So, as a present for myself (sad, I know) I bought Resident Evil 5 at a nice, cheap price (£30), I had planned on getting the metal box special edition, only to find that having been in stock moments ago they were then sold out.  So I went with the regular edition and they sent me the metal box by mistake anyway, so, win I guess. By sheer coincidence I should imagine, I was at the local supermarket today to pick up some movie watching munchies when I decided to get Resident Evil: Degeneration, only to find yet again that despite having been overflowing with stock every day the past 2 weeks i'd been in there, they were all gone, not a single copy left. All of a sudden everybody in Southampton (a shitty little city that never really recovered from WWII, before which it prospered) decided they needed to watch a terrible zombie movie right this instant and couldn't get to HMV to pay half the price for Night of the Living Dead. Crazy.

Anyway, so Residetn Evil 5 arrived on my doorstep, and a mere 6 hours 30 minutes later I had finished the main campaign. For the most part it was enjoyable, but the difficulty seems to be all over the fucking place, which is generally what happens when you're given an AI partner and nearly every enemy who isn't a regular spod has some kind of one shot kill potential where you don't even get the option to "Press X Not to Die" which brings me to my next point, in Resident Evil 4 it wasn't so bad, we only had stupid cut scenes to worry about pressing buttons in, but in Resi 5 enemies will often leap at you prompting an often impossible to react to "Press X!!!" to flash on the screen in order for you not to be impaled, torn limb from limb, etc. For everything else Resident Evil 5 does right, why the fuck couldn't they just give us a dodge roll and let us be the masters of our own destiny insteadl of trying to time the stupid QTEs, some of which aren't even necessary, or sometimes don't trigger at all.

That said, the QTE moments in the actual cut scenes themselves are a little better presented as they are used more often and therefore become normal, rather than using them maybe once or twice and essentially waiting for you to begin getting comfortable putting the controller down during cut scenes before springing one on you. Resident Evil 5 uses them mostly throughout, so you're always expecting them, which in my mind at least is a lot more acceptable. Fortunately, in all but Proffesional difficulty, you can just mash the entire face of the controller and it will register correctly. In proffesional mode, you must press that button, and only that button, or you die.

As has been remarked upon many times, so I won't dwell too long, the facial animation and cinematography are absolutely astounding, and I honestly think this is the biggest leap forward in this kind of tech since the Source engine and Half-Life 2/Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines facial animations. That said, unfortunately they wasted a lot of this unique camera control by simpy inserting a bunch of scenes from The Matrix. They even dressed the bad guy as fucking Neo (Wesker for anyone who doesn't know who the bad guy is, duh) Now, I know he has crazy powers because, well, science! But seriously, dressing him up like Neo and waving the camera around just because you can doesn't make it cool. 

Although to make up for it, we have what is in my opinion one of the greatest action sequences ever envisioned, balanced by an unfortunately restrictive (and fucking insanely hard on Pro mode) boss fight. Edit: People who disable embedding on youtube videos can suck a giant dick, so you get the low quality version instead, sorry guys.

Sure there's nothing particularly special about it, but damn, Motorbikes make everything awesome, and watching dudes fall off of them and the bikes crashing and flopping around like that just oozes sheer, concentrated awesome.

Without dwelling too much on specifics, basicly I thought the game was about 70% awesome, 30% bad design with a couple of major offenders being the most noticable, the lack of a roll ability, and being unable to move and shoot at the same time. Now, I understand the reason they did that, to 'Heighten the tension' and I fully agree with the decision, the part I don't agree with is making that decision at the same time as deciding your enemies should be able to run 30ft and then hit you before you can draw certain weapons and pull off a shot. Also, the amount of OSK enemies in the game that simply kill you because they happen to be in the right position to start the animation.. Fuck, let me move and shoot or take that shit out.

I like to pick at negative portions of a game which make my opinions seem incredibly negative, but the bottom line is that i've put near 23 hours into a game i've only had for 3 days, and have all but one achievement which I will obtain very soon, I just missed some of the treasure, and enjoyed almost every minute of it. In fact, the only time I was really not enjoying myself was at the end of the first playthrough when I realised how badly designed the final boss is, and refused to have to farm ammo from previous chapters when it should be available in the shop, so ended up having to KNIFE the FINAL BOSS to death. Man was I satisfied when the fucker finally bit the dust. The other two main areas of frustration came from the Jill & Wesker boss fight on Pro mode, and the Ndesu (Giant ogre guy) boss fight also on Pro mode. Mainly because they dumb down Shevas AI and she doesnt fucking help you, which amplifies the difficult 10 fold because everything already kills you in one fucking hit, without her help it's just insane.

So yeah, i'm gonna watch a few movies and then go back to the last few treasures I missed in order to get the first 1k i'm actually legitimately proud of and I can say was actually reasonably difficult, unlike my other 1k's, which include King Kong, Oblivion, and some crappy 2K6 sports games :P

As some of you know, it was my 21st birthday this weekend (Lot of that going around this time of year it seems) and while it passed without event, I spent the small amount of birthday cash I recieved rather wisely, or unwisely depending on your point of view. I'm well known for enjoying mediocre games when I can get them super cheaply, in my opinion anyone who refuses to buy games rated below an 8 average is missing out on an insane amount of budget priced fun, and is a fucking snob. So, I picked up Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard for £14.99, The Simpsons Videogame for £10.99. Followed by what I hope is a good purchase rather than a mediocre one, Star Ocean for Xbox 360, for £24.99. And Worms on XBLA. I don't know why I bought worms, I hate worms, but... 400 points is cheap.

I would have bought Riddick instead of the two cheaper games, but i've played the original to death and after replaying Resi 5's stages so many times, I need something i've not played before, i'll get Riddick when it's cheaper. I almost bought The Wheelamn for £10, but decided given how recently it was released, it must have been worse than mediocre.

So that concludes this wall of text, i'll finish up by saying that while waiting for Resi 5 in the mail, I did something I never thought I would do, ever. I went back to Command and Conquer 3 after playing the Tutorial mode a long time ago and deciding I hated it. Oddly, and inexplicably, I found myself rather enjoying it and got a good few missions in the morning before Resi 5 arrived, and I fully intend to go back to it while waiting for the above purchases to trickle through my letterbox.