This is your Brian on drugs

Feeling a little bored of the endless stream of FPS games out for Xbox I decided to have a look at the XBLA offerings. New additions this week included Speedball 2 - Brutal Deluxe (SB2) and Every Extend Extra Extreme (E4). I was a massive fan of SB2 back in the days of Amiga but was not expecting to be as blown away as I am by E4.

Lets quickly skip over how disappointing SB2 is. It's looks and feels like a direct port of the Amiga version which given the way that titles of that era can be polished and updated for XBLA that is unforgivable. No amount of nostalgia will get me to spend £5 on this clunky, black bordered let down.

Now, onto the good stuff. The remarkably named Every Extend Extra Extreme is a cross between a bullet hell shooter and a rhythm game. Having only seen screenshots for it I was ready to not like it well in advance due to my utter disregard for bullet hell games however Sunday afternoon boredom led me to play it none the less.

The simplest explanation of the game is: blow yourself up at the right time to the beat of the music to make really cool chain reactions for points and power ups. So far so dull right? wrong! This game has sucked the afternoon dry of time before I even noticed. 4 hours later and I am still hooked. Not bad for £5 XBLA game.

The key to the game is to blow yourself up right on the beat, repeatedly and pick up the right balance of power ups to get your score multiplier up. Getting this right leads to scores in the trillions.

Back in the days when my weekends were put aside for regular and heroic substance abuse we used to put the playstation on with some tunes and that demo that came with the console, you know the one, it had the disembodied heads and dolphins flying through space. If this had been available at the time it would have been all we played on a Saturday morning and it would probably have come back out for Sunday's pick-me-up session (usually a pill while watching Wildlife on Two followed by Star Trek Voyager).

This game makes me want to be on drugs. Kids today never had it so good.

Tired, but smiling

Had a long deserved fantastic session at cash last night. After what seems like forever suffering the runner,runner bad beats and idiot calls to instant service 2 outer rivers I cleaned up.

Things didn't start too good in the tournament, a dearth of cards and positions (I made what I could of stealing where possible but it simply wasn't enough to keep me alive) followed by losing 2 races to go out. Went down to play cash with a resolution not to be tilty, not to be over loose and to not just play my cards. Was doing OK up and down sitting at around £70 and just moved off the self dealt to a dealer table when the self dealt decided to go to "a round of each". Each in this case being Hold-em then Omaha.

Hold-em bores the hell out of me in long cash sessions (but its mostly all that is available at non e nose bleed levels) so I was straight back over there. Added to that is the fact that most of the players really don't get Omaha, I thought it was going to be a high value game. I wasn't wrong.

We had the perfect table, players who claimed to be hold-em players - one claimed 15 years of experience - who declared Omaha as "a girls game", "total bollocks", "a fish game". It didn't stop them doing their absolute bollocks at it though, and lets be clear, they sucked at hold-em too.

So many good pots that they got into with shit like top pair, one card flushes, a straight on a paired and flushed board. One hand that unfortunately didn't get all the value it deserved saw the nut flush go up against flopped quads and the nut full house, four handed! It's a real pity that the guy who would have ended up with the nut full house got out of it on the turn because it was me that flopped quads :D

Ah happy days and £250 to the good on the game.

Halo 3

So three days after "Halo Day" has it changed the world of video games as we know it? No, but that's not to say it isn't special all the same.

In case you missed it - and I have to say, even if you are not a gamer I don't know how you could not have been exposed to at least some of the hype on this game, it even made the BBC evening news (albeit with footage of a different game) - Halo 3, the final (yeah right) game in the Halo series was launched.

I wasn't going to get it as I am not that big a Halo fan. I enjoyed the single player campaign of both its predecessors - it is actually one of my favourite FPS now I come to think of it - but the Xbox Live experience has never really made me want to go online and play. Mind you the same could be said about any FPS. However since I have found a whole load of easy going 30 something UK gamers to play online with I thought I could give it a go. That and the fact that when I looked to see who was playing what on Wednesday every single person on my friends list was playing Halo 3, even my brother in law who is not a FPS fan at all.

The campaign is so far pretty damn good. The game looks amazing, the enemy grunts are as stupidly funny as ever and the enemy AI (something I loved about the first one) is great with them taking cover and generally making your task difficult. The big set pieces are great - taking down the Scarab tanks for instance - and the difficulty is just right (for me anyway).

Online with friends however is a total blast. I have not had so much fun playing an online multi player game ever. Blasting around a level on the back of a warthog shooting everything that moves while your team mate driver laughs as he runs over the opposition is amazing. Team shooters are nearly always fun, but the vehicles in Halo 3 make it near gaming nirvana.

Then you add in the fantastic website at bungie.net with the game stats tracking and ability to download, share and replay an entire match from any angle!! Let me say that again. Any game played can be saved off to an online share where others can download it to their console and replay it from any angle or point of view of any player. That's pretty impressive. For the "pro" clans out there it will make practice and analysis of games pretty easy to do in an organised manner. For the rest of us its a cool feature to send clips of especially sweet kills to those who you fragged.

Ready for the weekend

Here it is! It is truly magnificent. Pictures don't do it justice it has to be sat at to be truly appreciated. Jola is a bit, er, overawed by its size but I am sure she will get over that. Roll on Saturday.

Oh, and its not too late to help the cause...