I played a bit of Stranglehold last night. The game is a the 'spiritual sucessor' to John Woo's Hard Boiled it features Chow Yun-Fat as Inspector Tequila in action spectacular that could be called gun porn.

It's based around Unreal Engine 3 technology so the environments are all superbly destructible and reactive and look great. It also takes the bullet time trick and really runs with it. The Tequila time kicks in either manually or when ever you do something cool with an enemy in your sights.

Leaping over things or backwards or sideways and it switches to tequila time slow mo. It also happens when you slide across a table or land on a moving cart or slide down a railing or any number of cool action tricks.

They compliment this with the tequila bombs that do additional things starting with healing but moving on to things like a sort of sniper shot that does a follow the path of the bullet trick.

The allows you to use the environment with ease, want to slide across a table? Just run up to it and away you go. You can also chain up events leaping into the air and landing on a cart to roll across the room blasting away.

You can also use parts of the environment to get enemies by shooting signs or air con units that are above your foes you knock them down for extra style points.

It's a superbly crafted gun battling frenzy to play, environments start pristine and end up smashed to bits corpses everywhere.

The involvement of John Woo and Chow Yun-Fat definitely adds a good dose of gravitas to the thing and the presentation is slick and cinematic. The voice acting is good and the cut scenes obviously show a lot of the Woo influence, John Woo even makes an appearance in the game as a bartender and apparently you can play as him in multi player.

It's a hell of a fun game and I find because of the demo it's moved up my already quite full list of top games coming out soon that I want from a 5th to a 3rd with Mass Effect and Assassins Creed in the top spots.

It comes out in September on most platforms and is well worth checking out, for 360 owners there is a demo on xbox live I assume a pc demo will pop up at some point.

Read two, get one free! A review of a film from a while back, The Covenant, as a warning to those buying or renting DVDs...

Hello.

As Matt mentioned, we went to see some films the weekend before last. He mentioned the idea of us producing some sort of review of them, which didn't seem like a particularly unreasonable thing to do.

So we have.

Presented for your delictation, reviews of Die Hard 4.0 and The Simpsons Movie

Enjoy.

Byrn and myself took in a few films at the weekend, we had a wedding reception to go to on the Friday which finished early enough for us to go along to see the simpsons movie, which was good fun.

It seemed to hit all the right points with a good mix of fresh material and the old favourites and in jokes. It's worth seeing for spiderpig alone.

On the Saturday we took in a few more films Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix, which seemed to have been trimmed down fairly heavily from the book, which is both a good and a bad thing.

Getting rid of a load of Potters angsty whineing and also reducing the titular order of the phoenix to a barely seen two dimensional shadow whose names you only find out through inference and poor character dialogue.

Anyway it's OK if you have seen the other films I guess and Imelda Staunton is wonderful as the disturbingly unhinged inquisitor Dolores Umbridge. I'm sure it will make a fuck load of money regardless.

We then saw Die Hard 4.0 which is pretty much everything I was expecting stupid to the point of ridicule (it is brain poison) but it makes up for it with really big explosions. It lacks an English bad guy which is of course an almost unforgivable black mark (who even remembers die hard 2 with William Sadler as the bad Guy ... No body that's who!) but Timothy Olyphant does a passable job as the cruel detached madman killing teh internetz with his l337 skillz.

Kevin Smith also pops up in a small part which was funny. Bruce is back doing what he is good at and still looks like he is young enough for it not to be ridiculous, this definitely isn't in the Harrison Ford escape from a nursing home school of action films.

Finally we saw Transformers, the use of the beagle 2 lander as a plot piece still annoys me ... a lot ... if I ever meet Michael Bay I'm gonna give him a piece of my mind, well that's if the transformers fans don't get him first.

I spent most of yesterday finishing off 'The Darkness' it was good in some ways but I felt ultimately flawed, it felt like it could have done with a bit more polishing.

After finishing that I started on my other purchase the PS3 version of Enchanted Arms which I saw on offer at 20 bucks or ten quid. It contains one of my pet hates in RPG's random unavoidable battles.

Even the final fantasy series which I believe originated the idea has stopped doing this on their lastgen FFXII so to see it on a next gen title is very annoying. It was originally a dodge to get round the lack of memory and storage in the consoles but these days with the machines packing a 60 gig hard drive you would think they could store things there if not in the memory.

Apart from that annoyance Enchanted Arms seems fairly good so far, compared to the big guns of FFXII which I've yet to finish it's not particularly impressive, it has a tendency for very bland environments in someways the ps2 FFXII looks better than this next gen pretender. The PS3 additions over the X360 version are very tacked on involving shaking the controller instead of bashing X. Still it kept me amused and awake yesterday as I recuperated and for a tenner that's not bad value.

Then new E3 has just gone more of a trade show than the big public event of before and later in the year so less important as most of the platform holders have already made their major announcements at their own shows or one of the others like Ubidays or CES or some such. There was still the pelthora of videos issuing from the show the likes of Assassins Creed and Mass Effect looking better than ever, plus a few new things.

It's shaping up to be a good end of year for games (Q4 as the Americans would have it) with the likes of Bioshock, UT3, GTA4, Super Mario Galaxy, Assassins Creed, Mass Effect, and a few others all hitting in a few months. It's a shame so much good stuff comes at once it makes it hard to appreciate it with it all hitting at once. Maybe I need to book off some time round then to get some game play in, thinking about it I have the holiday to do it and it would make a change from taking off December.

Anyway this week will be spent catching up with things getting back into the swing of things at work, I think I there is another Descent session coming up at Pete's place but I have to check.