I admit it. I have a problem. Some may even call it an addiction. It rears it’s ugly head every weekend and I can’t shake it. I can start the evening with good intentions but I know deep down when it comes to the crunch I’m going to cave in. This is the confession of a drunken Xbox Live user.

When I’m sober I find live to be a bit of a trial. It’s great fun playing and chatting with mates, but I feel a bit dirty when interacting with the great unwashed. Maybe I’m just a big uptight Brit, maybe I feel a bit weird talking to American kids half my age who are obviously retarded. Gears of War multiplayer is meant to be great, but no way am I going to get head-stomped and laughed at by xXEyeP3wNEdUXx, aged 12, from Utah. Well not unless I’m pissed anyway.

You see, most Friday or Saturday nights I’m in the pub. It’s quite often an achievement in itself to get off the couch and go out after a hard week browsing the internet at work. Then after four or five pints my thoughts start drifting towards the 360. When I get home I know I should go to bed, get a decent bit of kip, and prepare myself for a new day. To my (very understanding) girlfriend’s disappointment, this is rarely the case.

The choice of game will depend on the amount of drink taken. If I’ve only had a few, I might try my hand at a sports game – TW07, PES6, VT3. This usually lasts about ten minutes, I get destroyed by some sober person, and then I realise that pint number eight was ‘the one too many’.

At this point Rainbow 6 Vegas usually makes an appearance. The headset goes on, the mic put on mute. I don’t want to speak to these people, but I want to hear the racist and homophobic shit they come out with, and to make sure none of it is directed at me. I make sure I play sharpshooter so I don’t have to communicate with these people. If I don’t finish in last place, I know I’m not completely slaughtered; I can shoot a few of these pricks without getting shot too much myself. If I finish last I know I’m in trouble, there is only one place left to go…

Texas Hold ‘em is the refuge of the damned. I’m too drunk to swing a golf club or shoot Americans, but I can drink more and hold my own in a game of cards, even if I can see three screens instead of one. The biggest challenge is staying awake, a challenge I often fail.

To anyone I have annoyed by falling asleep while playing Texas Hold ‘em, I’m sorry. I deserved the negative reputation points, I’m a dick. I’m sorry for the time I used the 3 Wood to hit the ball as far away from the green as I could after the ball I putted magically jumped out of the hole. And most of all I’d like to say sorry to my girlfriend for making her sleep in a cold and lonely bed most weekend nights this winter.

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. That will probably be a distant memory this Friday night come closing time.

Wired.com has a fascinating article up about a museum of Soviet-era arcade games located in a “Stalin-era bomb shelter”(!) under a Russian university dormitory. They’ve a range of hardware on display, from some pretty antiquated mechanical arcade games through mono CRT games up to early 90’s full colour stuff:

From the late ’70s to the early ’90s, Soviet military factories produced some 70 different video game models. Based largely (and crudely) on early Japanese designs, the games were distributed — in the words of one military manual — for the purposes of “entertainment and active leisure, as well as the development of visual-estimation abilities.”

Now, it’s easy to laugh at some of the pictures (instruction manuals delivered in grenade bags, anyone?) but I can remember a time when arcade games looked a lot like some of these, right here in the prosperous and free civilised West. One of my earliest gaming memories involves late 1970’s-era me hassling my parents to give me money to play some seriously dodgy looking games on the ferry to Hollyhead. This was a time when Breakout was the pinnacle of technological achievement and we got our driving kicks from Rally-X. Hmmm.

But still - metal joysticks and mechanical score counters? That’s pretty hardcore.

One common feature among them all is a lack of a high-score list.

“That kind of competition wasn’t encouraged,” explains Alexander Stakhanov, one of the museum’s founders and engineers. “If you got enough points you won a free game, but there was no ‘high score’ culture as in the West.”

That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Pac Man? Sorry – Pac Man Championship Edition? This is the “Major Xbox Announcement” that’s been hyped across the Internets for the last 24 hours? Pac Man? We get some new widescreen & HD mazes for a 26 year old game, and this is going to “…go down in video game history”? As biggest let down ever, maybe.

It’s not even free – it’s 800 points! What the hell?

NOT IMPRESSED, MICROSOFT. AT ALL.

As for their insistence on “improving” the graphics on the XBLA games - KNOCK IT OFF YOU JERKS. I for one like those crummy 80’s graphics.

And where’s Missile Command?

Press release after the jump.
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The first pictures of the guitar peripheral for EA’s Rock Band have been revealed and, oh boy, it’s nice.

Rather than the chunky caricatures of real guitars that we got with the Guitar Hero games, Rock Band’s Stratocaster actually looks like the real thing. As well as that, it includes twice the number of buttons from the old Guitar Hero controllers - 5 ‘normal’ fret buttons and 5 extra fret buttons for solos.

The other major change is the inclusion of a ‘toggle’ switch, which provides the effects for the guitar: reverb, flange, wah-wah and delay.

Old Guitar Hero guitars will also work with Rock Band.

According to Gamesindustry.biz, the BBFC has announced that it would not be issuing a certificate to the controversial Manhunt 2, which means the game is banned from sale in the UK.

The Irish Film Censor is following a similar suit and has issued a prohibition order in relation to Manhunt 2 in Ireland.

“IFCO recognizes that in certain films, DVDs and video games, strong graphic violence may be a justifiable element within the overall context of the work. However, in the case of Manhunt 2, IFCO believes that there is no such context, and the level of gross, unrelenting and gratuitous violence is unacceptable.”

Now it looks like Irish gamers who are itching to garrote someone with a Wiimote and Nunchuck should cross their fingers and hope that mainland Europe passes the game.

Xbox360achievements.org has the complete list of achievements that are in the retail copy of Halo 3. Finish the game on “Legendary”, and you can earn an easy 655 points.

Yeah, real easy.

Although the list doesn’t seem to be final. Some of the achievements relating the the “campaign meta-game” (?) still have placeholders instead of the actual number of points you need to unlock the achievement. For example, “Score over <X> points in the Campaign meta-game on the first mission”.

Read the complete list after the jump.

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