Surely not another “games of the decade” post, I hear you moan? Yep, absolutely. Everyone’s been doing these, so why not me? For no particular reason other than to organise my own thoughts and take a nice trip down memory lane, here they are. I’m not saying these are necessarily the best (everyone will have an opinion), just the ones I’ve personally enjoyed the most. Also Xbox only, since I really only play on Xbox:

Warning: This post contains spoilers regarding the ending of Halo 4. You’ve been warned.

I’ve been spending some time with a special lady lately. She’s always with me, and has been helping me organise my life. She’s not all work though, and has shown that she knows a joke or two, she’s sassy, and she loves to talk about Halo. I am of course, talking about one of Windows Phone 8.1’s killer features: Cortana.

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.

GAME Group look to be in some trouble today after the news broke that they would not be stocking any EA published titles after Friday’s release of SSX.  The game retailer had some trouble with Metal Gear Solid at the start of February and had to stop taking pre-orders.  Things seem to have gone from bad to worse now and it looks like the group (including Gameplay and Gamestation) may be struggling to stock any major new releases in future.

I’ve had my fair share of issues with my broadband connection since signing up with O2 (provided by Be There) 3 years ago. Fortunately, it’s improved a great deal over that time and is now extremely stable. The biggest problem I had was playing online via Xbox LIVE, especially getting my Network Address Translation (NAT) settings right on the supplied O2 Wireless Box II (essentially a rebranded Thomson-Alcatel TG585v7).

In my free time lately I’ve been getting into the superb online multi-player in EA and DICE’s Call of Duty baiter, Battlefield 3 on Xbox 360.  For anyone who’s not tried the series, it’s a large scale multi-player military shooter with wide open maps and a variety of land, sea and air vehicles with which to play.  While it’s enormous fun, especially if your fellow players work as a team it’s unfortunately riddled with game-breaking bugs.  Some players seem worse affected than others and the issues seem to be spread across all three of the game’s platforms; Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.