Manningham & Phillips

OK so this isn't really about games but what the hell.

I'm just so excited that that the Giants managed to put together another awesome draft class for 2008. Stand-outs are Safety Kenny Phillips for University of Miami and Wide Receiver Mario Manningham from Michigan. Manningham should stabilise the Giants the receiving core with him and Burress playing the outside and Steve Smith in the slot. Eli Manning has got no excuses now, the receivers are all there!

Manningham

Kenny Phillips is pretty much the finest safety in the draft so he should be able to step straight into the void left by Gibril Wilson jumping ship to the Oakland Raiders, who in my mind, might actually have a chance to win a few games for once.

Phillips

So yeah... Go Giants!

On a gaming note Brett Favre has named as the cover athlete for Madden NFL 09, which is awesome! It's good that he'll be the cover star before we get too hooked up on some other quarterback.

UEFA Euro 2008 Review

Check out the review here!

Boom Blox (Wii) "Meet the Blox" Video

Oh man, this game looks awesome. Who would have thought Spielberg would know anything about games?

Condemned 2 Review

Check out my review here.

Little Guys Can WIn Too!

Woot! Woot! Score one for the little guy! Electronic Arts have decided to scrape the idea of paying for guns as extra content in the upcoming Battlefield: Bad Company. The extra guns will now be available immediately to players who purchase the special edition and for everyone else you can earn them by levelling up to the max level. Still a bit of a scam but a much better deal! The huge outcry over the intentions of EA seem to have worked, at least for now...

Just yesterday finished Condemned 2: Bloodshot, review will be up probably tomorrow over at ripten.com. In the meantime you can check out a couple of news stories i wrote recently on Mario Super Sluggers and Orlando Bloom being handed the lead role in the Prince of Persia movie/movies. Bloom is probably the most "wooden" actor i've ever seen so it'll be interesting to see what he can bring to the table. Nothing probably.

Found an awesome article over at 1up.com on the 101 Best Free Games of 2008. So if you waste al ot of time online be sure to check out some of these, in some cases they are totally awesome. I like Splume, a Bust-A-Move clone with a few extras.

That'll do for now, gotta finish mah' Condemned 2 review!

Mahjong Man

Once again, another piece over at Ripten - NBA Ballers: Chosen One preview.

Found this awesome pic on Kotaku and had to put it up here. This game of "sexy mahjong" was too much for this Japanese guy.

Funny.

Got my copy of Condemned 2 Friday and from what i've played so far it's kind of a mixed bag. It is truely gruesome and scary if played in the right setting (dark room), but the combat is fairly repetitive which is a shame as other parts of the game work really well; the investigations for example. They'll be a review of it up somewhere in the next couple of days, i'll let you know.

COD4 map pack has taken up the bulk of my time this week. Generally the maps are good and make a welcome change from the bleak settings of the original maps. Having not played COD regulary for a few weeks, these maps rekindled my interest. Already though i'm dreading the though of going back to those other maps, so when the new ones get integrated into the whole multiplayer i dont think i'll be playing much after that. Seems like one of the main reasons i stopped playing was i got bored of those original maps - Bloc and Vacant are just dull to look at and play.

Creek is an interesting one. It has a good design in theory but the spawn locations and the position of objectives (in objective based game-types) are just plain biased. However starts on the high ground will generally win, which sucks. IW need to change up the spawn locations on that map fast.

COD4 Maps, N+, Bryon

New review for N+ up, over at Ripten. Check it out here.

Call of Duty 4 map pack should be available tomorrow morning. I haven't played any COD4 properly for quite a long while now, still gonna get the maps though. Hopefully it'll reinvigorate my interest in the game, at least for a while.

Been playing a HUGE amount of N+ recently, partly for review purposes but also just cause it's so damn addictive! Some of the levels are extremely frustrating and often down right sadistic but in a way that's what keeps you coming back.

The whole Bryon review on videogames has been the hot topic recently and i've found it somewhat interesting. It seems like she's just setting out a model that builds on the system currently in place, only that she recommends the BBFC take a bigger role in the classification process. This makes a great deal of sense as games such as Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 has no BBFC rating despite having been awarded a 16+ rating from PEGI. In reality, that means a 6 year old could legally go and purchase a copy of the game. Kinda ridiculous really.