What games have you played recently?

Bloody hell!

I still feel that San Andreas is the best. GTA 4 was great, but it didn't feel like it was stretching into new areas.

Yeah, they felt a bit aged when SA came out anyway. Luckily the sheer uberness of the game let you overlook it completely.

That's what i was saying to my little brother the other day; but he responded rather cleverly: they would need 4 blu-ray discs then, not one

Err..yeah...

I imagine GTA4 is going to look better on the PC as well. Hopefully like the previous GTA games, the textures will be crisper and the draw distance will be adjustable.

Yup, same on 360. Another great think I like about the PC versions - "Frame Limiter - Off".

I finally gave in to my lower instincts and got a Lord of the Rings Online account. Being able to walk into The Prancing Pony and have a chat with Strider, or visit The Shire and have a look at the different rooms in BagEnd is great fun. Soon they will publish a Moria extension where you can travel the old dwarfen city from one end to the other, shortly after the Fellowship went through...

I played Stranglehold when it came out (which seems like YEARS ago now!). It started off ok, but it seemed the only way it developed was giving you more guys to shoot..and that was about it. Still, good fun while it lasted.

I really want a new series of "Tycoon" games. They keep trying to re-vamp the theme park ones, but the 3D versions (RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 *cough*) ended up sucking compared to their pixelated predecessors. I'd really love to play a new RollerCoaster tycoon that handled more like the new C&C games (preferably with less tanks though).

Max Payne, I would love to play that first game one more time. Besides 'mafia' (which is still the best game ever for me) there's no game that can top the drama/dark cold atmosphere of that game. Stranglehold is very repetitive but also very brainless fun .

PS : Mark Wahlber will soon star in the movie 'max payne' , here's the trailer : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JboQmDIdKWs , it looks ok , but I'm not sure of Wahlberg, he's a bit too young for Payne (although he's a very fine actor)

Yeah, I hope they don't screw this one up, the videogame already felt more movie-like than most movies nowadays. It's very cinematic, even though its graphic novels are static, you could just fill in the holes with your imagination. I'm hoping they follow the story of the first game, because that one's brilliant, with a very satisfying buildup and conclusion.

Stranglehold I still have to play that... It's lying here for when I have time. Anyone ever saw the Hong Kong actioner Hard Boiled which is actually a prequel to the game? If the game even has half of the action it sounds great. I also love Chow Yun Fat so let the bloodbath commence!

LOL

Do I like it? Yes, I do... you really need good hardware to be able to run all the beautiful details in the visuals, but the game runs on smaller systems too (which is what I have) with a rather barren landscape in that case, but still it is way above WoW in that regard.

The game does a lot of things very right. The quests are in many ways a bit more complex than in WoW, and the epic storyline your character can follow will make him meet up with a lot of famous guys. Overall, the Tolkien feel in the quests is okay.

There are so many quests you can´t do them all with one character, which is great and allows you to play different characters without running out of new stuff to see or to do.

Since they don´t have the movie licence, they don´t use the movie´s designs, but they are so close that you can easily feel at home there, thanks to Tolkien being very specific in his descriptions, so I guess it HAS to look a lot alike.

The game mechanics are a lot more complex than they are in WoW, and I like that, but you may have to look around a lot to find out how some things work best. Not bad if you wnat to spend a lot of time with the game.

It IS a MMORPG, but it is more much better oriented to the solo player than WoW. If you don´t want to run a fellowship (a group) quest, just wait for some levels and then do it alone. The game doesn´t concentrate too much on the "professional level" stuff WoW is famous for. In WoW, you have to spend an aweful lot of time to get your character into a shape that will be accepted by large groups to participate in a raid, which is the only way to see the high level content. LOTRO doesn´t have too much of this stuff, so I would call it very beginners- and casual players-friendly.

The world is big, yes. There are a lot of things to see and visit, but in the end the world is by far not as big as in WoW, but since is only Chapter One, all we get is Eriador, anyway, so it´s all about the northwest of Middle-Earth, just up to Rivendell. Chapter Two, coming out soon, will take you deep into Moria, and I guess there will be a lot of Chapters before the whole of Middle-earth is laid out, and then we´ll have a giant world to play in.

I played Tiddlywinks today.

I'm going to shoot some pool at the pub tonight.