So I finally got myself a wii at xmas. Really pleased at how it gets the whole family involved and yet has games deep enough to keep me entertained when they are gone.

Seen some funky things to try out with the wii remote to like this demo by Johnny lee:

check it out here

Those of you that have Jailbroken your shiny iPhone have probably been making use of the Gameboy Advance emulator - gsPhone.

Performance and ROM support has been patchy but you'll be pleased to know the latest edition 0.5.0 now supports Final Fantasy VI - one of the best looking games on the Gameboy Advance.

Performance has slightly improved on other Roms and greatly improved on others.

If you have an iPhone but have no idea how to get games on it post a comment and I'll post instructions for getting it to work (note the UK edition is a little more difficult to do but I managed it so you can too).

ButtonMashingUK

While I await my new laptop I've been having to run the latest generation of beautiful games on a lower end system. I'm pleased to say that most scale really well.

I was most surprised by Crysis and Gears of War. On lowest setting Crysis still looks great - very similar to Farcry on medium-high. I managed to ramp it up to High on 1024x768 and found it playable on a single core AMD 3200+ Sempron with 2GB DDR 1 ram and an 256mb ATI x1950 Pro and Windows XP. It was perfectly smooth and responsive if I turned a couple of features from high to medium such as physics and it looked incredible. I was really surprised as it was described as needing mega hardware to do it any justice and my desktop hasn't been upgraded in over a year. Good Performance was mainly down to the graphics card since the processor and ram belong in a museum. Can't wait for my new laptop with a Directx 10 graphics card to see all the eye candy.

Gears of war also impressed managing to be playable on a Dell XPS m1210 (64mb Nvidia 7400) at low details settings and medium to high settings on a Dell XPS m1330 (128mb Nvidia 8400) at 800x600. Both these laptops come with basic graphics cards but they are still able to play the game. I wouldn't recommend it on the m1210 as low detail doesn't do the game justice but on the 1330 the dx10 anti-aliasing really makes it look nice.

Not so good news with other games like World In Conflict which play well on low detail on the above systems but get down to a choppy 4fps or fail completely when put on high let alone very high. Not sure if this is lazy programming or the fact that so much is going on in the RTS. Considering the amount going on in Crysis I'd say the former.

The Unreal Tournament Series has always had a reputation of scaling really well - playing smooth on low spec systems and looking gorgeous if you had the hardware to support the higher quality settings. I hope for the same with UT3 when it finally arrices. Glad to seegame developers not just focusing on the higher end hardware but making their games playable for us mere mortals on last-gen systems and yet still providing a rich mind blowing experience for those willing to part with their hard earned pounds/dollars for £300/$500+ graphics cards.

Halo 3 will be released in 3 editions. Standard, Limited edition and the extremely rare and pricey Legendary edition. The latter two will come with a bunch of extras. Play.com just announced that they are taking pre-orders on the Legendary edition which is likely to be in high demand and short supply so get your orders in quick.

Gamespot UK are giving away a years xbox-live subscription and a BT Broadband connection plus xbox points to the lucky winner of the latest contest.

As a Vista user I am looking forward to getting my xbox live account for windows (until i win an xbox360) so a year's free subscription would be awesome.

Anyway if you want to enter the contest will be here in a couple of hours

Tomorrow Gamespotters in the UK will be able to try and win a Playstation 3 - courtesy of Amazon.co.uk. The 60gb next-gen console will require you to answer two PS3 related questions. For regular Gamespotters it should be a snap.

So check out the contest here tommorrow.

Contest runs from Tuesday the 6th of March until Friday 30th March 2007.

I would wish you luck but I'm routing for my mate to win it :)

Blizzard obviously feel that 7-8million paid up active monthly subscribers is simply not enough. They have just launched their recruit-a-friend scheme. In exchange the member will get 30 days free access.

In theory, if each member invites 3 friends to play (let's face it someone who is addicted to wow is unlikely to have more than 3 friends that aren't already playing). And out of those 2 actually give it a go. Out of those half get hooked and continue to play. That's Wow's player based doubled. Yikes!

Will there ever be a 2nd expansion pack if the Blizzard staff can't get to their computers because of the wheel barrows of money blocking their way???

Only time will tell.

Game have now opened Pre-orders for the Sony PlayStation 3.

The console has been available in Japan and US for months now so many HARDCORE PlayStation fans will already have a Grey-Market imported PS3. Will this mean that the UK launch will be low-key or that a Pre-order is unnecssary?
That remains to be seen. One thing is for sure - it's not going to be worth buying a bunch of PS3s for resale. Many tried this in the US and because of

1) the large number of people doing the same thing and
2) the availability of PS3 in stores and
3) the high cost of a PS3 and persistent rumours of an imminent price cut

they got stuck with them or sold them at a lot lower price than anticipated.

The only console you'll turn a profit on at the moment is the Wii. They are still rarer than a Shevchenko goal in the premiership.

With ebay flooded with PS3s for sale and some still available in stores some ebay sellers became desperate.

Using scantily clad images of themselves, friends or girlfriends to model their unwanted PS3 in the hopes to boost sales.

One website collected all these auction pictures into a gallery which can be viewed here.

Forget waiting for your favourite NES game to come out on Wii Virtual console. Get EVERY NES game every released in one ebay auction