As a way of breaking up that painting, I requested some Arbite Enforcers for Christmas to paint.   The 40k universe was what got me tuned in to miniature gaming, and i prefer small squads to huge armies to paint, so i basically went for the mini’s i thought were cool and damn the consequences.  10 models that are essentially based on Judge dredd, with some big shields. I have a penchant for big shields.

A third project i have on the go is some extra models for my Blood Bowl Lizard men – I have a team, but would like to be able to field a full set, which meant i needed a couple of extra saurus and some skinks.  I don’t necessarily need them, but i’d like to get them whilst they’re available, and it’s nice to have a full set.  This leads me on to my recent endeavour of making a nicer Blood Bowl board.  Will probably come up as a post at some point, but i’ve managed to find a set of interlocking foam boards that should make a good board that will give some character, but allow for some portability (Foams quite thick, so it won’t be as portable as a board, but i find the board to be a bit dull).

The acting in particular was just superb.  Nothing fancy, and always understated, the relationships between the three characters play out with a real air of authenticity.  After the problems I had investing in vanquish, this was a real change of scenery, and was a perfect antidote to that problem.  You care about what’s going on.

I was playing it on hard, which for the most part was quite cool, and made most of the fights interesting instead of bash bash bash – you have to block and dodge quite a bit.  Main issue with hard was swarming – if you get 3 bots attacking you you can die very quickly, which as the game went on happened at a few bottle necks to really take the charm off.  Unfortunately, i haven’t got the sense to admit the level should be a notch lower and so i carried on regardless.  It certainly helped to give a desperate feel to the proceedings.

Recommendation: I paid £17, for that price you can’t go wrong.

I’ll probably pick up the DLC if it ever goes half price on a gold offer, but wasn’t pigsy’s biggest fan.

Some of the most enjoyable moments come from the boss fights that have a real one more go quality about them.  All of them are tough, and basically rely on the same combo of run away, shoot lots, scream at the television that they must be dead by now, run away, shoot some more.  The main difference to this is if you have the rocket launcher, which does an absolutely massive amount of damage to most things, to the point it seems like cheating to use it.  It scratches a similar itch to Lost planet 2, where the ridiculousness of the bigger and bigger boss battles with the one weak point you need to shoot.  But Lost Planet 2 was better in that sense, the akrid were just so huge you felt you needed to shoot them that long, in Vanquish, it often seems like shooting for shootings sake.

Visually the whole thing is impressive, but i never felt like i was really invested in the whole thing.  The story was so all over the place it ended up lacking any real context at all, and i think that was really to its detriment.  On playing the demo I had high hopes for this and was quite excited to play it, and now I’ve finished i can’t help but feel a little bit meh about it, which was not what i was expecting.

• Tomb Raider Underworld
• Resident Evil 5 – Veteran
• Risk Factions
• Red Dead Redemption
• Alan Wake (Plus First DLC)
• Lego Harry Potter
• Blazin’ Birds
• Lego Star Wars

Games that don’t have an end but pretty much done with:

• Chime
• Fifa 10
• Scene IT LCA
• Geometry Wars 2
• Monday Night Combat

On The Go:

PG Witerbottom

• Scott Pilgrim
• Guardian Of Light
• Skate Three
• FIFA 11
• Dead Space
• Halo ODST

To Start!!!!!

• The Writer DLC
• Resi Evil DLC
• Portal: Still Alive

Recently, games night on Tuesdays has become board games night, which has been mainly playing the new Civilisation (Which is fun but so far has failed to be very interactive between players thus far) and Arkham Horror (Which as a co-op game works quite well whilst still allowing people some leeway to do their own thing).  Arkham continues to impress me as a really fun game with a large re-play value, I’m hoping to get on to some of the expansions at some point, I’ve been recommended the King of Yellow to start.  Last night’s game was the lowest points we’ve got recorded: 7 points, after getting Yig combined with a Rumour card that forced the terror track up every turn on a 1 or 2.  Once the terror track reached 10, we would all be cursed, then Yig would eat us when he woke up.  It definitely threw our game plan for a loop, we ended up having to wake up Yig early to avoid the rumour card.  I really like the dynamic way that things like this play out in Arkham, it produces some great moments every time we play, there’s always a talking point at the end of the night.

In a similar Vein, I recently visited LLcoolJo, and got some games of Space Hulk in.  Similar deal with the stories, the way that every action rests on a dice really gives everything a knife-edge quality to it.  The second game we played essentially came down to a backs against the wall terminator overwatch with 6 genestealers running at him.  It’s really got me inspired to get my terminators painted (I’m going for some sort of Death wing approach, but still experimenting @tm), with the genestealers already on the way with about 8 done to a decent standard so far.  Couple that with plastic mountain of bretonnians I have, I’ve got plenty of things to spend my time on, I’m hoping that I might get some painting in over the Christmas holidays, it’d be nice to have my spearmen done before I see Mr CoolJo on new years day.

(The last three netted me 800 points back for spending over 2400)
All of these have been real stand out offers that I’ve struggled to pass up, and the only disappointing one so far has been Plants Vs Zombies, which has failed to really hook me in the way I hoped it would. That being said, I’ve yet to play The Writer DLC or Portal since I picked them up, although I already have portal as part of the orange box, so I know I’m getting some quality there.
I’ve been really impressed twofold recently with XBLA, firstly at the number of 800 point games releasing which I’m far more comfortable paying on a regular basis, plus they’ve really stepped up the gold member deals.  Just on the above I’ve saved 600 1240 2040 2300 3100, or about £20, which I’m very happy with.  It’s certainly kept me more than busy enough!

Oh, scott pilgrim isn’t on that list, but with 3-4 players it really comes into it’s own, we started playing it a few weeks ago after arkham and are having a blast, although there’s some grinding involved to get good enough to take on the last boss, which from a streets of rage perspective isn’t what I’d like.

On the back of this rip roaring success, i thought getting lego star wars complete saga would be a good use of my love films last month,  and we could get in some quality play time together without overdoing the harry potter.  Whilst fun, and definitely funnier so far, i’d completely forgotten how bad the camera is in all the other lego games. Coupled with some hash platforming, we both ended up quite stressed and feeling rubbish – i think taking turns on each level will work out much better, the 2P implementation is just so frustrating. It basically boils down to you being tethered to the other player, causing deaths and confusion at every turn.

The side effect of all this is to see me carry on my all-conquering Spurs side through another season, looking like 100 pts in the league, plus the quadruple to boot. Have got to the point now where i essentially have two teams in order to cover for the huge number of back to back games I have to play, but it works quite well.

The Actual world cup has had its ups and downs, but overall been very watchable for the most part (Thankyou south america!) and should continue to throw up some interesting matches at every round. Holland vs Brazil should be a good one on Friday.

You always feel on the cusp of death when you’re fighting one of the big Akrid, they’re just so overpowering if you get hit, you really have to co-ordinate well with your teammates to take them down. On that note, have been playing with LlcoolJo with no a.i. so far, which sort of eliminates many of the problems I’ve read in the reviews.

One gripe i have is the needless use of button mashing to use / activate things. It does a good job of adding tension to the task, but the rail gun really took it out of my poor thumbs (Crane {mash B})-> Charge bullet x2 {mash B}{mash B some more}-> move gun {mash B}-> shoot -> move gun {mash B} -> if necessary turn on coolant {mash B} REPETEZ). They also have a classic Capcom tactic of *Very* occasionally using QTE in a cut scene, with annoying insta-death when failed.