I decided to tally up all the money I spent on games this year and see what else I could of bought with the money. I have split the year up into wii and 360 just to make it a bit easier to read (I sold my wii earlier this year and the money was spent on a 360)

Wii

Wii - £180

Red steel - £40

Warioworld - £30

2x wii points - £60

Legand of zelda - £40

sub total : £380 sold for £250 = loss of £180

Xbox 360

Xbox360 - £300

Guitar hero 2 - £70

splinter cell pandora tomorrow - £7

Dead rising - £25

Forza 2 - £40

Lego star wars 2 - £25

smackdown 07 - £40

Halo 3 - £40

Assassins creed - £50

Mass effect - £40

Virtua fighter 5 - £40

Orange box - £40

Guilty gear - £14

Capcom vs SNK - £7

Grand total = £868

Now what else could I have bought with that?

202 chicken curries from my local Chinese

181 cheese pizzas from my local pizza place

$1721.50 American dollers

650 acres of mars

14,364 school dinners for poor Africans

2604 mosquito nets for Africa

Thats all I can think of the now, mabye I'll put more stuff up after Christmas (mabye not)

What alternative uses can you think of for your game money?

My mums friends son was moving out the house and he used to play warhammer but does'nt anymore and since there was no where else for his stuff to go I got it, now I don't play warhammer anymore and the stuff he gave me is older than me and not the stuff I used to collect but I did get a few roleplay books (think D&D in the warhammer universe) now the stuff is cool but I don't do that anymore. The second coolest thing that I got was a really old White Dwarf magizine and it says copyright 1992 (no issue number) and it has 32 pages and is a paper back pretty cool but the coolist thing is well you would'nt belive me if I told you so i'll show you a picture.

(this isn't my picture but it's the same book, I swear)

Now I'll proberly never play this but it's just so cool and who would of thought I would stumble upon this it made my day!

Yep Since I became 16 recently I decided to buy ascratchcard and I won yep I won a whole £2.00 at first I thought it was £200 but then I noticed the point. I've played and completed bioshock awsome game but I'm going to have to go though again and harvest all the little sisters instead of saving them.

Yep I got a avatar and I made it with pivot! it a cool stick figure animator but it's hard to get it to fit in the square and under the memory (only 20k! how dare you censor my art!)

I just completed the stranglhold demo on hard boiled and it's great! So cinematic and everything is so destructuble but Bioshock comes first I just hope that I have the money for 7th of september becausce I can't wait to get my hands on the full game.

Well for a while I've been a fan of stelth games and even though I've hadsplinter cellfor years I never thought it would play that well on the pc and just left it to collect dust, how wrong I was. I just completed it and am going to write a revew at some point, also I've seen conviction and it looks absolutly mouthwatering not quite the same as the origanal splinter cell but a different approch on sneak-them-ups (I think I just made that up there) but I'm getting ahead of myself as I need to play the other 3 splinter cell games before convicton comes out.

My guitar hero 2 disk is unreadable according to the 360 when I tryed to play Monkey Wrench so I deleted the save file, lets hope that sorted it as I really like my guitar hero.

After hearing about manhunt 2 being banned in the UK and also going on the forum and hearing other peoples views about the subject I can't really decide who is right and who is wrong, should manhunt 2 be allowed to go on sale in the UK or should it be banned? So after a bit of thought I decided to post all my thoughts on this whole manhunt 2 issue.

Reasons for the BBFC

1. Good track record

They have a pretty good track record when it come to games the only one they ever banned was carmageddon and even that got to be released after it was changed. I know they said no because it's the whole game that's screwed up but hey maybe take a cutscene from here and line of speech from there and it may just be acceptable. Also is really fair to them to give the this power to rate games and when they decide to ban a game to just turn round and say "You have no right to ban this game"

1. They've played the game

Lets face it you or I have'nt played the game have we? But they have. All we can do is speculate just how violent and gory it is. Mabye this game does cross that line. I've never played the original manhunt but I watched a video on youtube which demonstrates all the stealth kills. Most of them I was ok with but some I was a little more like err ok (like the machete one where he constantly chops away until the guys head falls off) and the testicles one, lets just say the less said about that the better.

1. It's the law

We can't just say "well this shouldn't apply to me because I'm not going to kill everyone so just release it already" because you can't judge people by your own standard as everyone is different (I suppose this is kinda like "a team is as only as strong as it's weakest member") What I'm trying to say is just because you will be diligent and not buy it for you're kids who says the people down the road are going to care about the 18 certificate? (shame on them)

1. Out of context

The story for manhunt one I thought sounded pretty cool as it was original for a game but manhunt 2 seems to have a pretty weak story in my opinion in case you don't know I'll give you a quick run down that I got from good ol wiki

"An experiment at a secret research facility has gone catastrophically wrong. Daniel is sent to the Dixmor Asylum, where six years later a freakish storm of lightning hits the power, leaving it dark and haunting. Daniel Lamb and Leo Kasper are the only surviving subjects. The Pickman Project will stop at nothing to hunt them down and stop the truth from getting out.

This sounds more of an excuse to kill some dudes to me. To be honest who knows it might turn out to be good but as I said I think it's more of an excuse to kill dudes, I think the first one is better.

Reasons against the BBFC

1. Other things get away with it

I've seen saw 1 and it was pretty brutal but it got away with it, it was never banned. I also hear that hostel and hostel 2 are both pretty gory but they get away with it and get an 18 rating as they should, is manhunt 2 really any worse I mean it can't look more realistic than these movies.

1. We have a ratings system there is no need to ban it

Well there is a 18 certificate for a reason and that reason is so people who are under 18 can not buy it without their parent or legal guardian there and if people who are really young have their parents buy it for them then it is bad parenting and why should that have a knock on effect to the rest of us?

1. Games don't make people go crazy (banning them does!)

There is more to life than games. If I went on a murderous rampage who's to say it was games that got me there, just cause I play them that could be seen as a really minor influence, there could be so much more going on in my life that could make me snap. Such as

1. 1. Being bullied
   2. Too much stress
   3. life is sooooooooo boring
   4. I recently turned emo (joke)
   5. my pet hamster died

Now none of these apply to me (thank god) but they may apply to someone else, someone that happens to play games and this someone just snaps and goes crazy.

So as you see I'm on the fence with this issue what do you think?

If you got though that then thanks for taking the time to read it.

For a while now I have been completly hooked on this webcomic about videogames. It's very well done and is just damn funny most of the time I recommend when you have a day doing nothing just read from the first one to the lastest one heres a link

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/

he also has some cool blog posts from time to time

Do you see that on the right, past the tagger flirt emblem yep thats it the radio star emblem and I got that cause my letter read out ages ago on the GSUK podcast. Congrats on everyone that got one oh and two more things.

1. That came with the first batch it's first edition it is can anyone say KACHINGG!

2. bring it on video cause I'm a radio star! (if that was'nt the words to the song I'm gonna look awfuly foolish)

Well I have finally cataloged all the games that I currently own and here are some things that I have renembred about the games

Harvest moon rocks

I have gotten over my sims addiction (for now)

I never played unreal tournament online

I got killzone for free so it automatically rocks

team buddies was amazing

I do not agree with gamespots team buddies review

Die hard trilogy is the only game I still have since I first ever got my origanal playstation and god it was fun with the lightgun

 for three years I had lost my 3rd disc of the legand of dragoon but it turned out to be in my origanal playstation that I had left at my granpas for years

I have'nt played stalker enough

Me and Chris from resident evil have a lot in common (but thats another blog post)

ghost master was hard

I have got a lot of rpgs

but I have never completed a final fantasy

why did I trade in my sega mega drive (genisis for you yanks) and my snes I'm a fool

I completed Grandia 2 but had to leave my house when the ending came along so I'll have to play it again sometime

I now use my eyetoy as a webcam

one must fall battlegrounds kept crashing on my computer that annoyed me

every time i played morrowind I was sick a while after and that put me off the game

oblivion was better but still did'nt do it for me, mabye next time

I never got to grips with the warcraft 3 map editior but the people who did made some really cool stuff, I hope little big planets community will be able to do similiar things

why did I trade in metal gear solid I'm such a fool

they need to make a sequal to team buddies on next gen systems 50 gig content FTW

well thats all I can think of so enjoy (and I hope someone gets the title)

Well I got streets of rage for the virtual console couple days back and it brings back good memories of playing it on my sega but I never got the chance to play streets of rage 3 and only got to play streets of rage 2 round at my friends house so heres hoping that they bring out the other two for the virtual console

Well I'll tell you whats been happening (to me at least and mostly about gaming). My mum and dad said they may get me a 360 if my standerd grades results were good (what good is could be anything) so I guess I will be looking foward to my tests in a weird sorta way. Eveyone here from the UK should listen to the UK podcasts there really good and imformative also about two podcasts ago they read out my email which I was pretty happy about so I sent in another one for next weeks podcast so fingers crossed.Also I was wondering if the eyetoy can be used as a webcam so when I hit level 10 I can have some way of getting videos out there even if it is just me making witty remarks and I just don't want to buy a webcam or some expensive video cam.

thanks for reading this