Hocking

I've just picked that up in the Steam sale as well, despite already owning it on the PS3. Word of advice though, invest in martial arts rather than guns. You get a far more enjoyable game-play experience out of using stealth and melee than you do out of trying to shoot things. The shooting mechanics are appalling. However, with a melee build, save Russia for your last area. Also picked up the Company of Heroes complete pack in the sale this weekend. I already own all three titles on disc, but I've not installed them since 2009 thanks to that atrocious Relic P2P patcher. I figure with Steam, I might at least play a game I genuinely enjoy the hell out of.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides Excellent twists in there and the amazing score by Hans Zimmer really highlighted the action.

I had bought Medal of Honour when it released, but traded it in after completing the campaign because it couldn't compete with Bad Company 2 for my time. I'm steering clear of linear multiplayer betas following the Halo: Reach Beta. I absolutely hated my time with Reach during beta and yet I thoroughly enjoy the retail version of the game - although it's over-sensitivity to disk blemishes has rendered my extraordinarily lightly scratched copy useless. During the beta, obviously prior to game balancing thanks to beta statistics, I felt that a lot of things were mismatched and uneven. The retail version of the multiplayer component felt a lot more comfortable. It's not that I have an aversion to beta testing in general, I've done a fair bit of testing for a few different MMOs and really enjoyed doing it. I think it's just that being a statistics guinea pig does more to dis-interest me than interest me.

Yes, classes are faction locked. You can however, roll characters from either faction on the same server. So you could roll Trooper and a Sith class on the same server as your friends. Alternatively, you could roll Bounty Hunter as a Sith - the mirror class for the Trooper. Unlike SWG, that doesn't involve hunting other players. I don't think it will. The MMOs that tend to go free are the ones that are generally lacklustre in content and thus can't hold subscribers. That said, Bioware have both their own fan base as well as the Star Wars fan base to draw subscribers from. As many negative views of Star Wars Galaxies there are floating around about the NGE changes, SWG has managed to keep quite a nice cluster of paying customers despite that fact it has extremely generic content. The Old Republic even broke EAs own record for global pre-orders in the first week of them going live.

This has been a problem for me and a few friends since 1.5 or 1.6 if I recall correctly. Like you I have 6GBs of RAM and I frequently run into it. I've found that keeping render distance set to normal rather than far seems to reduce the occurrence slightly, but also nuking the install every so often reduces it even further. I hadn't run into the problem lately until visiting a server belonging to one of the Bukkit plug-in devs. He was teleporting myself and another chap all over their extremely large server for about two hours. The memory error started to occur every few minutes after that and nuking the install has had it only show up the once since. I think it's possibly something to do with information stored locally from various worlds that for whatever reason doesn't unload.

Thanks for sharing. Had a brief look in creative mode at the new blocks, really happy with those additions. I was pleasantly surprised when the sun went down to find the new lighting is in this file. It's a lot softer and the transition is a lot smoother, a nice touch especially for creative/creative SMP servers I think. Switched over to Survival mode to see if I could find NPC villages - managed to make two furnaces before the client black-screened.

Warhammer 40k: Space Marine Only tried the multiplayer so far, loving it.

That is outstanding, how did you do it? Video is hilarious, I have to admit that I've been wondering how the game would've played out without the DLC in question. Little bit of a plot hole without it.

I kept re-loading until I managed to pull it off.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution Amazing game, lackluster ending.

I save like mad in most games, I have twelve saves going for this including the two auto slots, so fortunately I've been able to re-load whenever Jenson decides he doesn't like a particular piece of cover. It's gotten me spotted a few times while trying to ninja my way around or resulted in an alarm being sounded once or twice. The more frustrating ones I've found are when you rush to a particular cover and Jenson sticks to the surface next to the one that was intended. That's gotten me killed three times. Not sure if we've had the same problem with lockers, but I sometimes find that items can only be picked up from a certain angle. On the odd occasion I have to dance around a bit in front of a locker before an item will let me pick it up. Crouching to pick things up seems to help sometimes.

Couldn't have said it better myself, pretty much exactly how I feel about Obsidian and New Vegas.

Oh don't get me wrong, I did too. Rather, it didn't live up to my own expectations of what the game was going to be based upon the way it was marketed.

I had this with my first lecturer last year, in his 60s, trying to act 30. He spent so much fucking time talking about surfing that none of us actually came away from his tutorials with anything relevant to the course module. Worse so he didn't even appear to understand the module he was 'teaching.' For starters he didn't understand the course timetable and proclaimed that the lot of us where a week behind, because apparently "Week 0" meant 'Week 1,' which it did not. Regardless we all ended up doing two weeks worth of coursework in a single week to "catch up." He didn't have a good grasp on the course material either. It wasn't uncommon to get marked down on assignments for referencing something in the textbook because it supposedly wasn't in the textbook, you'd then get spiel about his 'expert' knowledge of the course materials when attempting to actually show content was in fact in said materials. Very headdesk.

Absolutely loving this game. Still on my first play through at just over 26 hours. I've been spending as much time as possible exploring every available area of the game. I'm really enjoying being able to go anywhere and do anything within the city hubs. I'm quite amused that it's possible to deal with hostiles that are in certain places for the sake of some side missions before they actually begin. Most of them I've able to step over all the unconscious characters that I had knocked out while exploring and simply complete the objective and then gleefully skip back to the quest giver with nary a problem - it's hilarious. I too am currently sporting the 10mm Pistol with all the snazzy upgrades. I had up until a certain point been avoiding killing anyone, I was strictly tranq, stun-gun and knock-outs for every hostile. I had held onto the 10mm and Combat Rifle along with several stacks of ammo for both just in case however. I'm still taking the stealth approach for the most part though. I'll tranq and knock-out to a point. When it seems like I'm going to be wasting a lot of valuable ammo doing this however, I start popping heads. I'm really interested that the game offers you both choices and makes them equally viable in a given situation and that you have so much choice over how you get the job done. I'm also really digging that certain decisions actually carry weight or feel like they've made a difference. Alpha Protocol was a massive let down in this regard. All that hype about making decisions and actions with consequences that ended up being rather whimsical. Having purposefully ignored all press relating to DE:HR I'm ecstatic that it's turned out to be the game that I had imagined Alpha Protocol would be.

I really dislike that he starts by promoting your comment and even replies to it - actually inviting you to respond further, when diplomatically if he had really felt the need to un-star you he could've done it and walked away. Instead he invited you to a conversation and banned you because he didn't like what you had to say. Seems rather childish to me. Reminds me exactly why I've stopped giving Kotaku page views though.

Indeed, I'd like to see another studio pick it up though. Perhaps DICE. Think you got your franchises backwards there, Lucas is Star Wars. Gene Roddenberry, Rick Berman and Ron Moore are Star Trek, but had absolutely zero to do with the games. I do love Star Trek games though. I still play STV: Elite Force and Armada 2 these days. I used to play the hell out of Bridge Commander and Away Team too.

Star Wars: Battlefront 3 Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force 2 (There is an Elite Force 2, sans Voyager, but it was to STV:EF as KotOR:TSL is to KotOR).

Not as of yet. One of the chaps I know has been wanting me to get it for awhile, but he is currently in America visiting his partner, so his online time is a bit erratic.

I too watched Sucker Punch recently and loved it. The opening to the film was excellent, helped largely by the song I think. It lost me slightly not long after the opening events, what with the sudden change - but when I cottoned on I thoroughly it. I didn't like the ending though.

Pre-ordered Deus Ex: Human Revolution Augmented Edition at HMV. I had been having real trouble trying to decide where to buy it, but I received an e-mail about points from two years back expiring on my loyalty card at HMV. Spent the points that were due to expire on £20 store credit, so I'll only end up paying £10-15 for it which is quite nice.

That makes sense, trying to cast the correct spells is pretty annoying. I'm pretty much just spamming Arcane Fireballs and healing. Never played Diablo or Torchlight. Magicka is pretty much the first game of that style that I've played.

Magicka Wasn't too keen on the demo, but after watching some 'Lets Play' videos I decided to pick it up via Steam. I think a lot of it is getting used to the controls. I spent most of my time in the demo trying to walk with WASD and accidentally casting spells.

Picked up Chuck Season 3 and Fringe Season 2 on DVD in town today. Previously seen them, so had held off until they dropped in price.