Today in Australia, on the East coast they let everybody get the full Spore Creature Creator for $2 with a newspaper, EA pushed it quite big here and I think it will be huge. I got my copy, but may give it away to somebody.

Giantbomb was launched a few weeks back, I was pretty crazy on the editing thing for a week or so then got quite sick of having to wait so long just to do minor updates that were replaced by other peoples edits because of the delay. Once you get to 1000 points you can do as you wish though. It's obviously going to be a bit more detailed than wiki is. The forums are not pleasant to navigate.

--Gaming--

Bought Condemned in THQ's gamers choice range, finished it in about 5 hours. Game had a few disturbing sections and some good shock scares. I was quite disappointed with the ending, basically you have a "boss fight" only the fight is repeated about 6 times where you kill the boss.

I also finished Assasin's Creed, the last assasination battle was hard, but the boss was pretty weak. The game as you may know features this sci-fi experience out of these animus generated memories, it actually helped it from getting too repetitive. In fact in small doses of 1 hour I thought it held up nicely, the combat improves as you progress and unlock more weapons and items, I think they did a pretty good job with the game really, the game doesn't really end though, outside the memories the game is not resolved at all.

I picked up Lost Planet Colonies, played a little bit and actually I don't mind it, It looks good, plays pretty well, some of the voice acting is questionable at times, but it was basically half price of a full new game so it's doing well for me. It has 360/PC play and live too. I don't really know what tweaks they made to this edition, the demo levels were fairly similar to what I remember.

Quakecon brought some cool news, Doom 4 (which we knew about) is going to be more like doom 2. Rage is mutants with vehicles. Sounds a bit like Stalker/Oblivion/Doom 3 mix, sad about the T rating - lucky PC gets mods for blood

Saw The X-Files movie, was alright - felt like a run of the mill extended x-files episode, which honestly can't be bad as a fan of the series.

As for games, I finished both GRID and Mass Effect. I may at some stage write a review for them. GRID sadly dragged on after a certain point, redoing the same races, same cars, same annoying sounds being repeated. I avoided all the drift races and came out on top of the ladder and the team ladder after about 17 seasons. Le Mans was boring after the 5th time, especially with the audi, but good game overall.

Mass Effect was also quite good, very cinematic, great story and brilliant acting/dialogue. I only really wish that some of the gameplay was better, in particular the enemy AI and the missions seemed below par for a game of today. Based on one playthrough I think The Witcher is the better game, not by a huge margin though.

I picked up Call of Juarez for $10 on Steam during the weekend sale, hard to resist those steam sales. I'm about 5 hours in and I must say it's prooving to be a very good game, the slow motion gun fights and bow/arrow fights are very enjoyable and graphically in dx10 I'm quite impressed. Even compared to ME, the voice work by Reverend Ray is superb.

Along with COJ I picked up Assassin's Creed which sadly is not doing much for me. I'm really not very far into the game (got my weapons back) and I'm already a bit tired of the game. If they didn't allow me to walk around like a fool during the boring cutscenes I'd probably have fallen asleep by now. I really like how you can just run and leap over objects with ease though.

Finished FEAR extraction point, it was 4 hours long, but compared to the original (7 hours) it was quite good. I think it actually did some really good scares, and built them up along side action as good, if not better, than the original FEAR. I had no idea what was going on with the story, and a bit more polish would have been good but as far as expansion packs go this was up there with the best.

As everybody knows D3 was announced a few days back (it has about 7000 people tracking it, rank #1 all games) and it has me quite excited. For those interested. Diablo was really my first online game that I spent a serious amount of time on, Dealing with PKers who had 50 ears in their inventory, questing with very cool people, and just having fun is still some of the best times I've had on PC. Diablo 2 was great also, but I didn't play much online because I was horribly lagged when I tried to play. I suspect I'll be playing D3 quite a lot, it will be a big game (and it's PC only!)

Next game on my WTFBBQ list is. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky. It comes out late August, it's also coming to Steam if you are interesting in digital copies. Check out the latest trailer

http://youtube.com/watch?v=TKb-LHP0g-w

2 new games!

I got Mass Effect on Saturday, so far put in a few hours and I'm enjoying it. Very cinematic, lots of good side quests, combat is pretty good. conversation/cutscenes are very good.

Also downloaded GRID from Steam, good price at $40USD for me, comes out at about half what I would pay for it retail here. Also seems like a good game, one thing I'd like to say is that. it. looks. damn. awesome. And it runs very well too. Played bit of multiplayer but the netcode leaves a bit to the imagination and it needs more modes or something. Campaign is sweet, I like how you can get your name in and voiced so your manager can whisper into your ear. "Welcome back Ben"

7000? Well thats just my posts on the gamespot forums, that's spamalicious I can tell you! FEAR extraction point kinda freaked me out in this one part, lights going out etc. Hard to explain without spoiling it so here is a spoiler

***SPOILER***