• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – ($44.99)
• Overlord Complete Pack – ($4.99)
• Nuclear Dawn – ($4.99)
• Fallout 3 – ($7.49)
• Atom Zombie Smasher – ($2.49)
• Killing Floor – ($4.99)
• Alice: Madness Returns – ($7.49)
• Dungeons Steam Special Edition – ($10.19)
• Dungeons: The Dark Lord – ($10.19)
• Batman: Arkham Asylum – ($4.99)
• IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 – ($3.39)
• IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover – ($16.99)
• X Super Box – ($9.99)
• Football Manager 2012 – ($26.79)

Torchlight 2

It’s no mystery how much we at P*N love Torchlight. It took the classic ARPG loot and leveling formula and nearly perfected it. One of the only glaring faults of Torchlight was the lack of multiplayer. Torchlight 2 is going to fix that. In November you will be able to run around Torchlight’s stylized world with a friend. With four completely new classes to play and large outdoor environments, Torchlight 2 looks like it is going to outclass the original in nearly every way. If that was the only ARPG on the way I would be happy, but there are plenty more.

Path of Exile

This free to play ARPG is in beta right now and it’s looking great. The influence of Diablo 1 and 2 is immediately recognizable. Path of Exile will send you into a dark and dreary world filled with things trying to kill you at every turn. Don’t worry too much though. You will be able to turn yourself into a monster murdering machine all your own. There are five classes announced right now and one more on the way.

Path of Exile doesn’t shy away from its Diablo influences but it does bring some new stuff to the table. Skills aren’t handled like they usually are in ARPG’s. Instead of getting them as you level up, you find them or earn them from gems you can socket into items. These gems level up on their own and become more powerful. They can even be modified with other gems to create different version of skills. You can have your regular fireball spell shoot multiple fireballs or have your zombies do lightning damage with every strike. The gem system really makes Path of Exile stand out. You can apply to get in the beta here.

Grim Dawn

There isn’t a lot of information about this game right now but I’m still on pins and needles waiting for it. The developer, Crate, was formed by former members of Iron Lore Entertainment, the makers of the excellent ARPG Titan Quest. It takes place in a bizarro Victorian era so you will get the typical swords and shield alongside pistols and shotguns. Check out some of the few videos of the game here. I love the splintering wood and flying bodies.

Diablo 3

This is the big daddy of the bunch. Diablo 3 has had more than it’s share of news coverage detailing every new game mechanic and controversy so I won’t go into too much detail here. I just want to say I can’t wait to have my little frogs hop at enemies and blow up in their faces. Or my pygmies turn monsters into chickens. Or to set fire to my minions only to blow them up later. Can this game be out please?

Better get your clicking fingers ready because the next few month are going to be filled with ARPG gold.

RAGE is first person shooter pioneer id software’s latest entry into the gaming market place. This is their first game developed completely in-house since DOOM 3.  Let’s see how id did in meeting fan’s high expectations.

“After an asteroid impacts Earth, humanity attempts to rebuild. Sheltered in cryogenic lifeboats, survivors emerge years after impact to a devastated planet where some of mankind survived in struggling settlements or murderous bandit clans, while horrific mutants roam the dead cities. And a mysterious tyrannical government is on the hunt… for you.”

The game opens with a gorgeous cinematic of an asteroid approaching and striking the Earth. The next thing you know, your arc has opened, you awake from suspension, and you are the only survivor aboard your ark. You exit the arc and step into the post-apocalyptic steam-punkish Wasteland of RAGE.

The first minute playing this game left two impressions with me. The first was the amazing visuals.  RAGE is absolutely stunning visually.  The eye-candy is endless and in every polished detail.  The second was the glassy smooth movement controls. Everything is responsive and natural, the kind of integration that makes the controller vanish and puts you right in the game. Even the vehicle handling is excellent. The only drawback here, all racing in RAGE is third person with no ability to change your view.

Weapon selection is more along the lines of traditional FPS games, with just one of each type of weapon you will need.  Certain weapons can only be crafted from parts, such as sentry-bots and advanced wing-sticks (think smart boomerang made of three razor-sharp blades used to silently lop the heads off of enemies).  The inventory system is elegant and simple as it groups like items automatically and just shows you a total count or total value.

Geographically, there is one small settlement and two larger cities in RAGE. The settlement serves as a primer to introduce you to weapons, vehicles and the way missions and economics work in the game. Very soon you move on to the first real city, Wellspring, which serves as the central game hub for the first disc. Here is where most of the NPCs reside to provide missions and supplies, a vehicle garage and a race track. Subway Town provides basically the same resources for disc two.

In each city there are several gambling mini-games to be played in order to win (or lose) money:

• RAGE Frenzy - This is a Pokémon style card game.
• Five Finger Filet - This is a pattern / timing game.
• Tombstone - This is a pure game of chance using dice.
• Strum - This is a musical pattern game.

In addition to the mini games:

• Racing - Each the cities has a race track where you can compete in a variety of racing events.
• Mutant Bash TV - You are put into an arena and must survive waves of enemies.

Do not confuse the RAGE Wasteland with the Fallout Wasteland. RAGE is touted as an “open world” game, but it is not very open at all. The connections from the cities to the mission sites are called the Wasteland and it serves as roads and a small battleground for vehicular combat. Outside of the mission sites and the cities there just isn’t anything to explore. Even the mission levels are linear with no room to wander. Granted this is firstly a first person shooter, but the RPG elements of the game leave you wanting more as there are far fewer destinations and missions than in Fallout 3, New Vegas or Borderlands

The multi-player player portion of the game is a completely separate experience from the main campaign, meaning there is no multi-player campaign. Instead, there are separate stories called Wasteland Legends. These are separate storylines from the campaign and are based on some of the tall tales told in the wasteland. This is the only part of the game that supports split-screen play.  Why no split-screen racing?

Overall, there really is a ton of stuff to do in RAGE, and all of it controls as good as it looks, however, the RPG fan in me says there should have been more.  More story.  More locations.  More missions.  And this brings me back to where I started; expectations.  I expected the “open world” to be like Fallout and Borderlands, big and sprawling.  RAGE isn’t.

The story feels like a pilot episode to a much bigger story.  RAGE is clearly meant to be a franchise starter leaving a lot of places for the story go.  The multi-player part of RAGE is fun, but completely separated from the campaign portion of the game.  Even the multi-player racing feels tacked on, like an after-thought.

Taking into consideration these minor disappointments, RAGE is a fantastically made game that is a pleasure to play, nearly bug-less on consoles (there are video driver issues on PCs that AMD and Nvidia are working to resolve), and completely immersive.  My biggest problem with RAGE is wanting more.

• Visually Stunning
• Glassy Smooth Controls
• Even The Driving Is Excellent
• Detached Multi-player Experience
• Story Falls Short

Final Score: 9 out of 10

Dead Island takes place on the Island of Banoi, in and around the luxurious Royal Palms Resort.  A mysterious and contagious zombie outbreak sends the entire island into chaos.  Among the guests at the resort, only four are immune to the virus, and they are called upon by all of the other survivors to risk their lives to go find everything from gasoline to Champagne.  The main quest is to escape the island before an approaching monsoon hits.

Playing as one of the immune, you explore the huge open-world island, finding weapons, looting luggage, drinking energy drinks (health packs)… and killing zombies.  Each of the four playable characters has a special skill (guns, blunt weapons, blades and throwing weapons) and just enough back-story to explain why they have their specific skill.

The huge island is divided into areas (resort, city, jungle, etc.) and access to each consecutive area is earned  by completing quests.  Weapons are literally everywhere and degrade with use, so scavenging for money to pay for repairs and supplies to modify your weapons are an important part of the game.  Fortunately there is no karma system in the game, so feel free to loot everyone’s luggage, steal medical supplies and help yourself to whatever you want in the church.

Dead Island is a culmination of some of the best features of many great games.  Imagine a Franken-game created with parts taken from the following:

• Sound design from Dead Space
• Four playable co-op characters from Left 4 Dead
• A huge open world map unlocked a section at a time from Borderlands
• Lots of NPCs with scavenging quests from Fallout 3
• Assorted zombie types from Left 4 Dead
• Skill trees from Borderlands
• Weapon mods from Dead Rising
• Vehicles from Far Cry 2

Dead Island has all of this, but the shining star is the melee combat and the selective damage inflicted on enemies.  Being able to dismember zombies is not only fun but crucial to getting past some of the tough parts of the game.  For example, thug zombies will pummel you with their long reaching arms – that is until you chop them off or break them, making it easier to move in closer to lop off their head.  Yes, it is ultra violent.  Yes, it leaves the ground littered with body parts and huge pools of blood.  Yes, it is one of the most fun survival horror games I have played in a long time.

There are a ton of great things about this game, and despite the shortcomings I am about to point out, this is a fun, must have, game

I’ll overlook the day one patch and the steam release issues.  I feel all games get a mulligan for release day.  With the complexity and scale of today’s games, I would much rather put up with a week of bugs than to have developers stop pushing the envelope. The negatives I want to focus on are all problems I have with Dead Island even after the first Xbox 360 patch, some of which are design related.

After the first console patch was released (September 15, 2011), there are still some clipping issues – zombies stuck in walls, attacking through doors, etc. but this is not what drives me crazy.  With all of the great things Techland got right in this game; it amazes me that the main source of frustration is the inventory system, which was apparently imported directly from Hell especially for Dead Island.  How much can you carry?  How much space is left?  Why can you sometimes pick up items and other time you must swap the item for something you are holding?  Who the hell knows?  And let’s not leave out the disappearing inventory items ala David Blaine.  If Techland can get this part of the game stabilized and reasonably consistent, there would be very little to stop this game from being a game of the year contender.

As for design issues, and at the risk of sounding a bit like a casual gamer, the re-spawning zombies drive me crazy.  If I clear out an area, it should stay clear – at least until I leave the area and come back – or restart the game.  For example, if I hack my way through a three story City Hall, eating up my weapons and resources in the process, why does everything I have killed re-spawn and block my way back through the building?  Sometimes, they re-spawn with me still in the room if I stand still long enough.

While these flaws seem like a big deal, I’m confident that they will get fixed or balanced in the near future, or I will learn to deal with them, because I am hooked – strike that, I am completely addicted to this game.  There should be a special warning label on Dead Island that says “Highly Addictive Game” just to let consumers know they will lose hundreds of hours of their lives to this game, because I know I will.  See you on the beach.

• Best of the Best Culmination of Features
• Awesome Targeted Enemy Damage
• A Blast To Play In Spite Of Flaws and Bugs
• Re-spawning Zombies Harsh My Mellow
• Dismal Inventory System

Final Score: 8 out of 10

Be sure to take a look at the rest of the screenshots in the gallery below and check out all the additional Dead Island coverage on Platform Nation.

The world has been destroyed by nuclear apocalypse. The human population is decimated, and society has been destroyed. Now lawless bandits roam around killing and enslaving anyone who is still aliv…..*zzzz zzzz*. This is the storyline to Wasteland Angel, and it will put you to sleep before you even start playing. The opening cut-scene begins with the line “It’s the same old shuggin story,” which will frame your experience playing Wasteland Angel perfectly. From the narrative, which could have been lifted straight from Fallout 3 or any of the many movies and videogames based off the same generic premise, to the gameplay, which offers nothing more than dull, uninspired combat – Wasteland Angel is simply blah.

Wasteland Angel is a top-down action game in which you play the Wasteland Angel, a savior of the remaining civilians scattered across the United States. You take control of Angel and her call, Ol’ Gypsy, which is loaded with guns used to turn the roaming gangs and mutants into scrap metal and mush.

Wasteland Angel plays like other top-down or isometric action games of the genre, like the Alien Shooter or Shadowgrounds series, and in some ways, similar to games like Twisted Metal.  As the Wasteland Angel you travel across the United States protecting settlements from roaming groups of gangs, renegade military units, and mutants. All of which have fleets of vehicles that are ready to destroy you, raze cities to the ground, and enslave the citizens they come across.

Each level is set up the same, you arrive in a town just before an attack, and you must fend off attack vehicles and slaver vans in a series of waves. Each faction you fight operates exactly the same. They will have one unit specifically dedicated to attacking you, another unit that drives into the towns and captures civilians, and a third unit that’s a hybrid of the two – with its task of attacking or enslaving randomized. As you play you can pick up power ups and special weapons to give you an extra edge, but you will hardly need it. The brain-dead and underpowered A.I could be defeated without even looking.  Unlimited ammo for your main guns also helps turn up the monotony  factor , as you can just hold down the left mouse button and dispatch entire armies without trouble.

It’s more than just the enemies that are recycled in Wasteland Angel. The game effectively doubles the amount of levels in it by making you play a day and night version of each map, with identical wave patterns (which seemed to be almost identical across the whole game). Not only are levels duplicated, but so are boss fights.

The most interesting parts of Wasteland Angel are the occasional first-person levels where you complete a variety of events, such as races or time trials, but even then Wasteland Angel could hardly keep me interested.  There is also a unique scoring system that carries over from level to level, eventually scoring you on your total progress in the campaign. However one of the games many bugs allowed my score to go above the maximum amount and plunge into the negative billions, effectively ending that fun little meta-game.

At first it was actually hard to say Wasteland Angel was a bad game. It was short, it was uninspired, it was boring, but it did not have the qualities of a truly bad game – such as anger-including mechanics or game-affecting bugs; however after spending about two hours in the atomic wasteland, the horrible reality of this new world became apparent. Bugs started popping up left and right.  Enemies would frequently run into pathing problems, causing them to drive into walls over and over like a broken roomba. One of the bosses (which you fight twice like all the others…) can only be  damaged by running over mines you place, yet the boss has some inexplicable ability to clip through the mines or push them off the world geometry.

Wasteland Angel will recycle mechanics and environments for about 4 hours until you get to the final chapter. By then though you will just be wishing you had bought a different game. I have no problem with this genre, in fact I enjoy the mindless shooting that makes up other games of the type – such as Alien Shooter or Zombie Driver. But even if you are a “fan of the genre”, there is nothing for you here. Wasteland Angel is not only copied and played-out in every way, but it’s also not fun – the biggest crime of all.

3/10

- Boring and uninspired gameplay
- Little variety in levels and no replay value
- Why does Angel talk like she is from the deep south if she lived in California?

Hmm. Actually that makes total sense. Bethesda Softworks, maestros behind Fallout 3 and the Elder Scrolls games, apparently came this close to adapting George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy novels of epicness into a series of video games. Todd Howard (Executive Producer of the company’s upcoming game, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim) talked with EGM.com and gave them the reasons why the studio passed on the opportunity:

“We wanted to do our own world. That’s where we wanted to put our time into. Before we were even making Skyrim, there was a conversation with George R.R. Martin’s people. They thought it would be a good match—and so did we, actually—but then we thought about if that was where we wanted to spend our time. It was tempting, though.”

Listen, I’m no huge Elder Scrolls fan (even though Skyrim gets cooler and cooler with each trailer) and I’m only just starting out on The Song of Ice and Fire books before I watch the much-touted HBO series, but I can still grasp at how utterly cool a game this would have been. And with said HBO show garnering the series such attention in both mediums, this would have been the perfect year for one. But, hey, silver lining: Game of Thrones uber-fans will be able to witness the history of Westeros in RTS form later this month when Focus Home Interactive releases Game of Thrones: Genesis. See? Not a total loss.

Source: EGM.com and IGN.com

In the interview, Howard stated the following: “So right now I can say that we’d like to do less DLC but bigger ones – you know, more substantial. The Fallout 3 pace that we did was very chaotic. We did a lot of them – we had two overlapping groups – and we don’t know what we’re going to make yet, but we’d like them to be closer to an expansion pack feel,”.

Currently, there are no released plans for the DLC, but Howard has stated that the yet-to-be revealed DLC will be available after the main quest is completed, a common complaint about Bethesda’s critically acclaimed Fallout 3. In my book, Skyrim is one of the most anticipated titles of the rest of the year, and come November, I know what I’ll be thankful for (the veterans, of course, not an awesome game set in a quirky fantasy universe).

Source: IGN

This timearound it is my favourite gaming platform, the PC.  I have tried to list 10 games that are exclusive to the PC but as you can see there are a couple of multi-platform games within my top 10.  The games are in no particular order but I would like to hear from you if you started any of these and never completed them.  Please try and make your comments spoiler free.

Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2: I have lost count of how many times I have returned to Half Life 2 in a an effort to complete it.  It has been a minor miracle that I have managed to avoid any storyline spoilers since it was released but it becomes harder and harder to avoid articles that mention the ending or the twist.  When Half Life 2 was first released my sound card struggled with it and the sound looped and jumped so I gave up and returned to it after an upgrade.  I got really far then a hardware failure meant I have to restart.  Repeat this situation more than 10 times and you have an idea of where I have got to.  At the last attempt I installed a high texture pack and got to City 17 to the point where I discovered I had been double crossed.  I think I am very very near the end but that save game was over 2 years ago and I can’t find it now and don’t know if I can face working my way up to this point again.  Episodes 1 & 2 are still sitting on my shelf awaiting installation.

Dragon Age: Origins

Dragon Age Origins: This was a Christmas present a couple of years ago and long after most of my gaming friends had completed it, I finally installed it and pushed the sliders up to maximum setting to enjoy the game.  It looked fantastic and I was really enjoying it but an annoyance that I just couldn’t forgive was that the text was tiny on my 1920×1200 setup.  I must have played about 5-6 hours before giving up awaiting a patch.  Dragon Age 2 is now out and I feel the urge to continue my original Dragon Age: Origins quest but will I?

Fallout 3

Fallout 3: Another Christmas present from my wife (have i mentioned how great she is at buying me the best games?).  Installed the game, installed the hi-res texture pack and just loved the game.  Maybe as many as 10 hours of gameplay have passed in my Fallout 3 playthrough but it was just one of those games that unless I knew I could devote at least 2 hours at a time then I didn’t even bother booting it up.  Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months and after a year I decided to play it again only to discover the Games for Windows Live! had screwed up and lost my save game.  I tried to start again but just couldn’t get into it again.

Homeworld

Homeworld: An RTS set in 3D space, oh how I loved the concept and at the time the graphics were groundbreaking.  Here was my favourite genre, real time strategy, set in real 3D for the first time.  I remember spending hours just spinning the camera around some of my ships.  One of the features of the game was that the size of your fleet at the start of each level was dependent on how you had finished the previous level.  I found myself with a small fleet deep into the game and didn’t have a save file that I could fall back on to replay the last level to see if I could have a better advantage on the level that kept kicking my ass.  Alas, I never returned to Homeworld and it’s one of those game I keep my fingers crossed for a modern reboot or even a 3rd game in the series to be announced.

SW: KOTOR

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: A Bioware masterpiece set in the Star Wars universe.  Similar to Fallout 3 and Dragon Age, here is a game which could eat more than 40 or 50 hours of my life if I let it. Unfortunately to dedicate that sort of time to a game at my stage of life would mean a month to two months of ignoring any new releases.  Something which is never going to happen.  Despite picking this up for pennies in one of the many Steam sales my total gameplay time for SW:KOTOR cannot be more than 2, maybe 3 hours.

Return To Castle Wolfenstein

Return To Castle Wolfenstein: I think I must have only played the first two levels of this game but the storyline of battling the Nazis and the occult really fascinates me.  Recent Call of Duty games have stole some of RTCW’s thunder with their zombies DLC but I still wish I had the time to play this game.  I had missed out on Wolfenstein the first time it was released and at the time, many gaming magazines were previewing Return To Castle Wolfenstein as a chance to relive the classic for those who missed out the first time.

Black & White

Black & White: Another one of Peter Molyneux’s flawed master pieces.  Black and White put you in the position of a god looking over your people.  The new twist to this game was the addition of a large creature which you commanded and your followers worshipped or feared.  This was one of the first games I remember incorporating a good and evil choice tree that impacted how the game world react to you.  I got to the second last level, about to enter the portal that would move me to that final island when a game breaking bug attacked.  My creature went through the portal but the game did not recognise this had happened and left me with a leash with no creature and no way to progress.  no way was I replaying that game to get to that point again, what a shame.

Far Cry

Far Cry: When Far Cry was released my PC setup was not capable of running at the highest settings and I really tried to perservere for a while on the lower settings but in the back of my mind I knew I was missing out on what was possibly the best looking game at the time.  So an upgrade or two meant I could now do the game justice but like many of my games listed here, I somehow lost the save file which was about halfway through the main story.  I tried a few times over the years to replay this but it just feels so dated now that I fear I missed out on a FPS which had a lot of influence on how the genre plays today.

Mafia

Mafia: Taking a sandbox world similar to Grand Theft Auto 3 and wrapping it in a gangster storyline was always going to be a hit with me but the frame rates were horrible on my PC at the time and the cars were so slow that I lost interest after a couple of hours.  I probably spent more time checking out the reflection of the two towers in my car than I did playing the game.  The storyline is regarded as one of the finest gangster video game stories ever told but I am afraid I will never experience it first hand now.  I have started playing the sequel and if I loaded up the original game I expect I would be so disappointed at how the graphics have aged so much that I may not be able to play it.

Doom 3

Doom 3: Oh how Doom 3 scared me so much.  I was lucky to have a PC at the time where I could turn everything up the the maximum and experience Doom 3 the way it was meant to be played.  Which meant creeping around every corner and hitting quick save with each enemy I dispatched.  The use of lighting was marvelous in this game and I loved how I was forced to alternate between the torch and my weapon.  However a modder ruined this experience by releasing the duct tape mod which meant you could tape the torch to your gun, effectively ruining the experience in one foul swoop.  I’m about 75% of the way through but its now been over 4 years since I last had an attempt at completing Doom 3.

So tell me, should I dedicate time to go back and complete any of the 10 named games?  Or are you in the same boat and have started but never finished some PC classics that you wish you could find the time to  revisit?

Next up is the Xbox 360.  Which 10 games will I pick?

I have a problem with Video games, don’t worry I’m not going to say that they have ruined my life or that I am spending every waking moment playing them and spending almost every penny I have on them. Nor am I going to joining GA (Gamers Anonymous) if there such a thing. If there isn’t, then I hereby make my claim for copyright and will sue whoever does start it. Anyway back to the topic on hand, my problem is that I have either a short attention span or short memory

What I mean is that if I for whatever reason move on to a different game, even if it is on a different platform or a different genre I will rarely if ever return to the original game. Thankfully it’s not so bad that I have to complete games in one sitting as that be suicide.

The list of games that fallen victim to this includes some A+ big hitters

1.      Assassins Creed 2

2.      Bioshock (Until this year)

3.      Oblivion

4.      Dark Sector

5.      Call of Juarez

6.      Spider-man Shattered Dimensions

7.      Resistance

8.      Tomb Raider

9.      Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas

10.   Alan Wake

I could go on; these are just some examples of the top of my head.  I know that this is a problem for me and I will do my best to prevent it by completing at least the basic story mode/campaign mode of a game before moving onto the next. I have thought about why this happens, part of me blames a short attention span and that I am always looking for the next immediately after starting the last thing (I must have been a joy for my parents when it came to Christmas presents) I also blame my whatdoyoucall it, the thing in your head that you use to recall information..Ah yes memory. I am terrible with names/faces/dates/events.  I forget who did what and when, where I am supposed to go and where I have been.  This mean IF I go back to a game I usually have to start from the beginning so I can understand and appreciate the story. This in turn causes another problem as I can and do get bored replaying the parts that I remember which often leads to me looking for the next thing again. It’s a vicious cycle.

I am sucker for a “collectable” item. It’s a trait I know I have and I hate myself because of it. I have bought countless items at a premium simply because of some awful shiny thing.

Thankfully, I have weaned myself of this over the years and no longer instantly buy something (Thanks in no small part to the plastic Simpsons Series box sets priced at £50) but I still get suckered in even if I had no real interest in the product in general.

I have several purchases which I later regretted as well as several near misses. Some prominent examples that come to mind are the Lost Seasons 1-4 box set that was an actual wooden crate. It’s worth noting that I hadn’t actually seen a single episode of Lost at that time, nor have I seen an episode since but because I liked the look of the box I had to stop myself from buying it (I actually still regret that my wallet won this fight)

Another example is the Planet of the Apes Collectors edition. Again I had never seen a single movie and haven’t seen one but I was really tempted to buy this. Although no one can deny that this is a pretty good looking collectable:

DVDs are the only collectors edition that I spend and/or waste (I’ll let you judge) my money on. I purchased the collectors edition of Halo 3 even though I hadn’t even played let alone complete Halo 2, I was even tempted by the edition that offered a replica Master Chief helmet. Fallout 3 is another example, I only had a passing interest in the franchise but upon seeing the lunch box my money seemed to just fly out of my wallet and onto the checkout.

I should be grateful though, for the most part the collectors editions that I do end up buying usually offer some actual physical content that is worth owning (apart from the Simpsons box sets, which feel cheap and in some cases have damaged/scratched disks due to insufficient packaging) I don’t mind paying a little extra for a little extra. Where else could I buy a Pip-Boy bobble-head? Or a Fallout lunch box?  When the extras aren’t real, that is when it is game content I am less inclined to pay. I want something tangible for my money. On a related note, Bioware and EA Please release something for Mass Effect 3. The Mass Effect 2 collector’s edition was good but poorly implemented. End the trilogy on a high. I would gladly shell out £100 possibly even more for an ultimate edition. A few examples that I would be happy paying for:

• A scale model of the Normandy
• A replica helmet(either Tali or the generic N7 Helmet)
• A replica gun.
• A model of the Citadel or the Mass Relay.
• Do a Pokémon and offer separate editions which each have their own character specific content(Tali, Liara, Grunt etc)
• All of the above

It’s amazing, another confession where I completely contradict myself. I complain about being a sucker for a collectable yet I beg for more. I need help.