The King of Fighters XII (Xbox 360)

For most of the month, the online mode for this game (which is the only mode I've been playing) has been horrible, with ridiculous amounts of lag and matches running in slow motion. Right near the end of the month however a patch was released which brings the online mode to an acceptable standard. It isn't perfect but a good deal of the matches I've played ran smoothly. Good games to CHRONOKILLER, SHINKU HAD0KEN, Zubrow, RaphooN, Skaar Banner, Supahsupreme and superzeric. The only idiot I've encountered this month is rappeter, who either rage quit or lagged out of a match after I won the first round against him. He first sent me this message. I sent him one back saying that he shouldn't have joined the room as his connection was that bad (he had a no-bar connection, the worst possible) so he sent me this. A quick Google search reveals he was last seen rage quitting on me in KoF '98 back in July. Some people never learn.

Left 4 Dead (Xbox 360)

Recently some downloadable content was released for this in the form of Crash Course, an additional campaign level. Sadly it isn't very good, with just 2 short stages in it (the others have 5) and an incredible amount of bugs and glitches, especially when playing in Versus mode. Some clipping issues are the main problem with this, as in Versus mode anyone can walk though walls quite easily in several places. Sometimes the set-pieces don't work so areas that are meant to have enemies rushing at you are empty. It was clear this was rushed out and at 560 Microsoft points it's expensive for what it is. With the sequel due out next month I hope more effort has been put into that.

Ace Combat 6 (Xbox 360)

Just started. I've beaten the first 5 missions on the easiest difficulty in the single player campaign. Online wise I've only managed to get a couple of games in, not many people seem to play it, sadly. More thoughts on it next month.

Project Gotham Racing 4 (Xbox 360)

I finally got round to starting the career mode for this and played through all of it. It was OK but some of the challenges could go on for a bit, especially the eliminator stages. I also finished every event in arcade mode on the silver (medium) difficulty. I haven't been able to play it online that much as it seems to have a lot of issues connecting to games (PGR 2 was never like this) but the races I have managed to get into have been a lot of fun.

Metal Slug Anthology (PS2)

I went round to a friend's one night and we decided to play some Metal Slug, or to be more precise, we beat Metal Slug 6. I hadn't played it for a while and initially it wasn't that bad at all, Ralf and Clark were fun to use with their exclusive special moves and I liked how the characters now had different abilities. I liked the new boss theme re-mix, the new sprites were good and there were some interesting new enemies like the giant walking train in the first level. Around level 3 the quality began to drop though with those stupid new aliens which take too many hits to kill. The boss for that level also went on for too long. And then it just got worse and worse, the last mission was really bad as the new enemies take far too long to kill and there are too many of them all on the screen at once. It also doesn't help that the aliens from Metal Slug 3 help you now but with the amount of stuff on the screen we were getting confused, shooting at them by mistake and wasting ammo. The last boss was yet another that just went on and on. Whilst it's still better than 4 and 5 I still say the series should have ended with 3.

Star Wars Rebel Strike: Rogue Squadron III (Gamecube)

After Metal Slug 6 we also managed to do something we'd never done on this game: beat "Strike at the Core", the last mission. This mission has you fly in and out of the second Death Star, getting in is a piece of cake but getting out is hell as you have to go as quickly as possible (fire is chasing you) and since one of you has to be the big, bulky Millennium Falcon it isn't easy. It took us several attempts but we did finally do it. After that we beat several other missions, like blowing up the first Death Star, knocking over AT-ATs on Hoth and beating the Battle of Endor level.