Our house was robbed just over a week ago. Among other expensive items, the crook got away with my 360, my girlfriend's brand new Halo 360, and all 24 of our games. Unfortunately we did not have insurance, so it's pretty rough. However, a friend of mine has offered to sell me his Elite 360, and was kind enough to bring it straight over and allow me to pay it off, so the joy of gaming has returned to our little home.

We're just lucky the crook left the PC. Way, way too expensive for me to replace in the forseeable future.

What really gets me though is the lost hours of gaming stored on my hard drive that I'll never get back: countless hours of advancement in Oblivion, huge efforts of levelling up invested in Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and getting half way through the second disc on Lost Odyssey only to lose all progress.... well, sadly I'll probably never play it again.

Still, there's something exciting about starting a new collection. I bought a few games last week as part of a buy two get one free deal: Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect and Spiderman 3, and I've payed off my preorder fore Star Wars The Force Unleashed wich is out this week. After that it's Saints Row 2, Fallout 3 and Fable 2. I'm keen to check out Mirror's Edge, Dead Space and Far Cry 2 as well.

Fortune smiled on me recently so that I found myself in a position to chuck out the old "email TV" and evolve to something a little more special... something with some serious power under the hood.... something in short could swallow up Crysis, spit it back at me in gorgeous detail, and ask for more. I've thrown a sizable sum of money at a pretty decent PC with a quad core processor so that I can taste the world of PC gaming and not miss out on some of the good stuff. I've even bought Stalker and Enemy Territory Quake Wars in anticipation for the day I get it home and set it up (hopefully this Saturday).

Anyone who glances over my collection here will see I'm a 360 man almost exclusively. So how will playing shooters with a mouse and keyboard go down for someone who cut their teeth on controllers? Will I actually get half decent at strategy games? Will I sell the 360 because I've decided to spend all my time on that stupid bloody Wowcraft game (gag! vomit!)? Stay tuned...

I thought I might as well continue the tradition of reporting on my efforts of going up against this series on it's most difficult setting. I was initially thinking COD 4 would be a bit..... actually a lot easier than COD 3 when I did the first mission on the ship. It just didn't seem too difficult to get through. Now I'm up to the first American mission, and the challenge has definately stepped up. It's Veteran alright, complete with numerous die-restart-die sections, and enemy AI that changes tactics as soon as you do. I'm enjoying it though. COD 2 was tough, but if you really stuck with it, you came out on top, and that's what this seems to be like so far. COD 3 was just ridiculously difficult. I hear Treyarch will be back to make COD 5, let's hope they aren't so over zealous with the difficulty next time, and strike up a decent balance as Infinity Ward have managed.