The Orange Box has finally released as most of you probably already know. I, like many others, bought the title a few weeks ago so I could start playing the Team Fortress 2 beta and get my skills back. I was a fan of the original Team Fortress back in my Quake days although I was never an exclusive player of it. I tended to play the standard deathmatch or rocketwars but I did enjoy getting shot to hell by a sentry gun now and then. After Valve bought out the rights to the mod I n...

Well I picked up The Orange Box pre-order last week while I was waiting for paint to dry. Okay actually it was the floor stain but really, its the same thing. Floors came out great though! Anyways my point is that I have decided to make a TotalGaming.net Gamers group (which is by no means officially supported by TG or Stardock) as a way to get some more interaction between us. If anyone wants to join up the group is public and is called 'TotalGaming.net Gamers' with the link to the grou...

So another bigger title has been added to the mix of the Holiday release schedule, which seems to now even include October and possibly even September with the recent releases of BioShock and Halo 3 . At the same time there have been a few titles that have been pushed back to Q1 2008 or even more specifically, just after the Holidays including Midway's AAA offering Blacksite: Area 51 , The Club and recently Assassin's Creed the later of which I can't wait to get my hands on. ...

Well first things first you should notice that I am playing with the formatting of my reviews a little. Hopefully this will add a bit of structure to what can sometimes be described as rambling. Although JoeUser is incredibly annoying to format and test things with but hopefully I can figure it out soon enough. Secondly and more importantly, I encourage any gamer near a Toy R Us to go and check out the store or at the very least the website because they are having a 'Buy 2 Get 1 Free' sa...

Well first things first. After struggling just a little to get BioShock working on my computer correctly, kept pretending it was in 'windowed mode' when it wasn't, I managed to get about 30minutes of play time in before I had to return to working on my house. Obviously a very early impression of the game but I like what I am seeing. The overall art direction reminds me A LOT of the Fallout series, not that that is a bad thing by any means. I still need to finish up Dead Rising before ...

Here goes nothing. Another futile attempt to catch my game reviewing habits up to my gameplaying habits. I swear I am almost there and with this triple-dose of Wii love coming at you I will be only one (although probably two games) away from being even. Upon Wii's launch I picked up two games, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess , which I have failed to play much of and Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz , which I am still working on unlocking the extra levels to. Just two weeks later (...

Get this, I actually finished a game that came out in the last year, this one I didn't even buy! No, I didn't pirate it, well, okay I guess in a way I bought the game, it came with my 8800 GTS that I got a few months ago and after finishing F.E.A.R.: Extraction Point I figured I might as well take down Dark Messiah of Might and Magic . I have followed the Might and Magic franchise for years, in fact some random number of HoMM was one of the first game I played on the PC and I even crea...

As promised comes the second batch of throwback reviews in hopes of one day catching up to the games I have been completing. I certainly didn't think a time would come when I was behind on my reviews but then again, I never put as much thought or time into them before causing them to take longer. I say that as part of review recaps instead of full reviews which is ironic but hopefully these reviews are insightful enough to help prospective buyers make a decision and remind others of the w...

So even though I have been steadily writing and reviewing titles here I have still only made a small dent in the backlog of games that I haven completed during and since picking up World of Warcraft . As it gets farther from the time I played the game I obviously forget more and more of why I liked or disliked the title, so in the best interest of trying to come up with the best reviews possible I have decided to just do a quick recap of the games that I beat awhile ago and have begun to ...

I have finally managed to finish F.E.A.R.: Extraction Point after picking it up from target some months ago for $20. I love when I catch those target sales and they have a solid game up for a such a great price. The deal wasn't as good as when I got Titan Quest for $20 since that was a full game and not an expansion but I can't complain. The not-as-badly-named expansion pack was the first FPS I have played since finishing the original when it came out and since I never reviewed it I might...

Lets hit the games I recently completed before I forget about them, and then I will jump back to recapping everything I have finished in the year+ lapse of reviewing. Just a mere two weeks after wiping Microland free of The Black Hole Army in Advance Wars: Dual Strike I once again kicked Bowser out of the Mushroom Kingdom in New Super Mario Bros. . I had started the game on my girlfriend's DS after mine was stolen but stopped playing it when I began getting looks. I guess I should no...

As I mentioned in my previous blog/rant Denis Dyack addressed some huge issues that are harming or at least holding back the game industry. He and Silicon Knights learned first hand at last year's E3 (and the final E3) how unforgiving and pointless the press could be when they looked at their latest project, the Xbox360 title Too Human . When asked if he thought the press was too harsh he went the other way, wishing their was more objectivity in the gaming press. Again I whole heartedl...

I am sure many of you here haven't heard of Denis Dyack but he has worked with the likes of Hideo Kojima and Shigeru Miyamoto and his studio, Canadian-based Silicon Knights , is a close partner with Microsoft after leaving Nintendo some years earlier. Gamesindustry.biz recently posted a two-part interview with him that include his thoughts on the industry from marketing to the idea of a unified console. What really caught my attention is his views on marketing and the structure of how ...

Again I will deviate on my gameplaying updates from days gone by, only this time its to cover a game I just wrapped up. Being that I can carry and play my DS almost everywhere I tend to get most of my gaming in via that machine, which has the best feature for handheld gaming since the introduction of the Backlight screen (with good battery life) some years ago. Of course I am speaking about its save state feature which was built into the hardware (some GBA titles sported the feature as soft...

I figured that since I posted what I was currently playing a few weeks ago I should probably take a break from my long delayed and still in the works Gameplay updates and actually get into what I am currently tackling on the PC. First and foremost I tend to be a little addictive when it comes to PC games. Although I play a good amount of them there is always a game that captures my attention for at least a few months, and in some cases years. I mentioned that I had quit World of Warcraf...