I finally got round to playing Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 this weekend. Admittedly the two sessions I spent playing only totalled up to four hours or so of gameplay.

For those of you who are unaware of what the team in Rainbow Six are all about, then I could be mean and direct you to the Novel ‘Rainbow Six’ by Tom Clancy. However that is a little mean so I will briefly explain it for you. By ‘I’ I really mean wikipedia, who have an excellent write up of the team available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_6.

So RAINBOW are a NATO counter terrorist special forces unit, and in this title you are playing as the leader of a four man squad, as you infiltrate and assault terrorist held positions in the casinos of Las Vegas.

While playing this I had the good fortune to be in Co-op mode, where I was squad leader, and my friend Idle Han was playing as one of my squad. This led to my first complaint about this game. Only I could give orders to the two AI controlled squad members, more realistic maybe having a clearly defined chain of command, but when I am pinned down and stuck returning fire, Han while in a better position to direct the troops could not give orders to the AI troops to assist.

However that little problem aside for the most part this game is very, very good to play! The AI squad is easy to control, with the A button acting as a contextual button, and the back and down buttons switching between actions (hold, regroup) and behaviour (assault, infiltrate).

It is a fantastic feeling you get as you watch your troops get into position and then storm a room, watching as they drop smoke grenades to hide their positions and execute a quick clean takedown of a room full of terrorists. All as per the orders you gave them with few clicks of your controller.

However the AI were very happy to hold position everytime you ordered them up against a doorway, and then entered yourself. If you didn’t remember to order them to regroup they would stay there indefinatly. They also on one occasion glitched as they both tried to enter a doorway at the same time and got stuck running into each other, rather than one letting another through first.

The actual manner in which you play the campaign is quite different from Halo 3, my usual frame of reference when playing an FPS on the Xbox. For starters like Call of Duty 4 the game features a more realistic damage system, you can only take so much damage before you are killed. Switching between weapons is slower, again more realisticly portraying a soldier pulling out his backup weapon out from his webbing, before being able to open fire.

I never got a chance to play the online multiplayer aspect of this game myself, which is a shame considering the high quality of the single player campaign. I would have loved to take advantage of the online cooperative play to get four of us in versus the single player campaign.

If you liked Halo I would definatly say Rent this title, as I feel you might not enjoy the game-play transition. However if you are a COD4 fan and if you can put up with the few minor flaws in what is otherwise an excellent game then I would happily recommend that you Buy this title. I will be to.

I really cannot review games to save my life.

You see the problem is I tend to enjoy playing games even if they are crappy. Not so much Joe Loves Crappy Movies, but Jim Loves Crappy Games. Though to be fair I define crappy to mean that the game is more like a B-Movie than a Hollywood blockbuster.

Games that have been poorly implemented and turn out to be full of glitches and broken drive me mad. I cannot stand it when I am playing what would otherwise be a fun experience and it is ruined by stupid little problems that a little playtesting should have picked up.

So when it all comes down to it I realise that when I start talking about a game in the blog I can only really offer one of three possible review scores; Buy, Rent, or Avoid.

Not really the most in-depth ratings but it is the one I will endeavour to use when talking about a game; at least that way you will be able to understand whether my ramblings are meant to be read as an endorsement or a criticism of the game or not.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Call of Duty 4 campaign this week. Between the Xbox Live downtime, and some problems with my ISP I have been unable to join multiplayer matches without lagging out mid-game, so I have returned to single player campaigns to keep me entertained.

I am a Bungie fan, and I loved the Halo series. After playing the campaign of all three games to death, the first thing that I noticed about Call of Duty 4 was how ‘gritty’ everything looked in comparison to the shinier more cartoonish look of the Halo 3 single player campaign. It immediately sent back to eight years ago when I was playing an entertaining FPS called ‘Delta Force 2′.

This game was introduced to me by two guys that I was on an IT course with, after listening to them talk about how great this game was they slipped me a CD-R and a slip of paper with a CD key. That night I had my first experience of Software Piracy and of Online FPS Multiplayer. For those of you wondering I went out and bought my own copy of the game that weekend; it still gets used on the odd nostalgic occasion, along with my copies of Dark Forces and Tie Fighter.

As I played the first few missions, I became amazed at the almost dual nature of the game. While playing as the SAS you have to play the game more like a stealth game like Splinter Cell than say a game like Halo where you can just charge in and let your shields take a pounding. Then you switch to the US Marine Corps, and the game changes slightly. You are now in pitched battles with insurgents. The usual tactics of sneaking up and knifing the opposition will not work. They know you are there and they want you dead.

This tonal change in gameplay threw me at first. I had done the SAS missions on Veteran difficulty without to many problems, but playing as a Marine was kicking my arse so hard it had turned me into a hunchback. I had to drop down to Normal to progress through the storyline. It amazed me how difficult more ‘realistic’ games could be compared to the typical sci-fi shooter I was used to playing. Grenades could, and routinely did take my legs out from underneath me. Death came on swift wings for me on more than one occasion, I was left staring at the screen wondering how I died.

For the first time in ages I actually found myself stopping to think before I acted. Even on Legendary in Halo 3 you could get away with infrequent acts of stupidity, but in COD4 stepping into a doorway without checking first could and would leave you face down in a pool of your own blood. After the initial confusion and frustration wore off I found myself quite fond of this game and cannot wait to get on to my ISP so I can jump into the multiplayer as well.