Wowsers, it's been more than six months since I last updated my blog. I guess that's just the way it goes. Funnily enough, I've been fairly active as far as gaming's concerned, although a lot of that activity has been centered around reading about the Wii and hyping myself up in epic quantities. I'll get to that later.

So back in July, the World of Warcraft guild that I started at EU launch finally broke away from an alliance of three guilds to start raiding on their own. I decided to re-activate and get back in the game. So three of the six months since I last wrote anything were spent raiding Molten Core and Zul Gurub and ultimately starting out in Blackwing Lair. WoW is a lot of fun, but only when you're playing with friends. As the guild was made up of real-life friends, and friends-of-friends, going back for those three months was a great decision and I fully enjoyed every minute.

I stopped playing again last month, not for any particular reason; I just didn't log in for a week and didn't miss it. Then a week became two and so on. I expect I'll go back for Burning Crusade, if only for another three months!

What about other games? I'm racking my brains here. The DS is pretty much gathering dust (and I feel really guilty about that), and my PC is due to become long in the tooth anytime soon. This really makes me angry, because I love FPS games and the home of the FPS is still the PC for me. I just can't get used to thumbstick controls to be able to switch over to console completely yet. Still, I'm optimistic that my Shuttle will hold up well enough to run UT2007 and Episode 2 next year.

And I guess it can't be all bad, as Company of Heroes ran extremely smooth for me right out of the box. I had read that the game was a bit of a slut to run, but I had no such problems. I'm no RTS fan, but that game is fantastic. Of course, I was playing it through on easy and I didn't dare step into multiplayer, but the campaign is mesmerising. I'll get back to it and finish it soon, honest.

Introversion released a new game, Defcon. I'm a big fan of Introversion, they bend the rules and make games that are different from the norm. And they have to - they're just a small bedroom programming team from here in the UK. Now that they've partnered with Valve and are releasing their stuff through Steam, hopefully the rest of the world will come to enjoy their games as much as I do. And I hope that they finally make a decent living from it, too.

Defcon is a pretty interesting. It only takes a short amount of time to play a round, and it's pretty deep tactically, despite having very few actual units to make use of. Playing with a couple of friends has been great, and I think it's going to make for a decent small-hours LAN game.

And so to the Wii. The Wii will be the first console I've ever had on Day One. And that's only if Gameplay manage to fulfill my pre-order. There's a lot of talk about shortages in the States, and I can only assume we're getting less units here. Nintendo once seemed confident that they were going to be able to meet demand, but now Reggie's saying that it's going to be tough to get one. It's a little worrying.

I'm also a little worried about the direction that Ninty are taking with the Wii. Since getting my Gamecube (my first ever console) in 2003, I've become a Nintendo fan. I thought every single first-party GC game was fantastic. I thought the GC's third-party support was patchy at best. It didn't matter too much, because I came into the GC two years after launch, so there were already a wealth of amazing Nintendo games available.

With the Wii, I'm in it from the start. Twilight Princess is a killer app, no doubt about it. I can't wait to play. But in essence, it's a port. It was written for the GC. It looks like a GC game, about on-par with XBox visuals. I'm not sure if that's good enough. I'm no graphics whore, I've been playing games from years and could quite happily play a text-based game if it oozes gameplay. As much as Nintendo try to push their revolutionary new control method, the average gamer (and non-gamer) here in the UK is going to see the Wii next to a PS3 or a 360 in the shop, and is going to be blown away by the hi-def, crisply textured and highly-polyed graphics of the latter two. While I'm sure the Wii is capable of better visuals than most of its launch titles would suggest, a good first impression isn't being made.

And by some accounts, the new control system is full of teething problems too. Initial reviews all report high learning curves and distracting niggles when using the remote for both tilting and pointing. I can't comment as I've not had the chance to check the console out yet, but some of the things that I feared certainly seem to be coming true.

With all that said, I'm positive that subsequent Nintendo titles will start to offer more impressive visuals and the controller niggles will be ironed out both by the developers and by the gamers as we get used to handling the new controller.

And besides, with the PS3 costing £400 and being delayed until March (you fail, Sony) and with the 360 premium still costing nearly £300, there's only one choice of console for me. I'm confident that in a year or so, I will own a 360 as well as my Wii, because Gears of War looks phenomenal and because I like the interface and points sytem of Live (two weeks ago I played with the 360 for the first time ever - I was a bit late to that party!). I'll be waiting for the price to drop significantly first, though.

Three weeks until the Wii, Europe!