I may well be posting less stuff here as Byrn and myself are now part of a new community site with a few friends that is named Lack-Of. You can find it at Lack-Of.org. I'm posting under one of my many aliases, Evilmatt.

It's a blog and things site and at the moment it is still getting going so we'll have to see how it pans out. Since we still pay for this site and it is our own little piece of the web I'm going to probably use the two in parallel posting stuff here and there as the fancy takes me.

Hopefully we'll manage to get some reviews going again at some stage, we have been too busy with other things to make it to the cinema of late but we are going to try and get in another trip next month.

The film version of vampire spectacular "30 Days of Night" is out next month which was a wonderful concept and a good graphic novel so will probably make for a suitably gory film. I suspect there are others that will also make for good end of year entertainment before the glut of crappy Christmas films that will inevitably show up.

I've been playing Eternal Sonata over the weekend, it is a spectacularly beautiful game in it's very Japanese art style.

The whole world and story concept is wonderfully weird too and something that could only come out of Japan.

It's a story we've all heard before many times, the famed composer Frédéric François Chopin lies dying from pulmonary tuberculosis slips into a dream world where people dying from incurable illnesses gain magical powers.

So far so every day ;) the world is strongly themed around music with the main characters all having names like beat, polka, salsa, viola, and allegretto. The story is usual thing of love loss and betrayal (at least that's what the back of the box says) and is interspersed with slide shows detailing Chopin's life as well as sections back in the "real" world where Chopin lies dying.

Gameplay takes the form of a RPG with some interesting twists to its battle mechanic, the mechanism changes over a series of levels as the game progresses but the normal format is you get a set amount of time to perform attacks and movement in this time dependant on level starts to countdown from the moment you move or perform an action. In the lowest level it stops in between actions but in later levels once started it continues to tick down.

The battle area is more or less free to wander around in you start in typical fashion two lines facing each other but after that you have complete freedom to move within the area but moving takes up time. Position is also important since mostly creatures can only block if you attack them face on so if you get behind them (or they you) usually attacks go unchallenged.

Normal attacks add time to the bar and specials greatly deplete it. When the time runs out the next person or monster get's their go. When being attacked there is also the opportunity to block by pressing the button in time with an icon on screen. A certain number of the attacks (for instance Viola's bow) can be aimed first person for say the head for greater damage. There is also a strong element of environment so light and dark areas appear on the battle ground some monsters change when entering different areas to be more powerful.

The characters specials also change depending on which area they are standing in.

The story seems interesting the graphics wonderful and the battling fairly fun. If you fancy something a bit quirky with a bit of a FF style thing then it's worth checking out.

I'm getting a little annoyed with heroes the whole stereotypical Irish sections are a bit laughable, my sister lives in cork so I have been there. I don't remember it being that dark all the time. All of their non American characters seem to be there for comedy purposes, comedy Irish gangsters (All Americans) who all drink Guinness talk with very dodgy Irish accents and are all fighty and theify cold as ice to someone then practically family boy o, comedy British thug come Japanese folk hero (probably American) obsessed with money and drunk on sake a real scoundrel underneath, comedy Mexican death twins (probably Americans) they are less comedy but pretty clueless.

I guess season one took a while to heat up, now one of my favourite characters from the first season showed up again maybe things will get shaking. Sylar rocks sod the rest of them.

I went to see Ross Noble last night with Byrn, Rob, Kate, Will, Nibbler, Dwain, and Fish. He was on top form some of it had me laughing so much it hurt. He also got some real gifts of source material a woman who brought Biscuit World and Potato Processing International magazines, as well as some woman who worked investigating fatal accidents and turned up late then said that she hoped he was better than he had been on the TV the other night.

I think a good time was had by all, Will sounded like he was dying at some points of it he was laughing so hard ;)

I've played through HL2:Ep2 which was excellent some great sequences in there especially towards the end. I noticed one of the voices was done by Adam Baldwin (Jayne Cobb from Firefly) who seems to be showing up in all sorts of things recently and is usually good. I just need to get some TF2 in there and I'll have extracted my moneys worth.

Eternal Sonata is out end of the week which looks good and shows what happens if you give Japanese games developers western history books, yes famed piano composer Frédéric Chopin really did gain super powers just before he died of TB he is the inspiration for Sylar off heroes and could make clowns explode using only his mind.

Next week Metroid Prime 3 comes out which looks to be the first decent game for the Wii, something to look forward to at any rate.

So Valves Orange box is out now (at least for people who use the steam version, I believe the shop version is Friday in the UK) with Half Life 2, HL2:Episode 1, HL2:Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2.

I already have HL2 and HL2:Ep1 but buying the new ones in the orange box is cheaper than getting them separately so I'll be gifting my spares to Byrn who has yet to play HL2.

I ran through Portal last night it took me 2.9hrs according to the steam widget and I wasn't really trying that hard so it is quite short as a game. It is superb fun though with a interesting story and innovative mechanic that really works well. I had my doubts but they have obviously sent the time polishing the mechanic to the point that it really works well. It makes Prey's dodgy attempt look laughable.

The number of things that are achievable with the portal once you master the basics is interesting and the game does a good job of training you with it's based structure with the slightly bonkers GLaDOS computer as part comic relief, part narrator, and part story element. As the game progresses the use of portals becomes more and more elaborate making use of things like conservation of momentum between portals to catapult you across long distances and the like.

That they have achieved an FPS where you essentially have no guns is a great achievement and Portal is a wonderful addition to the Half Life universe, the only down side is its brevity but I guess it's always better to leave the crowd wanting more. Hopefully more levels and maybe a Portal 2 will be along I strongly believe they are right when they say they have barely scratched the surface with what the Portal mechanic is capable of in terms of game play.

Team Fortress 2 looks wonderful with its somewhat cell shaded graphics and cartoon styling. I've yet to have the time to give it a proper go just having a quick try of it on my own to get a feel for the different classes. It looks like it will be good fun and I'll have to have a go of it maybe once I have got EP2 out the way.

So I've been playing Halo 3, it's roughly what I was expecting Halo with better graphics. It's a fun game but nothing amazing it doesn't really move the state of the art at all.

Maybe it's really amazing on multi player or something but I refuse to pay gold fees since I own a pc so why would I bother with that I can play real multi player games for free.

I don't think it was worth all that hype. It really is just fairly average, not bad just not exceptional in any way.

There's a few multi player things in the pipeline for PC the new Quake Wars Enemy territory is out looks interesting and team fortress 2 looks like a lot of fun.

Of course UT3 is coming out in November UT2k4 was pretty much the industry standard multi player game for lans it was looking a touch old but still holding up reasonably well. The new version looks to be shaping up well, got to love hover boards.

Byrn and Myself have a Descent session this weekend, repeated tweaking is yielding something slightly less unbalanced, it's still a real struggle in parts but we seem to be getting nearer to the optimal configuration till we start having to use more imaginative rules.