Whats the Story?

Wrapped up Modern Warfare on hardened the other night. Thoroughly enjoyable romp with the exception of the endlessly spawning enemies that had me gnashing my teeth on several of the stages. Oh, and don't even mention Mile High. Still, like the sucker I am, I will now go through it again on veteran to see if I can earn some extra points. Won't be for a while though as I have Assassin's Creed to work through first then Mass Effect and Blacksite after that. Oh Xbox joy!

Resident Tat

Maximum was one of the first mags in the UK to break the Resident Evil franchise to UK gamers. Of course the rest is history and no doubt it's success was purely down to our hyped previews... yeah, right! Still, despite Maximum dying on the newsstands it was much admired by the industry even if it was only for the chance to get more pages from one mag than all the others put together. Biohazard was also well up there on the office Tat-o-meter with large piles of T-Virus infected produce to enjoy. 99% of it was STARS gear like shirts, jackets and replica firearms which were just a little too expensive to hide from the boss. I picked out a few things I had left like this Anniversary collectors pack with the first three PSOne games and two bits of junk that came with the Biohazard briefcase. Both fall well within the circles of purest tat.

COD FTW!

Yes. It's superb. It's insanely superb. I want to play multiplayer ALL FREAKIN' DAY!!! I felt the same with Team Fortress 2 but no one plays that! No such problem with COD4 as the servers are packed with players. Ground War and 17 other guys going mental on each other is such a rush. A major plus is not having to listen to the usual crowds of pre-teen American 'doodz' with their squeaky, obscenity-laced drivel that we had to suffer with Gears of War. Speaking of Call of Duty 4, I threw together a background for the Live Theme contest they ran on the official COD website recently. Well, after the dust had settled and the votes counted I luckily got my entry chosen for the final pack! The theme is free and becomes available on Live on 16th November. My image will be seen on the 'Games' blade and doesn't look too bad seeing as I had little time to put it together. Congratulations also go out to the three other winners!

Modern Warfare in 12 hours!

That's how long I have to wait before it gets rammed through the letterbox and torn from the packaging for rampant playage. Well, I will have to wait a little longer as I have crackerjack deadlines on at the moment but when I get the chance. Of course that will mean all the other games get put 'on hold' for the foreseeable future. Orange Box, Sonata and VF will need to sit tight. Virtua Fighter 5 is especially enjoyable at the moment even though I am getting mixed results on ranked online matches. Plays like a dream online but, as I had not played VF for ages, I am extremely rusty and slow on the pad. As an ardent Wolf player I am getting mauled by the new characters like Brad, Blaze and Goh so got to keep practicing and figure them out. Still, don't have the time to learn like I did in the old days. VF2 was always a popular choice at the Emap haunt and was a Maximum favorite at the time. VF4 also got some serious workouts during our time on PSW but other than Richard there weren't too many others who wanted to play. Pansies.

It's all GO! here…

During my tenure with NMS I was asked to help out on the other Emap tomes every now and then. One such stint was knocking out the mini-handheld magazine GO! which was a freebie with C&VG. Working with Paul Rand we belted out this portable abomination every month and, as well as the layout of the pages, I also drew these dinky robots for the review section. I don't have any copies of it mind but I did hang onto the artwork.

Multi-tat! Gettit! Chortle... /coat.

Crawling through the attic unearthed this SNES tat treat from yesteryear. Once we sampled the four player antics this Hudson multitap provided we could never return to the Hori monstrosity we had been using before. Though we never used it for Bomberman I might add. Sorry Hudson!