By now many people would have been maid highly aware of Microsoft's brand new Operating System and will either be early adopters like myself or wait a while to get it for future updates and even the price to drop, although since it didn't cost me a penny I would be foolish to pass it up,so which ever you are you have your reasons, my reason is simply because I tried the Beta and loved the new interface much easier and more organised than it was before.

If I want to be fully honest all it is really is Vista with a slightly new look and a few new features, but it does load a lot faster even on my older system, although saying that after Windows XP upgraded to service pack 3 it took an age to load or do anything when starting up, so if you have XP now would certainly be the time to consider an upgrade.

The only real issue I seem to have right now is on the games front and any I have installed that are based on disc don't load at all so I am in the process of reinstalling them to see if that sorts out the issue, other than that all my old programs work fine with it and have yet to have any serious problems, although I will update as soon as I reinstall the games to see if that fixes the issue, which I am hoping it does.

Has there ever been a game series that you have played far more than any other but have never realised until you have actually sat back and thought of it? Well oddly I have done this recently and realised I have played the Pokemon series a lot more than I realised more so over the past two generations of games, I will have to admit having to collect all these creatures has became addictive, more than I had realised in the past. Having purchased no fewer than five games myself in order to get as many Pokemon as I possibly could even if it was just a single Pokemon, I purchased Pokemon Channel just for Jirachi, so it probably proves one thing that no matter how trivial the content in a game in that series if you are really addicted to it you will more than likely get the games just to get the most out of the series itself. So yes I am far more addicted to one single game series than I would have ever thought.

Well after a week now of playing The Conduit, and while impressed by certain aspects of the game other psrts just seem un finished and rushed for release almost, in many ways it seems HVS wern't fully up to the task of finishing the game in the time they had. While the controls are arguably the best ones for any FPS I have used in a long time, in no small part down to the huge ammount of customisation that they put into them, that alone does not make a great game. The Quantum 3 engine also seems to either not as good in places as HVS claim or they really got lazy in certain places on the environments as to me many look very unfinished often with blurry textures, more seems to have been put into making the character models and wepons than anything else. Sound wise it's a bit hit and miss for me while the voice acting it pretty good and does add to what is an alright plot line for me the overall music and sound effects are pretty average and not very memorable, again feeling rushed in places.

The design of the overall single player game is average at best while at times there is plenty to search for and destroy and finding the hidden messages and discs can take a little time, never do you feel the levels are all that big despite some going on for a while, since the whole time it's just a single set route through the whole game, making the whole game seem shorter because of that, and the out door areas feel just as closed in as the buildings, which is a shame, but i guess the kind of story it is going for most of this isn't going to happen in huge open areas, although a huge city battle would have been nice with multiple routes through. One of the other design problems on the later couple of levels is the respawning enemies that seem to apear from no where, early in the game there are at least reason the enemies respawn from either egg sacks or conduits so no complaints with that reason as its a simple case of taking the source out. So why later choose just to make infinite respawning enemies out of thin air?

Overall the single player games is ok just not great could certainly use a better achievment system though, although good to have one in there, they are all far to basic ones and can all be done on the lowest difficulty setting just playing through the game multiple times, which I am currently doing just in order to fully get my moneys worth from the single player game.

Multiplayer in my opinion is actually fairly generic and in many ways not complete as I find it full of glitches, I am not saying it is awful but like the whole game it just seems rough around the edges, if anything the whole game shows HVS still doesn't know how to program their own software engine as well as you would thing they should, the whole game just seems to show promise and doesn't quite deliver on that promise and while fun it's certainly not as good as it could have been.

Despite all this I will certainly be watching HVS's other in development Gladiator A.D. and The Grinder hopefully will help them really get used to the Quantum 3 engine and actually concentrate more on game design since if they can't start getting really good with it by then by the time it comes to making a sequal to The Conduit, which there pretty much will be one based on how the story end, then I can imagine it being more of the same just looking better by then.