A few weeks ago, I decided to buy Call of Duty 3, simply because I'd played Call of Duty 4 loads, loved it, then fancied the same sort of thing but set in WWII. I wasn't overly impressed - the campaign seemed to follow know structure or story whatsoever, and was full of cheesy lines like "tell Guzzo... Tell him to go to hell..." which leave you saying: "wait a minute, who the hell is Guzzo?" And the multiplayer was just comical compared to CoD4. There really aren't many things funnier than seeing a German staff car driving full-pelt off a bridge whilst "tooting" the horn and rattling around on wooden wheels. So, I think I'll be selling that one on pretty soon...

I also bought Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06, because I liked the 2005 version on the original Xbox and fancied a 360 version. It was actually really good, but I was a little annoyed when I discovered that all of the achievements are only available by playing online, and after some research, I found that EA took the TW 06 server offline in September last year. But, it's still a pretty good game, nonetheless.

So after playing CoD3 for about a week, I returned to CoD4 for a bit, then decided I'd give Halo 3 a go again. I thought that I'd gone off it a load since getting CoD4, but I was quite suprised when I re-discovered just how awesome Halo was. And as well as that, I'm still ploughing through Forza 2. I got to level 50 and have done most of the races - I'm just left with a few endurance races and some pro-series'.

But it still annoys me when I have three or four games on the go... So, I reckon I'll stick at Halo for a while then play some other stuff again. But because I've still got quite a few games to get through, I don't think I'll be making any new 360 purchases any time soon...

I downloaded the "Imperial Glory" demo about a month ago, and I managed to spend countless hours on that, so I decided I should get the real game. I looked around all over the place, and nowhere sells it. You see, it was made in 2005, and I believe it's been discontinued. So, instead, I bought one off eBay for a fiver. And it's quite safe to say that was the best fiver I've spent for a long, long, long time.

I've always had a big interest in the Napoleonic Wars - anything between around 1790 - 1820, which, incidentally, is when the game is set! Basically, long story short (I'm saving the long story itself for when I actually write a full review of the game...), you control your armies and your empire, moving them around from place to place, invading countries, fighting naval battles, etc. You build buildings and establish trade routes to gain more resources, then, eventually, create yourself an absolutely massive army and go around bullying little countries in Europe. It's turn based, each "turn" lasting a month, each turn allowing you to create troops/buildings, etc.

Though the best bit is the fighting itself. You command the battles by moving troops around the field in battalions/regiments, then choose when to engage the enemy best. The main types of units are infantry, cavalry and artillery. Tactics are usually simple: send your infantry infront of your cannon, and fire over their heads (and hope not to kill your own troops!), whilst at the same time sending cavalry in behind enemy lines to take out their artillery.

Overall, it's a brilliant game and is fantastic fun, though it's probably only liked by people like me with an interest... Nonetheless, it was a bargain and is proving to be a brilliant game.

My computer is probably about 18 months old now. It's got 1GB of RAM, an AMD Athlon 3500+ Processor and a GeForce 7600 GS graphics card. I got Oblivion for it when I got the PC in the first place, and I could run the graphics at full-pelt and there'd be no problems. After about 6 months I started seeing what I can only describe as "small patches of red wiggly lines" appearing all over the screen after playing the game for about 20 minutes or so. I turned down the graphics options and it still happened. It also did it on loads of other games. I had no idea why it did it, so I just stopped bothering with the PC games. Now I thought I'd have a look at it and it still does the same thing. I'm not very technical with this sort of stuff, but I guessed it might be a hardware problem.

So, if anyone could help me by telling me why it might be doing this and how I might be able to fix it, I'd be really grateful.

I've posted this in the forum as a thread. You'll find it here, but please message me if you have any helpful advice...

Cheers.

So, to sum up the Christmas holiday; it was pretty good. The few days before Christmas were spent mainly on CoD4, then some more days were spent on it between Christmas and new year... It's one hell of a good game. I've carried on playing Forza 2, too. Still not got round to playing Zuma though... lol. I will eventually.

But the new year was a bit of a blur... Overall good fun though. I've had a rotten flu or cold or something this week which sucks. But I'm getting ready to head back to the grind of college: whoopee.

Anyway, have a good 2008, everyone.

LIVE Arcade has never appealed to me. I once played Hexic HD because it was already on my Xbox 360, and thought it was pretty rubbish. Since then I've not taken any notice in these apparantly "addictive" games.

Until the yesterday, that is. My mate has recently bought a new 360 and it came with loads of free trials/demos of Arcade games. So, playing through some of them, it was business as usual. Every single one of them was rubbish. Save one: Zuma.

It was actually a really fun game. Simple stuff: the normal idea of LIVE Arcade, which is to mix lots of the same colour to remove/delete them before a timer runs out or the 'objective' moves ever closer to your 'player' or whatever it is. Zuma is basically this, except it's got a hillarious frog that fires the coloured balls at the other moving coloured balls. The music is also great. It's generally dead simple but highly fun.

So, for some retarded reason, I decided to buy the full version. lol. It was only 400MS Points too, so I'd say it was well worth it. Of course, the only trouble is that I still have loads of my other games to play through at the moment! I did the Call of Duty 4 campaign quickly in two days on "Regular" difficulty and have spent several hours online, and am playing through on the hardest difficulty. I've not played on Oblivion again since getting CoD4, and Forza 2 came yesterday, so I've played some of that today too. God, I need to play through all these things at some point... And then I bought Zuma on top of it!

I ordered Forza Motorsport 2 about four days ago, and that's due at any moment, but for some reason last night, I decided I'd get some Microsoft Points to download the new Halo 3 maps. Then about ten minutes later, I saw Call of Duty 4 for £25, and I just couldn't say no to it when it was that cheap...

So I've got new Halo 3 maps to play on, Call of Duty 4, Forza Motorsport 2, and on top of that I'm borrowing Oblivion from a mate, but not for long. It's weird, because I never buy that much stuff at once. I like to have a game and play it for at least a month or so before getting another new one.

And on top of that, I bought a new cable for my crappy internet connection for a quid off eBay, and miraculously, it's fixed it and it's actually behaving like broadband should do! Which means I'll probably find myself spending more time on Xbox LIVE... All I can say is it's a good job it's Christmas, because I'd never get through all of these games otherwise... And what's more, it had better be bloody cold to stop be from going out. But I'll probably end up spending more time in the pub than on Xbox this holiday. Oh well, I'm sure I'll find time to play them some time...

lol.

Okay, so I eventually got up to the stage on Colin McRae: DiRT that I wanted to be. I'd completed all of the career, unlocked all the cars, and completed all the championships. I was left with three achievements: the one for driving over 1000 miles in career mode, and two online ones. I had been annoyed with the online game-mode, because it seemed I could never win anything... No matter how hard I would drive, I would always be beaten at some point.

But after a good hour of online-driving, I finally started winning. I won the Rally and Hill Climb achievements, suceeding in three consecutive events in the first, and two in the latter.

So now, thanks to that, I've got one achievement left. And that's to drive 1000 miles in career mode. I mean, I had to play through career fully and then repeat some races just to get the 500-miles achievement, so I think it might be a hard one to go for, if I can be bothered. Does anyone know if "Championship" mode counts as a career race? Or does it actually have to be in "Career" mode?

Any help might be nice, because I'd like to know if there's an easy way of doing this.

Cheers.