So we're well into the summer holidays and I hope everybody has been enjoying their games as much as I have. Firstly I am going away on holiday in a few hours so I won't be around to read your blogs for the next week and my next blog will be 1-2 days later than usual, just so you know. Among other things I have spent more of this week on Giant Bomb instead of Gamespot, they just have a lot of stuff Gamespot doesn't. It's not that this isn't a good site but Giant Bomb has all the best editors, better features and at this point I'm not too impressed with the new version of Gamespot in beta testing. I'll tell you what, I've listened to the Giant Bombcast and it's easily five times better than the Gamespot UK Podcast.

But you probably want to know more about actual games. I've had more time with Dawn of War: Soulstorm and it's a good game but not a great game in my opinion. It adds some fun and inventive new armies and units to the game and once again stays loyal to the Warhammer 40K storyline but the campaign is very similar to the one from Dark Crusade and outside of new armies after 3 expansions we still haven't seen any great jump forward for the game as far as new features go. There's also a little gripe I've always had because despite adding most armies to the game, the Daemonhunters (Grey Knights) only got one unit in the game where as the Witch Hunters (Sisters of Battle, I refer to them as the Witch Hunters because.. Well they are the Witch Hunters, I think the name 'Sisters of Battle' was badly tied in) get an entire army and even worse than this the games have added pretty much every army that could be asked for including the 2 types of Space Marines and Eldar and yet still no Tyranids but I guess my nerdiness is costing me some enjoyment of the games. Overall with Soulstorm though although I don't regret buying it, it felt like they tried a little harder with Dark Crusade.

I've got Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 now and man is it superb. I'm not guaranteeing you'll like it if you liked the original Geometry Wars but the game is well worth a look. Despite being a simple Xbox LIVE arcade title they took the game and completely revised and reinvented it, it's a joy to play and it's like discovering Geometry Wars all over again. Hopefully when I get back from my holiday I can get a review out.

Now it's time to bash British Magazine MCV. As many read the magazine shocked readers by bringing out the news that the Wii 2 was in production and speculating over the idea that Miyamoto was out of ideas. I know the media will do their cheap eye-grabbing headline thing but this paticularly annoyed me, for starters the idea of a Wii 2 being in production was nothing more than a downright lie and they knew it! They also concocted the second piece of news from the fact that all the initial ideas for the Wii had been released, the key word there being 'initial' but again they didn't seem afraid to deceive readers. I hate when media publications do this, it's cheap and underhanded.

I'd shoutout to everyone but after I finish writing this I'll literally be packing up my things and leaving, but I don't want to end this on a low note so I will leave you with

Well it's time for me to blog on another week of game-related miscellanea and with the absence of E3 or any editorial I may be writing I can fortunately greet you this week without a wall of text three times the size of a normal blog. In fact E3 seems so long ago to me but perhaps this is because I am now in the third day of my Summer holidays and already it's been relaxing. I've played a varied handful of games that I won't go into except for Rock Band which I am still enjoying and somehow I managed to strum my way through the 58 song 'Endless Setlist' so I'm feeling pretty smug. Also just for the record, despite looking a little dated I've found Sid Meier's Pirates to have provided an immersive experience.

(This paragraph was removed from the blog as it is about the site you are on right now. However if you're really that desperate you can see it on the original post of this blog here).

Now for a humourous and once again Bungie-related story. A few weeks ago the Bungie fans thought they'd caught the clever developer out when a picture of a Wal-Mart database was taken from their intranet which listed a product called 'Halo Blue'. Of course the 'avid Halo fans' on Bungie.net (that means people who spend all day complaining about Trueskill and the power of the Battle Rifle, but never actually stop playing Halo) were immediately speculating away with talk of a Halo 4 or even more ridiculously a Halo 3 expansion pack. It was revealed more recently that although Bungie do have a Halo project in the works, in this case the legendary item was in fact just a blue Halo-themed USB flash drive.

Well that's this week done and dusted and now I must bid you adieu, places to go, headcrabs to kill. Thank you to some of my favourite people, PJ24, Edpeterson, Kingrich06 and Neojedi. Now I will leave you with the amusing but ultimately crushing to any game journalists out there, 100 game-industry cliches. Keep on rockin'.

-Gamer_152

 Well my blog so far has been situated primarily on Gamespot.com (http://uk.gamespot.com/users/Gamer_152/) and will most likely continue to be. However this site has been built by some of the greatest gaming critiques the industry has to offer and Giant Bomb looks like a project of monumentous proportions. I look forward to testing here and enjoying everything the site has to offer. Hopefully I'll also be posting at least some of my blog here. My blog goes out every Saturday and the link above will provide you with any posts that don't appear here as well as over 100 previous blog posts. Thank you for reading and once again to all the guys at Giant Bomb you're doing a great job.

-Gamer_152