• Stunning graphics
• Immersive. Digging out bullets, the thump of a grenade launcher, great first-person animation, etc.
• Fire! Burn! Burn good! Once you get hold of the flamethrower your heart will fill with glee, until you accidentally torch yourself.
• Interesting story, if you manage to follow it.

Bad:

• Difficult to follow story. I know we talk quickly in Africa, but these guys rattle off their lines as if they’re racing each other to get to the end of the script. Most of the time I had to hit escape to check what I was supposed to do right after an NPC explained it to me at mach 3. And the voices were far too soft, but that may be a hardware problem.
• Immersiveness gets tedious when you have to schlep across kilometres of terrain just to pick up a new mission. Why the hell do I have to pick up a folder just to learn that I need to go to place X to kill person Y for being a twat?! I have a cellphone you muppets! MMS me his damn mugshot.
• Unvaried missions. Ubisoft boasted about 80 hours of gameplay, but it’s actually 6 hours repeated ad nauseam.
• Fracking guard posts. I know everyone has whined about this, and I tried to make the most of it by taking them out in creative ways, but after clearing out your 100th post you’ll quickly start trekking cross country on foot just to have a break from the instantly respawning guards. I would’ve preferred a GTA style open world, maybe let us bribe guard posts or wear one or the other side’s uniform.
• Weapons. There are some fantastic weapons, but once you settle on a sniper rifle, uzi, and flamethrower, nothing else comes close to being as effective. Snipe all the guards and mortar bastards, move in with the flamethrower to cause chaos and kill most guards, then use the uzi near your objective so you don’t torch yourself. Rinse & repeat.

Conclusion:

Worth a play, but you will go from loving it to hating it about halfway through. Multiplayer is quite fun, but for some reason there are no local servers in South Africa so I’m playing more Left 4 Dead and Call of Duty: World at War now.

It’s as pretty as COD4, seems a bit buggy which is to be expected from DICE, and has the standard Battlefield gameplay with a focused front that moves around as objectives are secured. Not sure what the other game modes are, but the gold mode is loads of fun. The single player looks fun, with semi-decent AI and an interesting story far from the usual heroics.

The major selling point is the destructible buildings. In one section a guy jumped off a building over a wall to escape my hail of bullets, and instead of trying to find a path to him I just launched a grenade into the wall to make a hole, popped through, and shot him in his surprised face. COD4′s bullet penetration is great, but this is on a whole new level. Nowhere is safe! I nearly shat myself when a tank came barrelling straight through the building I was trying to hide in before it got lodged in the next wall when it lost momentum and I managed to plant C4 on it. Great success! In another section I was bearing down on a group of enemies at high speed in my tank when I tried to cross a bridge. A bridge they had laced with C4. Needless to say I ended up in the drink as the bridge fell to pieces.

Verdict: If you enjoyed Call of Duty 4, Crysis, or anything in the Battlefield series, then you’ll love this game.

Update: Found a great tips video on youtube that might show you some class-specific tricks you’ve missed, like the tracer darts the specialist class can use on tanks to allow RPGs to home in on them. It really shows how team-oriented this game is, definitely not easy to go lone wolf style like you can do in COD4.

Update 2: I’ve collected all the parodies of Rainbow Six, Gears of War, and Metal Gear Solid as well as the two best trailers in this post.

But the comedy runs out near the end, where the novel gets dark and tense as you see just how dangerous Rem’s accident proneness can be to other people, and the finale of the book will leave you gaping in disbelief as you try to separate fact from fiction.

You get taken on a rollercoaster ride of emotions as you empathise with the characters, and the ending will take you by surprise instead of leaving you wanting.

Definitely one of the better novels I’ve read recently, and that means a lot coming from a science fiction nut like myself. My only complaint is that some pieces of dialogue run together because you lose track of who’s speaking.

Find the best price at book.co.za.

Backcover blurb: A war correspondent sets out from Amsterdam to South Africa to piece together the fragmented history of Ace and Rem, two brothers from South Africa. Their bizarre and disturbing scrapbook recounts a suspenseful tale of trauma and heartbreak that crosses two continents and leaves a trail of shattered lives in its wake. Six fang marks and a Tetanus Shot is a superb, multi-layered novel that investigates the eviscerating effect that intense trauma can have on a young boy’s mind.

Author Richard de Nooy’s blog.

If you enjoy laughing at people acting daft, and you’ve had at least four beers, then go see the show, but be warned that it’s a few laughs interspersed with long periods of dull comedy sinking under the weight of tired political jokes.

The TMAS website has details on the show, which is live at the Baxter in Cape Town from Nov 19 till Dec 1, and some videos so you’ll know what to expect.

Okay, I lied. Unfortunately it isn’t as fantastic as that, but it does keep track of your sleep cycles so it can gently coax you out of slumberland instead of jarring you awake with the aural equivalent of a brick to the cranium.

It does this by monitoring a sweatband you wear on your non-dominant arm wirelessly, and when it’s time to wake up, within 30 minutes of your specified alarm time, it will try to estimate when you’re almost awake and then gently sound a tone that you can set. Much nicer than a violent beeping at 7am when you’ve just convinced Angelina Jolie that you’re a much more satisfying option than Brad Pitt.

It’s similar to the Sleeptracker watch I looked at previously, but the good folks at Identum were kind enough to send me one to review, so I can vouch for it’s effectiveness. I can’t wear a watch to bed, but the sweatband is hardly noticeable. I found the aXbo really effective when you have to change your wake up time and your body hasn’t adjusted yet. Gone are the days of groggily staring into my morning coffee at the office. Thanks aXbo!

p.s. I’m supposed to raffle my demo model off on my site, but I like it too much, so, um, I win the raffle. Mwahaha.