I picked up two games this week, both on Steam. Torchlight and Borderlands. Would you believe that my Steam Account has 85 games on it? How about believing that my Steam folder is currently 192GB in size and has over 140,000 files? I've had to delete a few games to make some room.

I've played about 3 hours of Torchlight and about 2 hours of Borderlands so far so I can't really conclusively define either game. My initial impressions are quite different for both. I'm enjoying one and not really enjoying the other, I'm sure you can work out which based on my long impressions below! Keep in mind these are very early impressions, I'm curious about how either game changes after you put some serious hours into it.

Borderlands:

The Good:

Shooting works pretty well, lots of random guns but they managed to make the mechanics work well for rifles, machine guns, shotguns and pistols. If you manage to get connected online the netcode seems pretty good. The art st-yle graphics are good, it is very similar to Prince of Persia 2008 but with perhaps more paper cartoon look.

The Bad:

I'm not enjoying it; the vehicle controls aren't very good. There are spawn nodes where the same type of enemy will spawn 5 minutes after you just killed the same group from that exact same location. There is no atmosphere at all in the world, the game relies on being generic and somehow trying to exploit how silly it is (this may be a turn on for some people). With some over the top characters / enemy types. I tried about 40 severs to get a coop game going and connected to just two. Apparently you need to forward ports which is ridiculous, needs a patch asap.

Once connected I was with high level players and I gained 2 levels far away from the action just for being in the world for about 2 minutes. The second match I did lots of random quests at my level with higher level players who were nice enough to help out with good weapons. The quests were standard bore fest run here, get this, and kill this guy. I had to deal with many groups of dog like enemies over and over. The game relies on you to have fun by just killing generic baddies over and over doing so far nonsense quests in a bland world.

There is no "save" the game saves when it wants, which is usually at quest turn in I think. But say you made a trek across the level you can't save there, you must restart from a node in town, this is obviously done to make it coop friendly you just hop in or out of games. Lots of ammo and money scattered around from enemies or in storage containers but you have to press "E" to pick it all up, for ammo and money this is annoyingly unnecessary.

Screens:

Torchlight

The Good:

Diablo st-yle music, it constantly saves so you can instantly leave the game and come back where you were exactly (preserving the entire world), dungeon crawling action, great loot system with constant upgrades and steady increase of items, pretty good art design great set of powers and skills, automatically pick up gold when you are near it, pet can sell your stuff while you bash monsters, good range of monsters. Treasure rooms, more action orientated with skill types. Some differences in weapons but allow you to play your own sty-le(dual weild, ranged, shield). Four spells to hold, might be things like summon skeleton or fireball.

The Bad:

Inventory is one item per slot no matter size, gems look tiny. Less character than Diablo games, npcs only have like "hello" then wall of text. Some samey looking levels even though they are meant to be random. Loot on ground has overlapping tags. Narrator can be annoying "you have triggered a trap" as flames come out of a barrel – thanks captain obvious.

Screens:

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So I'm really enjoying Torchlight on the whole, its simple fun and gets most of the action RPG basics right. I think there will be a patch soon to fix the loot on the ground where picking up rare stuff is sometimes very difficult.

Borderlands is not doing much for me so far (I'm level 10), I think it's design motto was "hey let's just shoot stuff together" which honestly doesn't do it for me. I do not think it's a great example of combining the FPS and RPG genres. The most interesting story aspect is the Angel Lady that talks to you from time to time.

While initially you might look at both games and say Torchlight is a casual, Borderlands is less so. I would disagree with that from what I've seen. Torchlight has far more depth in your equipment, skills, pet, attack combinations than Borderlands has had so far. Borderlands seems to be entirely casual, lets join coop and kill things with our guns+2. There are similarities between the two games, they both rely on a loot system to keep the player going I guess and both are doing a decent job with loot. Torchlight has a better story than Borderlands – and Torchlight hasn't got a great story believe me.

Of course these are initial impressions; I've only played a few hours of both. Things could change and please don't take offense if you are really enjoying Borderlands , it's just an opinion. I'm hoping things get better and they patch the co-op so people don't need to forward ports.

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I finished Uncharted 2 again on hard, solidifying the game being among the best. The experience was actually better the 2nd time and difficulty wise it was fine because I knew what was coming. I don't think I will try on Crushing, no need to ruin my experience.

I've tried online but it hasn't been a great experience, matchmaking keeps putting me in with American players and there is some noticeable lag doing things like punching (eg I press punch, I see myself die, then I see I punched some guy to death) I'm not really sure if this is how matchmaking functions on consoles (i.e. very poorly) or is just a quirk with Uncharted 2.

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Has anybody used Xfire game store, or heard any good or bad news about it? I'm tempted to give it a try and see how it compares with others. It's always better to have lots of competition out there, gives consumers more options, lowers prices.

I finished Uncharted 2 a few days back and will say its an amazing single player game, better than the first game. The characters, dialogue and action are really amazing. It's very close in terms of pacing to what Valve has produced with the Half-Life series. I'm replaying the game on Hard and it's a great game with some minor flaws (camera glitches mainly).

I've played some multiplayer and it's not quite as consistent as the single player game., sometimes i'll get a bad server and some freezing, sometimes I get a server with near as I could tell spainish people talking. Other times it takes 5 minutes to find a group then a few people leave and the teams get unbalanced. I guess it's probably more telling of multiplayer on consoles than anything else but maybe I'm wrong there as well. I have played some two player co-op and that was very good, its just single player like action spread over a few levels, more enjoyable than the stock mp in my opinion.

You can read my review of it on NGN

So far the PS3 "experiement" is going ok. I'm using it less than before because I've gone through quite a few demos to see what it has to offer me. I hate to use the cliche but uncharted 2 almost makes buying it worth it, there are some nifty games I plan to pick up for it on the holidays - Little Big Planet, Killzone 2 for example. Any other recommendations are welcome, preferrably older titles I can pick up for cheap.

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My PC however is not forgotten. I still consider this to be the best gaming platform in the market

Torchlight is out in literally a few days, super excited for it and will be waiting for Steam to unlock it. Not been so excited for a game for quite some time actually (last was Crysis I guess) hopefully it brings back that Diablo feel and maybe spark a cyclic turn around for the industry

Borderlands is out the same day! 28th of October. And I did actually preorder it, call me a sucker for FPS / RPG hybrids. The game is actually preloading on Steam which is unusual because 95% of third party games don't seem to get preloads.I love preloads because my internet speed here in Australia is quite poor (150kb/s down) which means 8gb can take a while.

Although I don't really think the box art is very attractive I'm hoping the game isn't just constantly trying to be silly in order to be fun. We will see!

THQ got themselves another European, post apocalyptic shooter in Metro 2033. I've been tracking this for a little while now but there hasn't been much news about it until now they release a pretty nifty trailer. It looks similar to STALKER, and there is a good reason for that - the guys that worked on the engine for STALKER are working on the game engine for Metro 2033. I'd say thats a good thing because I liked how the engine looks inside. Hopefully it doesn't have as many bug problems as the STALKER series.

It's coming to 360 as well, so maybe that will mean a bit more in terms of QA testing. Are you guys getting tired of post-apocalyptic shooters / rpg games? I'm certainly not as I feel the actual genre has not even come close to reaching potential yet.

Modern Warfare 2 hit Steam, with plenty of advertising. It's basically going to be using steam works, I think that means steam is required for Boxed versions even. Nothing wrong with that as I have many games that require steam, but some people don't like it.

MW2 is sitting on 3rd best steam seller right now behind borderlands and L4D2. Which tells me that the boycotts for L4D2 and MW2 aren't really making a huge impact on your average consumer who just sees game, pulls out credit card, buys game. I'm going to pick the game up, reluctantly, and I will see just how the lack of dedicated servers ruins the community (that is being optimistic btw).

For the record I'm still in the L4D2 boycott group - actually the leaders of the original group (40,000 members) decided to close it because they thought it achieved what it set out to achieve. WRONG. By the way those "leaders" were flown to Valve and given the royal tour of their offices for no cost, not a bad deal huh. Another couple of guys set up a new Boycott group which has 750 members so far.

Today it was announced that Modern Warfare 2 PC would have no dedicated servers, no server lists, no mods

I'm pretty disappointed by this news from Infinity Ward. I was pretty confident we'd see much the same as COD 4 - dedicated servers and all that goodness. I mean the COD 4 PC community is very impressive and it's one of the most played FPS games on the PC. 14,000 people playing right now, more than BF2 and TF2.

Rob Bowling said in the podcast "Making it much more accessible to the PC community as a whole" Which is interesting when you have such a huge player base already? Surely that says that maybe we don't need more accessible at all. The only good news out of the podcast was the fact that it uses STEAM and VAC - which is imo superior to punkbuster. The rest is purely a slap in the face and I'll strongly consider cancelling my preorder. I'm not really that interested in single player for call of duty games. What are your thoughts?

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GAME REVIEWS

I completed a review for Red Faction Guerrilla overall I enjoyed it. There are many things built around the gamplay design that are done simply to make it fun, not realistic. Like for example your vehicle gets destroyed in the middle of nowhere, you start running along a road. A red faction vehicle will spawn in and drive right up to you and the driver gets out and walks away. Or when you do a side mission the vehicle turns around so you can just drive foward instead of doing a 3 point turn.

The other game I picked up within days of Batman AA and Red Faction Guerrilla was Resident Evil 5. I'm very glad to say that Capcom did a great job with the PC port. The game looks amazing, runs like greased lightning on my machine, great cutscenes and decent multiplayer. But sadly I'm not a fan of the gameplay at all, the game mechanics are very slow and cumbersome. You can't move while you aiming or reloading and you can't turn your character while reloading. That along with some really really bad AI (Sheva) makes me strongly recommend against single player. However if you are into Co-op then it's decent (some inventory issues) and mercenaries mode is sometimes enjoyable.

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NOW PLAYING

Lastly but certainly not least I picked up Uncharted 2 on Friday and have played up to chapter 12 so far.

My initial impressions are very favourable. I am enjoying this game a lot more than the first. I think they are doing more with the story, the dialog is better and makes me chuckle frequently. The pacing is pretty good, no rogue checkpoint saving problems yet. The enviironments are really detailed and the ambient sounds really puts the icing on the package. It's definitely a good contender for GOTY for me although. I'm not strongly versed in the PS3 catalogue but I've played a fair share of demos enough to know this game up with the best..

UPCOMING GAMES

Well since my MW 2 preorder is under question right now I only really have Torchlight as a certainty which I already purchased on Steam. The game is selling for $18 on Steam currently in the pre-order phase. It looks like fun anyway and with the somewhat lacklustre Q4 release list for PC (and even consoles) I'm in need of something that will last me a little bit, dragon age is there also but release day DLC just annoys me to no end.

Let me introduce you to TORCHLIGHT

Torchlight comes out at the end of this month, it's an single player action RPG and draws similarities from Diablo, Fate and Mythos (unreleased). The game also has the great bonus of having 2 of the leads from Diablo and Diablo 2 - Max Schaefer and Erich Shaefer. It also has the very guy that brought the Diablo mood to light - Matt Uelmen who composed the music for the Diablo games.

I'm not being paid for this promotion (wish I was) but I have high hopes for this title - being a huge diablo fan myself. It will be available digitally and a boxed copy is planned later. I'm sure that depends on how well it does. An MMO will be released later - it will be free to play with microtransactions as payment.

Here is the game on Gamespot.

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I completed Batman Arkham Asylum, was a great game with a few flaws. Fans of Batman or strong story / characters will absolutely love it though, it's a great effort by the relatively unknown Rocksteady studios. Looking forward to the sequel which will surely be coming. Read my review for it here.

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Working my way through guerrilla, while not as good as batman it can be fun at times. It's GTA on Mars with obscene levels of destruction that unfortunately bring my system to a crawl when things get really heavy. Lots of side missions, can be fairly challenging, mp seems kinda fun.

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It's Christmas time!

Christmas stuff is out in stores here. Is it out for the rest of the world I wonder? Start of October our retail chains put the trees up, decorations out and try to maximize almost 3 months of solid christmas cheer, heh. Commercialisation is great.

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I completed uncharted on PS3 after SONY patched the firmware, it was a pretty enjoyable game. In contrast to Tomb Raider it has a lot more (and better) combat. I would have liked a little bit more puzzle solving stuff but thats just me. I think at times the checkpoint save system wasn't tested very well, also some enemies spawn in a little bit too unnaturally.

Uncharted 2 is out soon (just in time!) and the mp beta is up and I had the chance to play a few rounds of the coop mode. Coop seemed really fun, mixing combat, some platforming, some melee together and it works pretty smoothly.

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Wolfenstein Review on Gamespot

Lastly this blog is pretty long, but I tried to break it up so people can just read or lookat what they want. Do you guys prefer smaller blogs more frequently, bigger blogs less frequently? Or medium sized blog medium frequency

(PC talk below )

I picked up my PS3 Slim on the 3rd, unfortunately my cheap HDMI cable (shipped from USA - I'm in Australia) didn't arrive until the following monday, but compared to the $70 cables locally I think I got a pretty good deal at around $5 It seems to work well on my new Samsung monitor.

I did get the PS3 with Uncharted Drakes Fortune based on numerous friend recommendations. Unfortunately for me the lastest firmware causes random freezes in that specific game, trying it twice it froze after about 20 minutes so I decided to wait until it's fixed before resuming. It did seem quite enjoyable from what I played, hopefully sony can get a fix out soon.

I did pickup wipeout HD on the PSN store, I was a big fan of Wipeout 64 back in the day. I'm really enjoying Wipeout HD, great visuals, very smooth gameplay, nice techno music and good race tracks. I've also tried out my fair share of demos, Killzone 2 (which does look quite good), Little Big Planet (neat game), DiRT 2 and some other console exclusives including condemned 2 and the darkness.

I will first up say that my aiming with the right analog stick sucks, in situations where I'd mow down entire squads with M / KB I end up dying because my crosshair overshoots or falls short. Racing games are prefectly fine (great in fact) but first or third person aiming is prooving a real challenge. I think I'm better than when I started and will persist until I've played through a few shooting games, hopefully I get competent!

Overall I'm happy with it, it's nice to have access to demos the PC doesn't get (eg DiRT 2) and then use that information to buy or not buy a PC version later, then I also have quite a few games that will never be seen on PC. The PSN store seems to be lacking a little bit, none of the games you download or buy have screenshots to view, and only a few have videos. I suspect the store wil grow quite a bit however.

PC TALK!

BF2 got a 1.5 patch, huge patch but it includes the booster pack content and Widescreen support finally. The new maps seem awesome and it's quite nice that EA have decided to release the content to everybody that was once $10 a pop. It's certainly a step in the right direction. Playing again is pretty fun, even if I'm a bit rusty.

It's going to be a fairly busy month with releases.

Mmm finally you can taste the Q4 action! Also a few just around the corner.. MW2, Ass Creed 2, Torchlight, Call of Pripyat and others.

no time for outdoor activities folks!