Greetings. I hope you are well on this fine Sunday evening (if you’re in New Zealand, of course. If you’re not in New Zealand it’s probably Saturday or Sunday morning.)

This week has been a pretty good one, highlight by a trip to Auckland on Friday to play some of the Gears of War 3 single-player campaign. I got a chance to play it for two and half hours but alas, that’s all I can say. There’s an embargo on talking about it in detail until August 16, so you’ll have to wait until then to hear my thoughts on it.

In anticipation of Gears of War 3 I’m doing what I often do when the second (or third) game in a series is near – play through the previous installment again just to get a feel for the controls and re-acquaint myself with the story. At the moment I’m up to the bit where Dom and Marcus have to investigate the research facility that has lots of wretches wandering about and has razor hail outside. Time permitting, I’ll get it finished before Gears of War 3 is launched in September – and I’ll pick some of the achievements I missed first time around.

I’ve also been replaying a little bit of EA’s Mirror’s Edge and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet on XBLA – a strange game that is hard to describe so I won’t but it involves a little dude in a flying saucer who has to fight his way through a black planet that has tentacles.

This morning I recorded the Well Played podcast with Julie Gray, Aylon Herbet, Siobhan Keogh and Chris Leggett, so that’ll probably be up tomorrow or Tuesday. I’ll let you know when it’s good to go. It was a good lively discussion today, which is always a good thing.

I’m in talks with Sony at the moment to see if I can get interviews with someone from Insomniac about Resistance 3 and someone from Naughty Dog about Uncharted 3. I’ve got my fingers crossed for those.

That’s about it: it’s pretty quiet for full-priced games at the moment so it’s good to be able to play some older games  before the new ones start landing. Good evening to you.