Well, Command & Conquer: Generals arrived yesterday. I really didn’t want to come in to work today. The graphics are very pretty, even on the lowest resolution and detail settings, though animation became jerky on the highest detail setting. Lots of the best bits from previous C&Cs are there, my personal favourite being the fortifying of civilian structures, and the building method has been heavily modified. Now, instead of the central command structure as the source of all buildings you can use roaming bulldozers (or workers) for construction. Providing you have more than one dozer or doozer you should be able to cope with even the destruction of your command post.

I’m still very much a first world war general- get as many units together as possible and throw them at the enemy in the hope that attrition will work in my favour- and that’s working for me so far. However, the ability to use the landscape is greater than in previous versions, so I’m going to start creating bottlenecks and dropping buildings on the enemy.

(I started out as America, and the first mission was to ‘liberate’ Baghdad because the terrorists were in control there and had Weapons of Cool Graphics [sorry, Mass Destruction]. Hmmmmm.)