Well, as you probably know, a little game called Halo 3 has arrived. It took me two days to complete it and I must say it is a great game that was totally worth the wait. I thoroughly prefured it to Halo 2, which I really wasn't too fond of. There were some minor problems such as the terrible second to last campaign mission. It was so boring. Another one was paying another £10 for the collector's edition but not getting the 2 day Xbox Live Gold free trial. I know it doesn't sound much but I'm currently on Silver and I can't afford to pay for another Gold membership (saving for other games) so that free trial would have really come in handy. But, apart from that, I really enjoyed the game. It's the best game on the 360 so far.

Unrelated to Halo 3, I played Motorstorm a few days ago and I personally found it to be very disappointing. The handling has terrible and I couldn't bear to play it. And the games keep on rolling in. Zelda on October 19th, Metroid on October 26th, Mario Galaxy on November 16th and Mass Effect on November 23rd. And to finish up this blog, I'm seeing My Chemical Romance on November 15th at the O2. Hell yeah! MCR and then Mario Galaxy the day after! All hail Gerard Way!

I know. Shocking isn't it. A new blog. Many things have happened since my Virtual Console rant. First things first, I got a PSP in mid-July. My opinion of it? It's okay. I find some games on it a bit overrated. Daxter for example. Gamespot gave it a 9.1. A 9.1 for a game in which you exterminate bugs. I was expecting a proper Jak and Daxter game, like the ones on the PS2. Man, those games were brilliant. Especially the first one, before they commercialised the game by giving Jak a gun. But, instead, we get a game about Daxter exterminating metal bugs. The best games that I have on PSP, in my opinion, are Tekken, Metal Gear and Loco Roco. All great games. Sega Mega Drive collection is pretty good but it isn't as good as it could have been. They missed out key games such as Sonic 3, Sonic and Knuckles, Streets of Rage trilogy and Dynamite Headdy which were all great games in teh Sega Mega Drive library. My brother got a PS3 and Resistance is actually a pretty good game. The campaign and online are both great. It also is pretty simple and basic and I like that. It's a change. I haven't played MotorStorm yet as my brother says that it is very slow and kinda realistic. I don't like realistic racers at all. I hate Gran Turismo. I really should play MotorStorm but I'm having too much fun with Resistance at the moment. Super Paper Mario for the Wii is also a very good game. How did WarioWare outscore it here? I seriously don't have a clue. In my opinion, it's the 3rd best game on Wii. And, I'm very happy with what Nintendo is currently doing on the Virtual Console. This "Hanabi Festival", in which games that were never released in Europe will be released on the European VC, is a fantastic idea. Super Mario Bros. 2, thats right the REAL one, is available to download only until the end of the month. Needless to say, I got a Wii Points Card as soon as I heard about this. Sin and Punishment, the superb Treasure N64 shooter, is coming out on Friday but I have to stick to my budget so I won't be getting it for a bit. I need to get Halo 3, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Metroid Prime 3 and Super Mario Galaxy. Those are only the main games. Don't get me started on Zack & Wiki, Assassin's Creed etc. Anyway, thats the end of my blog. I hope to post more often.

The Wii's Virtual Console service, in my opinion, is great. Some classics are already available for download and playing some great retro games on the Wii is sweet. However, there are some things that annoy me about the service which I am pretty disappointed about.

First of all, playing VC games on a HD television with component cables. When I first played a Virtual Console game with the compnent cables, the screen turned very strange. I tryed out other games with the component cables and found that it was the NES, SNES and Mega Drive games that turned weird while the Turbografx and N64 games worked just fine. I phoned up Nintendo and asked about the problem. They explained to me that some VC games don't run properly with component cables and are trying to get the matter fixed. So,I had to unplug the component cables and put in the normal cables whenever I wanted to play VC games. Then I realised that some new games had "component cable interlace mode" in the description of the game. I tried out The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past (the first game I downloaded with the "interlace mode" in its description) to see if it would run fine on my TV. It didn't and I was very annoyed. I checked the FAQ on the Wii Shop Channel to see if there was any explanation to what this "interlace mode" actually was but I found no help at all. I found out what it was on Wikipedia. It turns out to turn on interlace mode you have to go on the operations guide of one of the VC games, plug in the nunchuck and then press Z and the 1 button at the same time. I checked to see if it had worked and it did. Now, while I was happy that the game was running properly, how the hell was I supposed to know that I had to do that to make interlace mode work? Nintendo didn't explain it at all. So, Nintendo updated some games that were already released to support interlace mode but some all time classic Nintendo games still weren't updated, including the legendary Super Mario World. I thought to myself "Well, it will probably updated within the next few days". It has been one month and a half and STILL there has been no update to Super Mario World and to other classic games. Do I really need to keep on unplugging these cables all the time to play one of the greatest games ever made? This issue shouldn't even exist with this whole "interlace mode". Nintendo should have checked something like this before the Wii even came out.

Also, whats with the lack of N64 games? The Wii has been out for half a year and only five N64 games have been released. F-Zero X was released yesterday and was the first N64 game to be released in over two months. Come on Nintendo!

The Virtual Console is meant to be a place where people can relive classic games. So, why are companies deciding to release pure rubbish onto the Virtual Console? No one is going to buy it and it is wasting Nintendo's time. Instead of putting great games like Super Metroid on the VC, they have to waste their time putting on crappy games that no one cares about and no one will buy.

I think that I've covered all of my niggles about the Virtual Console. Apart from these things, the service is top notch but these downsides are holding the VC down