Pre-orders

Game have a lovely little offer on at the moment rewarding you with £5 off a purchase over £30 with a voucher code. You can use this voucher as many times as you like, so I've taken advantage of it to pre-order the following:

Lego Batman (Wii)
Star Wars The Clone Wars (Wii)
Ghostbusters (Wii)

These are all £29.99, so with the voucher it brings them down to £24.99, the magic sub £25 figure I blogged about here. Ah, but £29.99 is LESS than £30, so how does that work then? Simple, I also took advantage of Game's summer sale to order myself the following, all for £4.99 each:

Alien Syndrome (PSP)
NHL 2K7 (360)
Tomb Raider Legend (360)

All of which should provide ample amusement for what they've cost me!

So why were all my pre-orders Wii titles? Well, in the case of Clone Wars, it's fairly simple, it's a Wii-only title, albeit with a DS version on the way too. In the case of Ghostbusters, it's the only version of the game to offer 4-player co-op throughout the game which made it the version of choice for me in spite of the cartoon-style graphics rather than the realistic ones offered by the 360/PS3/PC versions. Lego Batman is a game I can see the kids playing a lot, so it's a Wii title for the same reason as Lego Indiana Jones, i.e. to keep them away from my 360!

I'm currently uhming and aahing over a pre-order for Left 4 Dead on PC, with Guilty Gear Accent Core on the Wii being added to the order...

Alpha Protocol

Now this is a title that has suddenly jumped onto my list of wants from nowhere. Not much of a website at the moment, but what there is can be seen here.

Kotaku have a preview up here and I'm sure you won't need to do too much searching to find more info on it. Interesting to note in Kotaku's preview how they compare it to Mass Effect which I just picked up for the 360 today at the bargain price of £9.99 at Argos!

Treated myself to that with a little of the money from my Metal Gear Solid sales on ebay...

Halo Sundays look set to continue!

Myself and Player Boy continued our semi-tradition of getting up on Sunday mornings to blast some Covenant and/or Flood. This morning we battled our way through the last couple of levels of Halo and completed it. High fives all round and an agreement that next week we will start on Halo 2.

We're both very excited...

New games!

Me and Player Boy took a trip to the shops today, which is actually a pretty rare occurrence. I tend to buy almost all my games, dvds, etc. on-line, so it's actually a bit of a novelty for me to venture to proper brick 'n' mortar shops.

Anyway, we came back laden down with some new Lego from the Lego Store. I bought two excellent Batman sets that were in the sale and Player Boy picked up a couple of Exo-Force sets. We also made sure to check out all the games stores and he came home with Bleach for his DS and I picked up Unreal Tournament III for PC after trading in 3 games.

Player Boy is LOVING Bleach and insists that I should go back to the shops tomorrow to pick myself up a copy. I have been checking reviews and just might do that. We actually looked up reviews whilst in the store on my fab mobile phone and saw that it was well rated at Metacritic so went for it. I didn't want him picking up something that was rubbish and he would play for five minutes before discarding, I know how that felt when I was a kid.

One Saturday after work when I was about 14 I had my brother's friend run me to the shops before they closed so I could pick up Chase HQ for the Commodore 64. I had played the game loads in the arcades and loved it. I was so excited and couldn't wait to get back home with it.

After it loaded I sat down to play it. First impression was that the graphics were very poor. Then the sound turned out to be poor. And the controls. And the speed. And... well... everything.

I quietly turned it off, put it back in it's case and slipped it into the games drawer, suddenly very aware that I had spent all my wages on it...

Snake? Snake? SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!!!

Okay, I admit defeat.

I've not touched Metal Gear Solid Twin Snakes since struggling past Revolver Ocelot. Somehow it all seemed to much effort and too little reward. Why go back to playing something that I am clearly not enjoying as much as I'd hoped? So tonight I decided enough was enough. Metal Gear Solid Twin Snakes, Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance and Metal Gear Solid 3 Subsistence have all gone up for sale on eBay.

Now the good news is that prices for all 3 have jumped a bit since I bought them, so hopefully I will make a little bit off them which can go towards repaying my new PC. Ah yes, my lovely new PC...

Have pretty much ironed out all the teething troubles now, I won't bore you with details. Am now looking to pick up a few cheap titles that will show off it's power. Company Of Heroes arrived yesterday which I have wanted for ages! I am, however, reluctant to commence the install as I fear that it will take hours, especially with all the patching required! At least I have all the patches (yes, including the 1.5 gb one!) downloaded and ready to go, but this just reminds me of what it is I dislike about PC gaming...

Quite fancy getting Unreal Tournament 3 for my new rig actually. Did download a demo today but the file seems to be corrupted and won't install. Grrrrr!!!!

Naruto!

Naruto arrived at the weekend and I've played a bit since then. It's early days obviously, but so far I think it's fantastic! It looks just like a cartoon, in my mind it's the best cel-shading experience since the original Jet Set Radio blew me away on the Dreamcast.

The game has also gotten me really interested in Naruto. I've got the first volume of the manga on my bookshelf and the whole first season on DVD to watch.

Earlier this evening Player Boy was getting stuck into Dragon Ball Z Budokai on the Gamecube and loving it. I can see a purchase of one of the Wii titles and a few DVDs in the near future!

I love my new PC!

So my new PC arrived Friday. Booted it up and it all worked fine. Installed the new graphics card and then ripped my Audigy card from my old PC and installed that. All still fine. Added my Ubuntu drive and that was fine too, although I've yet to install GRUB so I can boot to Ubuntu, but that's another matter.

Spent much of the weekend uhming and aahing over various possible game purchases. I want something that will show off my new power, something that just wasn't possible with my old outdated kit. I've finally settled on buying a copy of Company of Heroes, I'm just tracking down a copy at a good price.

In related news, Player Two bought a new laptop which should arrive later this week. Hopefully it will be able to cope with Company of Heroes also and we can get some top multiplayer action going...