Kameo

And finally... For Christmas I got 'Kameo: Elements of Power' for the 360. After 4 years in the making and switching from GameCube to Xbox to Xbox 360 during it's deveopment (mainly caused by Microsoft buying Rare) the final product is the best game I've played in ages. The game varies from action, to adventure, to roleplay seemlessly and just keeps giving the player something new to challenge. The 10 elemental warriors each have their own skills, so each boss involved the challenge of not just how to win, but also who to win with and even combinations of warriors and powers. The puzzle elements were nicely merged into the gameplay, adding the need to solve some logic puzzles to progress, breaking up the 'just kill everything' sections. Saying that, most of the time it was actually a test of which things needed to be killed, rather that just everything, which all added to the enjoyment.

The final scene involved the destruction of the airship fleet (above) to complete the mystical story. I ended the game with a playtime spread over about 5 seperate days of I think a very respectable time of 15hrs 45mins - which included a few of the side quests. I did admittedly take a good 3 or 4 attempts to kill most of the bosses and one particular ice path took nearly 20 attempts to cross grrr... I did get the final boss in one try though :-) Now to return to 'Perfect Dark Zero' and 'NFS:MW' which got put very much on hold while this amazing game took over my life :-)

Game rating: 9.5/10 - A must for any 360 owner, in fact about the best reason for buying a 360 when you can get hold of one :-)

Going HD Ready :)

I knew before the Xbox 360 arrived that the television I would be using to play it on simply would not be up to the job of full resolution gameplay, so as I had been considering the purchase for a while anyway for when my new bedroom is complete I took the leap and ordered a nice new large high definition lcd tv too - only three weeks on order before it arrived too and it is simply fantastic! Can't wait to get it hung on my wall instead of it's temporary place in the living room, but either way it shows exactly what the Xbox 360 can do, utilising the full 1080i video output and demonstrating exactly why these new Samsung displays have outperformed all other lcd manufacturers. No wonder the smaller model was chosen for all of the 360 demo sets in the high street - it just cannot be matched on picture quality by anything else.

Xbox 360!

The first of my self bought presents arrived spot on time (1 day after release) - just shows how important choosing the right supplier is really. I decided right at the beginning of November to put my name on a pre-order list, but discovered by then that I might already be too late with everywhere saying that the pre-orders were full or that there would not be delivery by Christmas - Comet were still taking pre-orders so I took the chance and put my name down, and sure enough they delivered perfectly (if only I could have got 2 and made over twice the price back on eBay :( ) Anyway, I got the premium bundle with the extra controller and 'Perfect Dark Zero' and so far have had no problems with any overheating at all :-) It did however take me another 3 weeks to get hold of a wireless network adapter for it!

NFS:MW

Ok, so while I've been waiting on my orders, I've been spending some time on the new 'Need For Speed: Most Wanted' - and what a great gane it is too... This time around there is no actual need to make your cars look silly just to progress in the game, just to help change the appearance to reduce your wanted level. The graphics are better, gameplay I think is slightly more fine tuned and the story is better than before, but it's mainly just a race, race, race until you finish the game again. Here's the Mazda RX-8 and Ford Mustang GT I've got in my garage at the moment (about half way through):

Game rating: 8/10 (so far)

December Update

Thought it was time for a bit of an update of what's been going on over the last couple of months... Well let's see, at the end of November I moved permanently to a new site to start work on yet another new health center, after having worked here and there for a few weeks. A couple of weeks into the new project I finally took delivery of my new company car (after only 10 weeks on order) so the 'pepper red' Focus morphed into a much nicer new model 'moondust silver' Focus, already with 250 miles on the clock due to it's 230 mile journey up to me! Well at least that means I've got a silver weekday car to match my silver weekend car :-) Amongst other things I've placed my orders for a couple of my own Christmas presents too (see above) since I expect the demand to be just a touch high...

White Chamber

From the authors of 'Crimson Room', 'Viridian Room' and 'Blue Chamber' comes the all new 'White Chamber' - go and play it now at Fasco-csc.com. It's perhaps a little more logical than the previous rooms and took me about 20 mins to escape - the main problem was guessing what words you have to use for the two code entries once you realise that you actually need to! Enjoy :-)