If for some reason you have not seen what the maps now look like in Battlefield 3 using its FROSTBITE 2 technology then check out the videos below all of which show actual gameplay!

Strike At Karkand
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Gulf Of Oman
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Wake Island
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Sharqi Peninsula
Well I would post a video of this map as it looks but it does not seem like one exists, not an official one from the Battlefield YouTube channel.

For more Battlefield goodies then you can do the following.

Follow on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/Battlefield or via Facebook > http://www.facebook.com/battlefield and you can also visit the OFFICIAL Battlefield website > http://www.battlefield.com

Be sure to take care of your cat’s needs or they may scratch and dig their claws into household furniture items. Relieve their destructive nature by taking them to the cat jungle or buying them a scratching tower. Interact with your cat by teasing them with a laser pointer or even using them as trustworthy ally to hunt down unwanted pests near your home. With The Sims 3 Pets, you can have a pet and be a pet.

Feel free to read more about this announcement and other Forza related items on its official blog. http://forzamotorsport.net/en-us/underthehood1/

This could be down to several reasons, maybe EA have their eyes on a Porsche racing sim or perhaps they just don’t like competing when it comes to racing games anymore? who knows….and if you do then leave a comment below….

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Unique to the Xbox 360 experience and for the first time in The Sims’ history players with Kinect™ can take control of their pets and Sims by voice commands, like telling their Sim to be romantic or feeding their dog.

Players take creativity by the reins and play out the stories they want to tell whether it’s the single guy in the dog park picking up women or the criminal overlord and her evil cat. Across all platforms, The Sims 3 Pets players will be able to create, customize and control over a hundred different kinds of cats and dogs like the Australian Shepherd and the Maine Coon, and can breed and share them with friends providing endless possibilities to create new and exciting breeds. Each platform brings a new world for players to explore from the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions where players will unlock achievements by solving mysteries around town, the Nintendo 3DS with new lots to unlock to the PC/Mac version where they’ll be able to take their pets on play dates or meet other Sims at the dog park, cat jungles and even a horse ranch. With The Sims 3 Pets, players will be able to create, control and play with life with their pets.

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The Sims 3 Pets for Nintendo 3DS takes advantage of the hardware’s built-in pedometer that tracks player’s real life movements. The more a player walks the more Karma Points they earn, which they then can spend to make mischief or give wealth. Using the Nintendo 3DS StreetPass™** function, players can gift pets to other The Sims 3 Pets owners in their proximity.
As the next expansion pack to The Sims 3, the best selling PC game of 2009***, The Sims 3 Pets Expansion Pack for PC/Mac brings the exclusive new opportunity to create, customize and play as horses. Players will be able to use their horses as a form of transportation to get around town and also to raise and train them with activities like racing or jumping hurdles.

Starting today, players will be able to pre-order**** to get the Limited Edition game with exclusives. Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 players will be able to obtain new breeds such as a dog tiger retriever, a dog panda chow, a cat skunk birman as well as other additional pets. PC players will get the exclusive pet store where they’ll be able to meet and mingle with neighborhood Sims and get new and unique objects. For more information on the Limited Editions, please visit www.thesims3.com

Whether the player prefers to customize the newest designer breed or be mischievous with their dog or cat, The Sims 3 Pets gives them the tools to play with life and create the perfect pet. The Sims 3 Pets for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo 3DS and PC/Mac is being developed by The Sims Studio and is not yet rated by the ESRB.

*Requires The Sims 3 for PC/MAC to play
**Owners of The Nintendo 3DS must have installed an in/outbox and played The Sims 3 Pets at least once
***In North America and Europe according to NPD data, Chart-track UK, Gfk France, Gfk Spain, Gfk-MCC Germany and EA internal estimate.
****While quantities last

Let’s get the boring, familiar stuff out of the way first. Rock Band 3 follows the basic gameplay formula that has gone mostly unchanged since the beginning. Notes travel from the top of the screen to the bottom, where you strike/strum to play them. In the career mode, this time divided into “Road Challenges,” you earn stars depending upon how successfully you complete the 83 songs on the game’s setlist. You also earn them by fulfilling objectives assigned at the beginning of each venue’s set. These objectives include note streaks, overdrive deployment (doubles your score multiplier for a brief time), and others. You can also take advantage of the game’s detailed character and band creator, which allows you to build an avatar from a selection of pre-programmed templates. XBOX 360 Virtual rockstars will be sad to know that you still cannot play using your avatar.

Continuing the trend it started with Beatles: Rock Band, Harmonix has included three-part vocal harmonies in RB3, joining the lead and bass guitars, and drums. But the game’s biggest innovation is the debut of keyboard parts. These are played on an authentic, two-octave MIDI-capable keyboard controller. The keys are grouped into color-coded sections, matching the colors of the buttons on the neck of the guitars. When playing in normal mode, you only need to worry about five adjacent keys. But the real challenge of the game lies within it’s Pro Mode.

Pro Mode gives you the closest thing to real musicianship that you can find in the entire genre. The Pro Mode tutorials for each of the instruments (minus the vocals) are a mixture of music theory and actual practice. You are given an exercise and an objective; your job is to play all of the notes in the exercise and complete the objective one time (at full speed) to advance to the next section (a tempo adjustment lets you try the lesson slower so that you can wrap your mind and your fingers around it). If you’ve spent any time with music-game tutorials, you know that they can be tedious at times, but not so here; difficulty starts low and steadily ramps up to almost expert level, and each section has new patterns of notes to play.

The tutorials include no mention of real music notation, the keyboard lessons are designed for the right hand only as you need the left free to deploy overdrive, and there are some music-theory anomalies such as enharmonic misspellings and questionable finger bashing suggestions. Pro Mode is a good start into the world of real musicianship, but eventually you’ll have to find yourself a good teacher to show you the stuff that Harmonix has skipped. Also, the price of admission to this brave new musical world is fairly steep. The current retail prices of the new peripherals runs from around £69.99 for the keyboard from Game to £119 for the wireless Fender Mustang guitar (featuring six rows of tiny rectangular buttons on the neck). The six-string wireless Fender Stratocaster will sell for £69.99 when it hits the site as it is showing it is out of stock. The guitars are both on Game.co.uk from 26th November 2010.

RB3‘s graphics are far the better than any of the music games so far; just pop in any of the other games after spending a few hours with RB3 and you’ll soon notice differences. The setlist is a nice selection of tunes from the 1960s to the present, of which I posted here. I did notice that despite the arrival of the new Keyboard there isn’t much in the way of Road Challenges, since many of the songs have very minimal piano parts, making those five-star scores difficult to achieve. Song repetition in the random setlists is a big problem, as it has been in other games in the series. Surely it couldn’t be too difficult to exclude songs from being selected a second time until the others have been played.

Image from Flickr

An area where you could spend some time is the character creator. It is very well designed, allowing you to change many of your avatar’s facial and body features, but it won’t let you create personal versions of Meat Loaf, Jack Black or Guitar Hero‘s Lars Umlaut (no fat guys allowed). You could have a go at making famous people though as has happened in this YouTube video.

I love these music games, but during their tenure they’ve become stale. Fortunately, Harmonix has stepped up to the plate and delivered a home-run with Rock Band 3. With the addition of Pro Mode and the new instruments, they’ve taken a juvenile concept and forced it to grow up, while retaining all the things that have made the previous games so successful. There are some unfortunate glitches, such as the intrusive in-game graphics; the needless repetition of songs in the career mode. But if you really want to know what it’s like to step up on stage and perform like your favorite bands do, Rock Band 3 gets you closer than any of them.

Online play is sometimes frustrating as you will be sat waiting for anything up to 30minutes and more for someone to “join your party” and that is very bad in my opinion. Then the people that join either just vanish mid-song or before you even get to hit the first note….it’s definitely one to play with friends in your house and I would not expect to get many hours online.

It is hard to score a game like this considering some of its annoying niggles but I’m gonna say 7 out of 10 is fair for this game.

ROCK ON!

If you wish to have a jam with me sometime then get me on PS3.

I must admit I did enjoy being behind the wheel of the Crown Vic and that will probably be my car of choice when it comes to the full game which is to be released later in the month, also if you think its anything like the previous ‘Hot Pursuits’ then you are very much mistaken, in fact it’s like a new game all together. Check out the demo yourself – it’s free, what you got to lose?

The offers up to Christmas will change every week and also do not stop any other offer, clicking the banner will take you to the EA Store where you can check out the various offers.

So whats it like on the console then?

Well previous console versions were ‘ok’ and had only slight elements from the PC versions but this one is very similar to the PC/Mac versions. There is however some annoying things that console versions do not have and these are, the ability to take ingame screenshots and also being able to buy a plot of land and build your own house, you can however alter the current home of your sim there is possibly more but these are the only ones I have found so far.

One of the best things about the PC version is the amount of customisation you can do and this is present in the console versions too…apart from building on an empty lot of course.

If you want to change the fabric of certain things then you can whether it be furniture or clothing almost everything can be tweaked to your liking and then shared via the Sims Exchange so that others can see and download your creations.

More info will be put into the review but so far so good for me!

Steve