Oh Christmas stash, oh Christmas stash, how patiently you wait for me,

Oh Christmas stash, oh Christmas stash, how shiny in your wrapping,

I rip you open on Christmas day, now it is time for me to play,

Oh Christmas stash, oh Christmas stash, finally it’s mine at last.

 

This year my Christmas stash contained a lot of DVDs. It was great to unwrap the complete set of Black Adder and the final Sex and the City seasons to finish my collection… but who cares about that when I also got games! There were three games that I really wanted this year: Tomb Raider Underworld, Prince of Persia, and Professor Layton and the Curious Village. I did one better than that, so Christmas was a success!

Sparkle sparkle.

Now to make it even better I have finally joined the world of clear gaming. A world where I can actually find relics by looking, not just by running blindly into every dark corner. A world where I can read on screen text and understand the underlying plot. A world where I would not just give up on Dead Rising. Yes you have guessed it I have finally gone over to HD. As of yesterday’s shopping spree my giant tube telly sits quietly in the corner and in its place there is a beautiful new Sony Bravia.

Glint-y super shine.

The worlds seem to have come together in a karmic gamer moment for me. I went away for Christmas and on my return I discovered that the shop just over the road had a Sony sale on, the weather became too cold to possibly consider leaving the flat and I am still on holiday leave from work. So I seized this opportunity to spend the whole day gaming. I am now flying through Tomb Raider (racking up gamer points that no-one can see as my Xbox Live has run out and I am too poor to renew it) and I discovered that at 23.30 following a whole day of Tomb Raider I have the brain of a 60 year old. Oops. Maybe I should leave the house today if only to wake my brain up a bit.

T’was a few nights before Christmas and the sound of my 360’s fans were thankfully drowning out the horrendous seasonal music from the other parts of the house. Engaging my smug mode I sat down ready to play something… anything and then it happened. A horrendous screeching noise from the cream coloured box of gaming pleasures, topped off with a nice cherry coloured flashing set of lights.

Suffice to say that no Christmas song had ever had any of the profanities that followed accompanying it, enough to make old Cliff choke on his mistletoe and wine. I felt a bit like a child who had just had his innocence broken when he was told the big secret behind Father Christmas a few years too early.

My Christmas gaming plans had been thrown into disarray, I was destined to spend the holiday season in Azeroth with a side helping of Team Fortress, not a bad plan by any means but not ‘the’ plan.

Fast forward a few days and come Christmas morning I had a lovely surprise when I opened a present to be greeted by a shining brand new Elite, I was as happy as a Z-list celebrity in a Primark ½ price sale.

So, thanks to my girlfriend and my best mate who went in together to get me the console, my gaming plans were back on track. Throw in half a dozen new games and I’m happy as Larry, whoever Larry is. Even watching movies is a more enjoyable experience, as the audio is no longer over shadowed by its predecessor’s fan system, but the less said about that the better!

I suppose every cloud really does have a silver lining, for me I got myself a new console, for Microsoft they got a new console sale, either way, everyone ends up happy. Now if you excuse me, I’ve got some running to do, jiggies to find, piñatas to entice, civilizations to dominate and some chainsaw duels to partake in.

As unusual as it may sound to anyone who knows me, and maybe some who don’t, I picked up the current issue of Glamour Magazine on Tuesday. Now my main reason for stopping in the WHSmiths to pick up a magazine on my way home from work was because my DS had run out of power on the way to work. I’d already read the newspaper on the way to work so it was magazine time on the way home. My commute is over an hour long and for me that’s way too long to be staring out the window into the dark.

Now before anyone decides to pick on me for buying a girly magazine, Tony I’m looking at you, it’s one of the very few with some substance – more than just a bit of meaningless fashion. I bet you’re wondering what the hell I’m doing posting about girl mags on a gaming site, well I have a good reason and that of course is the gaming contents of the magazine.

There was not one article, not two articles, but three articles on gaming. At first I thought these must be advertisements, but couldn’t find anything that said they were. I can’t tell you how overjoyed I was to find three gaming articles in such a girly magazine. The first was about casual games such as In the Movies and High School Musical on the Xbox 360; the second about the DS and Nintendogs and the third specifically about Lips. All are casual games, but that doesn’t matter. I’ve read in many places that 40% of gamers are females and I’d be willing to bet that most of them are casual gamers.

This is just the beginning. Gaming is moving forward and it looks like the female magazine market is finally realising that gaming isn’t just something that guys do. So girls, time to do a little happy dance for Glamour Magazine seeing the light.