I wouldn't know what came first. Games like BF2 had medals and ribbons I would guess pre 360/ps3 being released and they are basically achievements. I can understand why people don't like them but then they can be ignored - I know plenty of people who love them and will go to great lengths to get them.

Now completed Dead Island...

That was a great game, with three annoying problems : The Lab bug, the 7 second re-start timer and cooperatve play - didn't like that at all...

And the last one for q while :

Metro 2033

This is a weird game in many ways. First it's based on a Russian book, and whilst I like "survival horror" post-apocalyptic fantasy FPS games as much as the next, this doesn't really make much of former, and the latter is quite standard, with the only difference being the acute shortage of ammo (which also makes buy any upgraded weapons a bit tricky too).

All baddies/enemies takes many, many rounds to kill (according to game's story its due to the lack of military grade ammo), which does get annoying - for the really tough monster I just avoided them...

The ending is good - finally a FPS with no need for a end-of-game showdown.

The game itself is clearly a console port - you do need to use a joystick for a lot of actions, even though the standard PC control fare is mouse and keyboard - you can't even get to the main menu without needing to press a joystick button. This process lets the game down pretty badly.

The "horror" part is totally under-used - you occasionally meet some "anomalies" and killer shadows (why they can kill you isn't explained), which is quite unsettling, but nothing is really made of it...

You should look into Metro: Last Light. Should be good I reckon

Couldn't really be worse

Just completed R.U.S.E

That was one tough game (just as hard on multi-player, but that is verging on "unauthorised"). The last few missions I had to re-start numerous times...

Graphics are pretty good, although the game can crash with, whilst not regularity, it does happen more than once...

Yea, I enjoyed RUSE. The last couple of missions were indeed hard. I enjoyed playing 4v4 skirmish maps when it came out but the problem is that the strategies used get so refined that after a while only the best players can play online. My top tip for playing any strategy game online is to get it on release and get playing whilst the good bad and ugly players are still there!

Actually, since playing it again, it has grown more on me... The Last Light train battle looks good.

Whilst I didn't receive it for Christmas, I did get Star Wars : The Force Unleased II for my birthday.

Haven't played a Star Wars game since Jedi Academy, I had heard rather unflattering reviews about this, but I found it great.

It does have performance issues - at least until I disabled anti-aliasing settings in the nVidia control panel and reset the machine (changing values in the game didn't work - at one point I even tried 800x600, and just changing control panel values didn't work).

There are a few silly platforming sections (especially near the end), and with a large distance between save points, if you make a mistake it can get annoying...

The game also expects you to use a control pad - although there are keyboard/mouse controls, it wouldn't accept that (unless, I presume the joypad was unplugged).

The ending was a slight anti-climax - Darth Vader (or Darthy as he is known down at the local Working Man's Sith Club), just really parries your attacks and very rather attacks himself. I was expecting a grandiose light-sabre battle myself, but there you go...

Finished the penultimate Christmas game now (Command And Conquer 4). It was okay - it was nice having no need to gather resources, however the low population caps was rather annoying, especially as you need to play online to increase it).

Graphics are good. It is quite hard though on Medium, so I downgraded to Easy...