Last night, we played the new Wii.

My roommate has just purchased a new plasma wide screen, the Panasonic TH 37PV70, and decided that it was time to buy a Wii, to make optimal use of his new screen. Because watching one of the 300+ channels of digital that we have is sooo 2006... Time for some gaming 2.0 therefor, enter the Wii!

We bought a premium kit with extra controllers and an extra game. But the Wii comes standard with four Nintendo games, e.g. tennis, golf, bowling and boxing. This set of games we played last night.

First we tried playing some tennis, after six hundred years, in which we miraculously succeeded. Tennis on a Wii is fairly easy, the console makes no difference between a fore- and a back hand, your Mii just decides which hand should be played. Although the console make sit easier to play, it's not less fun. Especially when you're doubling, the fun increases drastically. People walking on the other side of the street stopped as they passed by, watching us Roland Garros-mentality driven people trying to break a tie.

After tennis, we decided to start boxing. My gf started the first round, against an opponent that – from the looks of it – was working a 9 – 5 on a local insurance company billing department. He was surprisingly tough, though. My gf had to give up half way the second round. Don't mess those billing clerks, I say. I stepped in.

Now, I know that everybody agrees on the Wii making an excellent instrument for obese children who just game all day, eating chips and not getting their exercises. But the Wii also provides for adults trying to watch their diets by eating just south European foods, avoiding King- and Mac Drives when they get in to their car and jumping on their bicycles whenever the rain is not pouring down. When the match was finally over, my chest was heaving, my heart pounding and my back was wet.

Needless to say I beat the light out of this fuckers eyes, though . . . .

In short, the Wii is fun on gaming, its a very 2.0 console where interaction between players themselves is concerned, and is very, very for people of all ages who thing they're missing out on exercises.

This is definitely the phone with the most stuff built in … ever !! Here’s a rundown of what’s inside this little puppy : Infrared, Bluetooth, Wireless networking (WiFi), GSM/GPRS/UMTS, GPS receiver, SD memory slot, QVGA screen, available in black and white models, running the operating system Windows Mobile 5. (An upgrade to 6 will be made available soon).

The device is shaped like your average pocket pc device, but it packs a lot more features because of the UMTS and WiFi , you will always have a fast internet connection on the device. If you have a flat fee UMTS subscription it will be interesting to install Skype on there. I have tried this merely as a test and it works fine. My phone bills are paid for by my boss so I don’t really care though. A point I would like to mention about using it as a phone is that dialing numbers is done on the touch screen which is not the most user friendly / usable method. Using your call history or contacts is reasonably fast but dialing a number is just slow and tedious. Of course you can use voice dialing which works pretty well.

The built in GPS and WiFi antennas seem to be a bit underpowered compared to other devices I’ve used. The GPS takes about 2 minutes to start up and get a fix on your position… this is a little above average and if the car is moving at that time, forget about it. I usually start the GPS just before we get in the car and while the driver gets ready you will get a position lock. TomTom 6 seems to be running just fine on the device, which is what you would expect from the 400Mhz processor in there.

The 400Mhz CPU also runs lots of other stuff just fine. I installed a lot of games on there that I used to run on my older Pocket PC device like Doom, Quake and Toki Tori. Even older games built for the previous versions of Smart phone OS seem to run fine on here, which is quite surprising as most of the times there are compatibility issues between OS versions in the Windows Mobile world.

All in all a very good device with tons of functionality built in. Perfect for on the move, but the phone feature could use some work… 8 out of 10 if you’re looking for a PDA device / 7 out of 10 for a phone.

Platform : XBOX 360
PR Score : 7.5 

After all the hoo-hah, i think everybody would like to know how good this game really is. Well ... sadly, I have to report it's not all it has been cracked up to be. While the graphics are great, it has some 'control issues'. In the end, it's not worth all the 10's and 9's it was getting in reviews on IGN.com and stuff. We'll discuss all of this in the review.

What's good about Gears of War ?

The graphics are immense. The detail in the character faces is just unbelievable. I don't think there are any other games with so many polygons in the character faces.  Also, the architecture of the buildings is extremely well done. It has a nice dar, gothic style to it, which is used consistently throughout the game.

The action is super intense. The shootouts you can have in GOW are really thrilling at times. It's a duck and cover game, so you will be diving for cover and peeking over edges to shout a couple of rounds of ammo onto those aliens (The Locust). Blood is flying everywhere, especially if you use the chainsaw that is on one of the weapons/guns.

Active reloading is a feature unique to G.O.W.. Instead of just having a reload button that puts a new magazine into your gun, when you hit reload, your character will start a reload sequence which is depicted by a progress bar in the top right corner of the screen. You can just wait for him to finish this and he'll do a 'regular reload' ... this will take some time however and can sometimes be a real problem if you're in the middle of a fight. So just before the middle of the progress bar, there is a little white stripe which marks the 'perfect reload' point. if you hit reload again JUST when the reload bar is in the white part, you will do a much faster reload. If you miss it however, the magazine will get stuck and your guy will be there swearing at himself and his weapon trying to push the magazine back in. The result is an even longer time to reload. So you can try to go for a faster reload, with a slight risk to making it take even longer. Then, at the beginning of the 'perfect reload' stripe, there is a line, which, if you hit it will trigger a 'perfect reload'. A perfect reload grants you a damage bonus on your current round of ammo. This of course makes it even more attractive to try an active reload. At hardcore level and above it is sometimes even necessary to do these perfect reloads in order to stand a chance against the Locust. Also, doing 5 perfect reloads unlocks an achievement, so does 25 active reloads.

The weapons are all really cool and well balanced. However, it's a bit of a shame that the Hammer of Dawn is always there when you need it. (It will be lying around somewhere). Because you can only carry a limited amount of weapons, it would have been cool if you were forced to carry around a weapon like the hammer of dawn for a little while. You quickly learn that this is not necesarry and thus focus on usually 2 machneguns or you swap one out for the shotgun or sniper. Anyway, in multiplayer mode you will really notice the balance of the weapons more then just against the Locust.

Co-op gaming is setup very cool. You can play any part of the game together with someone else, and moreover, they can join at any time. So if you run into a level that is just a little too hard to complete with the (sometimes not so smart) computer controlled team mates, you hit the dashboard button on your controller and go to your friends list. You then invite your mate to help you out and he can join as one of the other team members to play with you. Whenever he leaves the game, it just gets controlled by the computer again. I think this method of Co-op games is also unique to gears of war.

So what's NOT so good about Gears of War ?

First and foremost, the controls. Almost all of the controls have been placed under 1 button (the A). This is probably done to make the game more accessible to casual gamers, but it doesn't help the control system to be fast, responsive and properly usable. It has happened a lot of times that I wanted to take cover somewhere (coz I'm being shot at), and instead of taking cover, my character would make a dive / roll move. Another thing that really bugged me about the controls is the 'run' feature. You have to hold the A button down for this to activate, but it takes a fraction of a second for this to pick up. This is not what you want in the middle of the heat of the battle. Then there are some other small things like you *have* to hide in front of a stone before you can jump over it, which just doesn't make any sense to me and just looks plain stupid.

The split screen multiplayer mode is also far from perfect. Having played Rainbow 6 in splitscreen, I can confirm that GOW has chosen the wrong screen split (they chose horizontal instead of vertical split.). The game's graphics are obviously meant for a widescreen TV since on a 4:3 TV there is a blakc border above and below the screen. This means there is always more space horizontally then vertically, so why have the 2 screens above each other instead of next to each other ?? This I find completely unforgivable because split screen could have been so much better then it is now.

The AI. The artificial intelligence controlling the Locust is a little simplistic at times. It seems that every level or room has an invisible line going through it. As long as you don't pass that line, you're ok. The Locust will not try to get near you that quickly (unless you really take a long time at killing them.). If you cross the line however, you will be swamped by the Locust, attacking you together as a group. So as long as you don't do that, they just seem to think individually and you can drop them 1 by 1. Sometimes there will be a locust that tries to flank you, but this is more an exception then the rule.

At first there were quite some connectivity issues with the multiplayer games. This however seems to have been solved by the latest patch which will automatically be applied if you start the game when your console is connected to Xbox Live. This, IMHO should have been resolved before the game launch.

Final verdict :

The game is definitelly worth the money. Great graphics, solid gameplay and plenty of multiplayer options to make it last long. However don't expect the 10 that many sites have given the game. For that it just has too many little flaws. 7.5 would be more like it