First up is my review of Cricket Revolution on Resolution which resulted in some outrageous comments. I can accept people disagreeing with what I wrote, but those who accused me of having a bias because of the nationality of the developers? That disgusted me.

Onto more joyous happenings then! A piece (well two really) that I am really proud of is my interview with the creator of AI War, Chris Park on The Reticule. Part One and Part Two. It was a pleasure talking to Chris, he has so many thoughts on such a wide range of topics. Great chap.

My second interview of the month is with the developers of C&C3 mod, Tiberian Dawn which you can read here. This mod is looking very nice, more than just those shots in the interview show off.

Finally we have my review of FIFA 10 on the PC which is a two-headed beast really.

Two other pieces I want to highlight, Greg’s take on Rapture here and Steve ranting at MMOs here.

Firstly my stuff from Resolution, I just want to thank Lewis and Fraser first off for letting me unleash hell with these two pieces (hell, fortunately, was not unleashed). Firstly was my roundup of the Experimental Gameplay Project’s ‘Bare Minimum’ theme and secondly I went off and interviewed Kyle Gray where we talked about Henry Hatsworth and the EGP.

Over on The Reticule I gave some impressions on the FIFA 10 demo then proceeded to take an angry swipe at Games for Windows Live which is one of the most infuriating pieces of software I have ever had to deal with.

In order to calm myself down I talked about the Tiger Woods Online closed beta which has unfortauntely recently come to a close. I am looking forward to the open beta! Bringing us right up to date is my review of EA’s Need for Speed: Shift

This will be back when I feel like I have a decent number of things to share with the world.

Well I have a couple of interviews, the first was with Fredrik Wester the Paradox CEO about, well Paradox! It caused a bit of a stir in the Hearts of Iron community I must say. My second interview was with Michel Gagne and Joe Olson about Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.

Apart from that I reviewed Osmos which is a beautiful little indie game and I also charted my experience of playing Day of Defeat Source again.

That is all this time!

- Chris

Firstly I want to highlight this Games Set Watch column where Kevin Gifford looks at how online gaming sites are ignoring the stories that often break first in print magazine. Very good piece of journalism there. Also from GSW is Phill’s latest column about PC ports of console games.

From Resolution comes Lewis’ look at Half-Life 2 mod ‘Curse’. Good to see some lesser known Half-Life 2 mods getting some exposure.

From The Reticule I have to highlight Greg’s hands-on preview of the new Operation Flashpoint which looks outstanding.

Time for my own stuff and I start off with a rant about Games for Windows Live which has ruined my experiences with Street Fighter IV and nearly done the same with Fallout 3.

On The Reticule I have Hearts of Iron 3 and grabbed a sneaky quick interview with DoubleBear Productions I also played Ashes Cricket 2009 and while I really enjoy the game, I can’t recommend it to many other people.

That is a wrap, look out for more of The Roundup in a fortnight.

Hit the jump to see what I have in store this week.

First off some piece from other people. I have to mention Phill’s piece on Resolution about the Third Person Disconnect which is a very interesting analysis of how the third person perspective in games. On Gaming Daily Steve has talked about the aggrevation poor console to PC control porting causes. Fortunately this was something Overlord did very well, check out a review from Mark on that here.

Looking a bit closer to home with The Reticule we have some fine pieces of work, the best I think is this piece by Greg which looks at game pricing. He has also started a Hearts of Iron 3 game diary which is looking very good. Meanwhile Ben has interviewed Mark Darin of TellTale Games.

Now don’t go thinking I haven’t been doing anything! First up is my Gaming Daily piece where I looked at the importance of bots in games. On Resolution I contributed (along with Phill and Tom Bramwell from Eurogamer) to a discussion about why we play games. Some very interesting comments all round there.

Over on The Reticule I have given Anno 1404 a Verdict along with judging Bookworm Adventures 2. Both are very good games, especially Anno which I really hope more people look at and try out. Finally I also looked at the open world scenarios of Fuel and Burnout Paradise, you can read that here.

As I mentioned the other day, the main piece to share is my gues post on RPS called China and the Future of Gaming. Heavily inspired by my dissertation, this is a look at the role that gaming plays in China at the moment and what censorship there is on games. Pretty interesting piece for anyone who cares about the industry side of things. Read the comments for debate over usage of Wikipedia!

Over at Gaming Daily I look at The Opening Levels of a Game which pretty much was a chance for me to talk a bit about the awful opening to Drakensang.

Done quite a lot on The Reticule in the past two weeks, more than I thought I had actually! First off I looked at the Experimental Gameplay Project and the first batch of games to come from it here. Expect me to do more like that when the next set of games are released.

I reposted an interview originally done here with Javier Maldonado about Masq. After that I got in touch with Javier again and have learnt some interesting things about the future of Masq, hopefully I can reveal all soon!

An early build of Majesty 2 was played and written about. The game seems interesting, especially for its take on controlling your heroes.

Finally I looked at games on Facebook and I went back to the Omaha landing level from Medal of Honour Allied Assault and wrote about it.

A busy couple of weeks there I must say. Now to get back to watch le Tour de France!

This is part of a series of guest articles to appear on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Lewis Denby wrote about Galatea and Phill Cameron should see something published sometime this week.

The Roundup will still be coming this Friday, don’t worry about that!

I did my usual column over on Gaming Daily, this time I looked at Evil in Games which led to some interesting debate. I am currently working on a piece looking at the new games from the Experimental Gameplay Project which will be published soon enough on The Reticule.

In other news The_B has joined the staff at The Reticule (and Gaming Daily incidentally) and I must say it is good to have Ben working with us. He is a great writer and has already written some good stuff.

Expect more stuff in the next Roundup.

Hit the jump and see what there is this week.

Firstly I want to share this link (via Richard Cobbett’s twitter) a nice short article examining the stupidity of password masking. I had never thought about this before, but it makes sense, why do we have our passwords masked all the time? Think about it.

The second piece to share is the story of Alice and Kev by chum Roburky. This is a touching story of two homeless characters living in The Sims 3. A very good piece of journalism by Ro.

Resolution boss Lewis Denby has written on Face Off Games about the demise of the solo campaign in modern games. I find the focus on the mutliplayer aspect of games bit tiring nowadays, I look back fondly at the original Half-Life and yearn for another top quality single-player FPS to arrive soon.

I also highly recommend this piece by Lewis on Resolution where he talks about the joys of shorter games, Portal and Gravity Bone are the ones he looks at.

On to my stuff then, that is what this is meant to be about!

My first piece on Gaming Daily went up last week, I explore the role of teamwork in games. Of course Battlefield 2 gets mentioned a fair bit as does Left 4 Dead. (talking about Gaming Daily, Steve has his first piece up there, check that out here.)

Three pieces on The Reticule to share today, the first and my favourite, is this interview with 2D Boy. Ron and Kyle are two very good developers with a lot of great ideas. I am looking forward to what they do next, the Experimental Gameplay Project is going to be good.

I also did some impressions of Hearts of Iron 3 which certainly caused some controversy amongst fans of the series. Hopefully I will write more about the game when it is released, just without so invoking as much anger.

Finally I provided some thoughts on the Cities XL beta. Hope that game is a success when it launches, city builders are a rareity now, but with Cities and the recently released Anno 1404 things may be changing. I hope so, city builders are a great way to spend your time.

That is all for this edition of The Roundup, back again in a fortnight!

First order of business, I got a 2:1 in my BA (Hons) Modern History and Politics degree. Hell yeah! In other news I have recently started doing some writing on Resolution and I will soon be writing semi-regularly on GamingDaily

Oh and as I haven’t actually mentioned it here before, I am currently spending most of my writing time on The Reticule which I am involved on with Greg Wild, Steve Peacock, Phill Cameron and Mattias Tammet, or more commonly StalinsGhost, SteveTheBlack, The Poisoned Sponge and Mythrilfan.

First up, goodies from The Reticule:

A retrospective piece on Battlefield 2 which I started sometime towards the end of last year, but have only just gotten round to finishing up. It has been a joy to go back and play the old beast the past few days, it really is a great game still.

I just did a quick look at the Overlord 2 demo which looks pretty interesting. Just hope it has more evil in it than the original!

Last thing from The Reticule is Greg’s Verdict on ArmaA II. It may be a buggy mess right now, but I am looking forward to getting to play it. Hopefully we will be looking at the multiplayer aspect of the it on The Reticule when we all get the chance.

On Resolution I got the chance to play an early build of Machinarium and talk to project lead Jakub Dvorský. You can read the whole thing here. The game is looking very good right now.

And I am afraid that is it for this first Roundup, hopefully I will have some more to show off in the next one.

- Chris