Chindie

The general story of the multiplayer from what I've heard is that once you get good at it, you'll run very hot and very cold, have matches you dominate and matches you get tonked. A lot of that could be to do with the fact that its very much 'You're shot = you're dead' and it appears to have instant headshot kills. It won't drag people away from COD, sadly, but I really rate it as a game. Just going off the campaign that is. I do kinda think COD's dominance has become a problem for the shooter (and perhaps by extension, the games) market. It's too dominant and too popular. To this day at our place copies of COD outnumber everything else, including about 5 years of FIFA put together). Anyway, buy Crysis people, it's fantastic looking and plays briliantly, it's less of a COD shooting gallery and more freeform.

Beveren? Couldn't have been good enough for Arsene clearly.

My sneaky sneaky silenced pistol shooty heady tactic falls down a bit when the aliens turn up in numbers

Misleading. They're not 'uranium bombs'. They're bombs that have a depleted uranium tip used to pentrate and burn in an anti-materiel role. They're also completely legal for use in warfare, and there is yet to be a consensus on the danger of it, and thusly they haven't been banned. The quoted chemist, Marion Falk, in that article claims they match the description of a 'dirty bomb' in every way. They don't. At all. Using a DU tipped bomb as a dirty bomb would be a waste of time, and Falk clearly doesn't have a dicky bird what a 'dirty bomb' is. Falk also claims they're the perfect weapon for killing lots of people. Well, yes... it's a **** bomb, it's kinda what it does. The inference for the ignorant is that the depleted uranium somehow makes the thing more deadly to large groups of people... Except these are specifically used to attack materiel (i.e. military equipment) and tanks, meaning that they're not actually that effectively designed to kill large groups of people, as a bomb without the tip would do the same thing far more effectively and efficiently than a DU round might. That's because it isn't the role it was designed for. All in all, what rubbish. The only use of that article is letting you know that, shock horror, NATO affiliated forces have used entirely legal weapons in the way they were designed to be used, in a war. In other news, US, UK and French forces use flammable poisonous liquid to enforce no fly zone - codename 'Jet Fuel'.

Tills at work crashing in the middle of annoying and longwinded processes meanign you not only have to start again, have the mebarassment of having to restart the thing. Especially when the process you were in the middle off requires the manager to help at pretty much every stage because of silly company protocol engineered into the till system. Tests that have questions that not only are in the main now entirely out of date, but also contradict both the reality of what it's asking about and what the research material provided with the test says is correct.

Zuckerbergs character detracted from the film for me - he's a complete word removed, a real unlikable bastard. Good film but as much as I appreciated it and liked it, it's main character being someone I genuinely didn't like whatsoever means it'll never be a favourite.

quite ironic given they only have three songs; two of which are just different variations of 'everton'. nor do they sing them, either... to be fair to them, they also chant 'HANDBALLL!!!!!!' so often I think it's become a club anthem. Ball will only need to go near a Villa player to have them screaming in unison for handball.

I refuse to watch Unthinkable for that very reason.

Channel 4's documentary that ad a bit of analysis of the tsunami and earthquak is well worth a watch, was on on Thursday, should be an easy find on 4OD. Clips from a US bloke in a park in Japan as the earthquake that it shows are simply bizarre - he sees cracks open in the ground, which he then watches open as close as the ground pulses with the tremors, in between which he also sees the pressure cause the water in the ground to surge up like little fountains everywhere.

Having had an hour or so crack at it, it's a very interesting game to me. It feels like it's got some meat to it, theres weight to everything, which is refreshing after the CoD dominance of recent years. I find myself playing it completely differently too - each encounter with enemies I'm creeping round between cover, taking my time to analyse the area and pick out hostiles, stealthing constantly and picking off enemies carefully - to the point that my most used weapon so far is the silenced pistol with laser target, headshots ahoy. I'm enjoying it a lot. It's not perfect though, I've noticed a couple of what I think are bugs - early on you're asked to collect a tissue sample, which I struggled to do as the game seemed not to register my holding X to scan. This was then followed by the game refusing to not instruct me to use visor, even when I was using it or even when I didn't need to. It just got stuck on that - I'm fairly sure this is related to the issue with the tissue scanning. Hoping a reload sorts it. Looks great, runs well, plays well, wunderbar. Will get into the online once the campaign is done (Chindie88 for any Xbox users who want to embarass me with my uselessness at shooters )

Sold about 11 today.

You're far from alone mate, trust me. I was deeply cynical of it, when it turned out that its - Pug ugly - has an awful story line that drips right wing patriotic America fuckyeah ****' pinko commie bastards **** our women rhetoric and at times verges on racist, as well as patronising - doesn't actually play terribly well, certainly not better than those it copies wholesale - has an only mildly interesting multiplayer that is also in many ways more flawed than CoD ever was at it's worst - even if you make the mistake of buying it, thanks to the 1 time only online crap it comes with in the box (to prevent preowned sales...), an awful lot of stores will not do refunds on it. ...yeah, if you're gonna buy a shooter released on consoles in March, buy Crysis 2 .

No, I mean the demo is offline, it was only a multiplayer demo and on US release they pulled it, though you can still download it, you just can't do much beyond browse the menus.

Don't touch Homefront with a disinfected bargepole, it's absolutely atrocious.

Fair enough. I find it distracting, and positively anti-immersive, a bit too much like a piece of technology being thrown in your face (boom boom) badly. Theres pretty much nothing positive to it in my eyes. In a phone, I can think of few things more useless.

If the 3DS is anything to go by, no, not at all. In a phone, especially when you consider smart phones already have god awful battery lives...

The demo's gone offline, don't bother.

Fairly often found in bunches of bananas in UK supermarkets too.

But those London clubs you mention - wheres the initiative for them to do it? They're already selling out more or less every game, with no standing areas. There's no impetus for them to take the cost hit on making safe standing areas.

You might be slightly disappointed if you're a big fan of the first one as it's supposed to have been streamlined quite a bit. I'm told thats not necessarily a bad thing but in terms of the kind of encounters you have, it's obviously not like the first game where you more or less had the sandbox of a jungle covered island. It's now supposedly more focused.

Anyone picking it up Friday? I'll be trading Dragon Age 2 for it. Always wanted to play the first game but never had the PC to hack it (and still don't), so this will have to do. Looks great, understandably for a Crytek release, a more meaty than usual campaign and a multiplayer that riffs on the traditional COD style and has been designed by the fellas at what used to be Free Radical (of Timesplitters fame, and formerly guys who worked on Goldeneye way back when). I missed the demo, unfortunately, but by most accounts it plays well enough. Looking forward to having a new FPS to get my teeth into proper.

It doesn't have one. Not even on the corners, 'cos they round them off.

I think you'll find that more genres than not don't really benefit from 3d at all though. I mean you say 2 there, in a medium that has dozens of genres. I really don't see the benefit of it to either of those either, I'd file it under distracting gimmick. Less so in a racing game I guess but I would wonder if your lap times benefitted from the 3d at all, or were hindered. I'm guessing the latter. On a phone, with the kind of games that suuceed on a touch interface (which is a rather limited field even now), 3d smacks of desperate top end tech tagged to the top of the spec sheet to give the appearance of a useful addition to the device over it's rivals.

Thanks for posting this. I think this might help a point I made earlier re. the argument that clubs could fit more people standing in the same space than they would sitting, which I think may not be the case especially with modern H&S legislation. From the looks of this picture and what I know of VP seating... there appears to be a **** load more space here between rows than at VP, especially somewhere like the upper Holte. If that is the case (and it sure looks like it) I imagine that any safe standing solution would look similar here too, and to me I think that backs up my point that the capacity may not change much at all, meaning clubs would almost certainly lose out on match day takings, making the time required to recover the cost of the planning and sorting out of the conversion... all adds up. For me, the emotional side of this debate is the red herring that will used to sell to the consumer the denial of what some will want, simply because the real reason, money and business, doesn't play to the crowd too well. At the end of the day if they could justify charging more for a standing seat, there'd be a clamour to get safe standing in from a lot of big names. As it is, they can't, so they don't care, which means theres no will from a major actor for it to happen, which means it will not.