We’ve hit that time of year where everybody’s doing a “top games of 2016” write up. I’m not going to differ.

12th December 2006. The day the world bid farewell to disk drive pioneer Alan Shugart, and grumpy grandad Frank Barone (Everybody Loves Raymond). A Tuesday. Also the day I unlocked my first achievement on my brand new Xbox 360.

A lot can happen in ten years. People can forge a career, a relationship, move house, raise children, or simply end up turning tricks under the bridge due to bad life choices.

In addition to some of the above (I’ll let you figure out which), I’ve somehow managed to rack up 100,000G on Xbox.

I cower in a crater, left in the middle of the Egyptian desert by some recent artillery barage, and drop a medkit by my feet. Heart pounding, I look left and right to make sure nobody is following me. My vision is blurred, breathing heavy as the medicine starts to take affect. Cautiously I peek my head over the lip of the crater, scanning the distance for some sign of the sniper. I work up just enough courage to sprint to the next crater when out of nowhere, a horse thunders past and it’s sword-wielding rider cuts me down, just as a biplane loops overhead. This is World War One. This, is Battlefield 1.

The biggest adjustment with having a kid is just the sheer amount of time they take up. And I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. Especially after they start walking and needing constant supervision. I regularly find myself recalling pre-child times and wondering just what the hell I did with all my time. The following tips are just a few things that I’ve learned throughout the last year and a bit, that are mostly common sense. I thought I’d share them anyway. Some of you may relate, some may find inspiration, some may be able to add more!

Video games are based on rules. To quote my man Morpheus, “what you must learn is that these rules are no different than the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken.” The more that a game attempts to give you, the more variables are introduced, and the greater the scope for bugs and other general weirdness.

Love them or hate them, there’s no escaping infographics these days. They are EVERYWHERE. Personally, I’m a fan. I’ve always been interested in visualisation techniques and better ways to represent data visually. After all, the human brain can process images and patterns much faster than it can text. The best visualisations are the ones that need no explanation, while the worst are the ones that basically just overlay some text or numbers on some graphics and still make you read the content to understand what’s going on. Even then though, I’m a sucker for a nice infographic (yes, event the overly textual ones).

Anyway, the point of this post was to show off a little infographic that I received from Xbox LIVE Rewards the other day to celebrate 10 years of Xbox LIVE, and illustrate my contribution to that:

Last month saw the launch of Battlefield Premium, DICE and EA’s answer to Call Of Duty’s ELITE system for their seminal online shooter, Battlefield 3.

Being a huge fan of the Tom Clancy games ever since the original Rainbow Six broke onto PC way back in 1998, I picked up Ghost Recon: Future Soldier for the Xbox 360 at the weekend. True to form for the series, the game’s mix of 3rd-person shooting, high-tech equipment and squad mechanics is as entertaining as ever. However, on the back on numerous complaints about audio issues with the game, I’ve encountered this one which has left me, quite literally, speechless.