see a guy run into our M-com Station, I decide to fire a "noob tube" into the base, missed him and destroyed the wall and the station. Minus 10 points and an angry squad.

I'm still playing Final Fantasy XIII finally finished chapter 10 all but one bit, I beat the boss but I'm stuck on a fight just after that and its kind of bugging me because I know the exploration part of the game is just around the corner.

In other news I managed to get my hands on a copy of fight night round 4 at a reasonable price and after being impressed by the demo all that time ago I'm glad that I did. So far I have been pleasantly surprised by the new control system, the little tweaks to the fights make the game a lot more skill based than the round 3 slogfest and several of the fights I have been involved in have gone right to the wire and genuinely captured the excitement the sport generates.

Guess I will post a review soon for Final fantasy and fight night.

I would do something a little special and give you guys my own personal gaming journey, from my first game, right through some of the big landmarks in my own personal history. It's important to remember when you read it that up until the Playstation came out I hadn't bought a single console/computer on its launch day, the main reason being that I was a child and couldn't afford it.

It all started with the Amstrad CPC 464, my grandfather had a friend who was an accountant and because the Amstrads where so cheap he had bought a surplus of them for his office, unfortunately they weren't what he was after and he was keen to get rid of a few of them and so long story short my grandfather purchased me one.

This was the beginning of my journey and because the games came on tape and Amstrads software division Amsoft had discovered games sold really well they had made literally hundreds of them and they were purchased as a box set.

This introduced me to the joy of home video gaming, the games I had included such greats as Harrier Attack, Rowland on the ropes, Galactic Plague, Oh mummy and Bridg-it just to name a few.

One game from this era stood head and shoulders above any others and that game was Treasure Island Dizzy, this game was a mix of exploration, platforming and puzzle solving.

After the initial Amstrad packed up my grandfather bought me a newer version of the system the Amstrad PC1512 DD, the new computer had a built in hard drive, DOS operating system and had two 5.25" floppy drives. The main problem was that the system was built for business users so for me it was hard to get games and if I could they were too expensive for a kid to purchase so it was pretty much a bust.

However there were a few key moments with this console, games like Prince of Persia and Monkey Island made the computer worth playing. This was also the system that introduced me to the world of RPG's, near the end of the computers life my father brought home an RPG that to this day I don't know the name of. I've been looking at screenshots of the RPGs from that time and I am almost certain the game in question was Ultima 3, though I could be wrong.

Up until this time in my life video games had been on the sideline, I was more interested in sports than game but that all changed the day I came home from school to find that we now had a NES, only 2 games Duck hunt and Mario Bros, to this day I still have nightmare about that dog and its incessant chuckling.

This generation of video games changed my life and introduced me too many of the big names in games such as donkey Kong, Mario, Zelda, Metroid and the Castlevania series.

Although I loved the NES and all of the games I had I eventually swapped it with my friend for his master system, a decision I would later come to regret, the reason for the swap was simple... Sonic the hedgehog though because the master system was great, many of the stores where I would buy video games didn't actually sell Master system games and I suffered from a lack of games at this point.

The drought ended when I finally got a Mega Drive for Christmas, games like columns, world cup Italia 90 and super Hang-on came in the included bundle and later I was able to purchase the original Mortal Kombat, After burner and each subsequent sonic the hedgehog game. The joy was short-lived however and unfortunately the console was broken when my dog at the time Sultan (named after the Amstrad game sultans maze) urinated in the cartridge slot and broke it.

This was the start of a bad run of video game related problems which I will just list for simplicity

SNES – Had it for 2-3 months before it got stolen when we got burgled.

Gameboy- screen cracked after a few months.

Game Gear – got mugged for it after getting off a bus.

Eventually I did get a Mega Drive 2 and a mega CD though I never actually owned a single game on CD and therefore found it too be quite useless.

Then one of the biggest changes in Home video games since its inception all those years ago happened, September 29th 1995 and I am standing outside of a HMV in a queue which I can only describe as never ending waiting to purchase a Playstation.

3d gaming was now in the home, I got such greats as Tekken, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo and for the first time I wasn't that weird kid who plays with video games as console began to make its way into the mainstream.

Needless to say this led on to the Nintendo 64 and Playstation 2 and into this current generation, there have been some exclusions from the list here including the Atari jaguar, commodore 64 and my PC which i simply didn't include for length reasons.

My challenge to anyone reading this is too write up a blog post giving your own personal gaming history as I'm interested in how everyone got started and what experiences they have had along the way.