Dawn of War's awesome. Spent an ungodly number of hours filling the middle of Valley of Khorne with troops (having modded out the population caps) and inching them gradually forward into the enemy base. Good times...
I'm between PCs at the moment (my shiny new i7 3820, 16gb quad-channel DDR3, overclocked 670 GTX, hopefully near-silent monster will be arriving tomorrow!), so have been messing around on the dusty Xbox for the past couple of weeks in Fight Night Champion and Rock Band 3. Quick thoughts on them..
-Fight Night: I loved Round 3 back when the 360 was young and hot like 1995 Jennifer Anniston; tactical, involving, reasonably authentic and very meaty gameplay. Picked up Champion recently and am not so impressed... the controls feel less naturalistic and tactical, and the fights often feel disconnected and unfair. And as with R3, there's still a major problem with the training mini-games being an annoyance. However, it's still tactical enough to make a great game, and I love that you can tailor so many settings to fine-tune the way the boxers fight. Round 3 remains my favourite of the series, but I had some fun (and lots of frustration) in Champion.
-Rock Band: I'm glad they finally made some concessions to interface navigation with RB3, as you can give each song a rating and apply lots of sorting filters for choosing your playlist. But the campaign mode is still worthless, you still don't have any control over what kind of players you match with online, having bandmates below Expert difficulty still prevents you getting a gold-star rating, the song lineup still isn't quite as likeable as RB1's despite being so much longer, and there's a lingering sense that the series has gone totally stale. Having grinded up to Expert skill on Bass and just about capable of it on Guitar, the game now feels thoroughly played-out to me.
Still, a lot of my favourite songs in Rock Band just don't quite have the same atmosphere when they're not accompanied by the crushing of varyingly coloured blocks.
