Oh Mickey, you're so fine, you're so fine, you blow my mind.

Where to start? Well, if I said that the last week had been a good gaming week for me, I'd be lying through my teeth. It started off well, with my re-discovery of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which has eaten up about 12 hours of time that I should have spent sleeping this week. I have played Oblivion before, about three times from start to finish actually, so I thought I'd mix things up a little this time. Playing as a Khajiit, an anthropomorphic cat for those who haven't played the game yet (although you really should, it's a very likely candidate for the best game ever made), I've taken it upon myself to make it my goal to hunt and kill every Argonian (lizard people, and historical enemies of the Khajiit) in the game world, after they've served any purpose they might have that is.

Aside from that, this is the first time I've tried playing the game with Light Armour, and only the second time using swords, as I usually go for heavy armour and axes or (my favourite) warhammers. And it's my first time out of the dungeon that I wasn't in the shoes of an Elf too, so a lot of the game is fresh to me this time. But that's the high point of the week over right there.

After the surprisingly great ObsCure, I was eager to fire up ObsCure II on the Wii, and was appalled. None of the atmosphere had survived, the creepy post-Gothic feeling of the original's high school setting had been replaced by a college frat house full of asshole stereotype douchebags with absolutely disgusting voice actors that they must have scraped up off the street. I commented on how Sum 41's 'Still Waiting' failed to set the scene in the first one, but the opening music to ObsCure II (god knows what it was) was comically inappropriate, actually cheerful sounding.

Then you get thrown into the gameplay, and the erratic animation combined with the standard sketchy-at-best Wii controls that make any attempt at a serious game (bar Resident Evil 4) a chore make the game virtually unplayable. The writers seem to have forgotten that our heroes found a cure for their infection at the end of the first game, because now they are having to take medicines to stop it spreading. Also, none of the returning characters look, sound or behave as they did before (our hero Stan has even stopped talking like Vanilla Ice), showing yet more lack of attention by the developers. And after a bad nightmare sequence that shamelessly ripped off Silent Hill and a run-in with the game's very first enemies who can tear about a third of your health away with one hit, it wasn't long before I switched it off. If I ever find it for a decent price on the PS2, I might be tempted to have a go at it with a normal controller, but as it stands I'm just not interested enough to put myself through it.

So I moved on to this week's main event, the infamous Rogue Warrior on the PS3. Rogue Warrior is a supposed true story based on the autobiography of former Navy Seal commander (and tourette's sufferer, if the game is anything to go by) Dick Marcinko. I'm not going to skirt around things here, this game is BAD. But it's not insultingly bad, like Haze, it's laugh-out-loud, piss-hilarious bad. I suppose, if you'd spend £40 on it, then it would be a bit of a kick in the balls, but I only spent £14.99 (I can only imagine how bad the person who sold it to Cash Converters felt, he can't have gotten more than a tenner for it less than a month after it was released. I hope for his sake he stole it).

I'm going to start with the script. Dick, voiced by muscular pensioner Mickey Rourke, must have said about 4 or 5 words before his first 'fuck' broke through, and then never looked back. Apart from the D-grade military action movie jargon I think I heard one line of F-bomb free dialogue in the whole game, and that was a reference to cunnilingus. At one point, close to death, Dick descended into one long, uninterrupted swear word, which went something like "fucknshitbastardcommiemotherfuckinfuck". That's quality writing right there. From his voice, you get the feeling that Mickey's heart wasn't really in it. But you also get the feeling that half of the expletives weren't actually on the script too.

Right, gameplay time. Rogue Warrior is a standard FPS, one man versus the whole of North Korea and the Soviet Union type of affair. It's cover system is like a happy marriage between Killzone 2 and Gears of War, and it feels great until you reload. If you leave cover half way through reloading, the action is cancelled. It's okay though, there's no reason to leave cover, because the enemies will just stroll over and stand at the other side of whatever you're hiding behind, happily firing round after round into the bulletproof barrier, allowing you to use blindfire and just poke your gun over the top and kill him without even aiming.

The enemies take cover too though, and I actually saw one throw a grenade at the cover he was hiding behind, resulting in the explosive bouncing right back and landing in his lap. So it's no surprise that Kim Jong Il's finest pose very little threat to you throughout the game. The only problem comes with the Shotgun carriers, who defy the laws of the world by being able to shoot the hairs off a flea's back at 200 yards. Attention to detail, nothing is spared.

Like with The Punisher on the PS2, I tended to favour the melee kills, which are triggered by moving close to an enemy and pressing the X button. This sends the camera out to a third person view so you can admire you suitably brutal finisher, ranging from turning an enemy's gun on himself to slitting his throat, to the frankly worrying move involving sticking your knife up a poor communist's arsehole. The mind boggles.

It's hard to imagine, that with the publisher of Fallout 3 and the developer of Rogue Trooper and Aliens vs. Predator, that an FPS with such a rich upbringing could go so wrong. Whoever thought it would be a great idea to let people play as a demolitions expert (the game's main aim is to plant explosives on missiles) was sorely mistaken. And who decided that 2 and a half hours was an adequate lifespan of a game was frankly insane. But at least it made me laugh.

And that's about it. I had a quick go on Madworld the other day, and it didn't really grab me. The visuals are headache inducing (reminding me of pictures I used to draw as a child, where I would only colour in the blood), and it seems to me that they had tried to come up with a valid storyline involving terrorists at the start of the game, but then abandoning it and leaving the cutscene in. One minute the president is addressing the nation over a terrorist attack and promising to send in a special agent, the next you're in a violent Running Man style game show. Then it's just hitting people until the game over screen. I'll have another go, but I don't predict I'll fall for it. Speaking of falling for things, I tried the Just Cause 2 demo last night, and I think I'll be bringing the full game home on the 26th. Even though I loved the original, for some reason I wasn't expecting much from the sequel, but was very pleasantly surprised. Gives me something to look forward to.

Check back next week for the DLC special!