Long time no speaky!

Howdy all and sundry! Welcome to 2006 and whatever other greetings are usually forwarded at this sort of annual time.

Sorry for the lack of writings for the last month but things have been a little hectic and yet somewhat relaxed over Xmas (feck it, I was off having a good time without having to worry about noting it all down).

Anyway, I’m a week into the ban now and to be honest, I’m totally ambivalent towards it so far. A couple of freeware games have tempted me slightly and someone took great pleasure in reminding me I’m going to be missing out on the DS version of Age of Empires but apart from that things have been going swimmingly. Somewhat worse than the upcoming release list has been looking over stuff I’m going to have to wait yet another year to catch up on. There are quite a few titles on my wishlist that I’d like to have known I could play this year, but alas, I’m going to have to leave things like Lost in Blue, Phoenix Wright, Ouendan, Touch Golf, Metroid Pinball, Bad Day LA until next year now.

Xmas yielded a relatively modest (for me) crop of games. I grabbed a 98p copy of Timesplitters 2 from the Game sale and presents turned up in the shape of Space Rangers, GTA Double Pack, Call of Cthulhu & Brothers In Arms Earned In Blood. Six new games. On their own they’ll probably represent 100-150 hours of gaming. As I tend not to play for more than around ten hours a week you can see why I’m having such a dilemma about picking up new content. Over the weekend I intend to post a definitive list of what’s in the collection, along with indications of “play-ed-ness” (so what, it’s not a real word, get over it!) and will then continue to update as to my progress through the pile.

Xmas was dominated by two games in particular this year: Brothers in Arms Road to Hill 30 and Animal Crossing Wild World. The former has been a real treat, as although it has different developers behind it, it’s essentially nothing more than a follow-up and improvement on the cracking 2004 title, Full Spectrum Warrior. BIA takes the concepts introduced in FSW and applies them to a WWII setting whilst affording the giving the player his own character to use. By altering your point of few from that of a floating camera to that of a soldier the immersiveness is increased tenfold. If you truly do have great first-person skills then you can be a real asset to your fellow troops and help them out where getting to a flanking position seems all too difficult for them. The unlockables being released at the end of every mission is probably the only bad point thus far, being something that only serves to remind you you’re sat on your couch and not scraping mud off your boots following another successful set of maneuvers.

Animal Crossing’s a strange beast. It’s been suggested that it’s nothing more than “The Sims by Nintendo” but there’s definitely more to it than that. It really does represent its own little world and the fact that it runs from its own calendar of events only serves to drag you into your weird little town all the more.

In other news this season, my PC room got tidied, a new style DS got hinted at by “the Regginator” and Microsoft announced that they are in fact releasing an HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360. Fascinating times, eh?