Just Cause 2 is in a different league. It has a lot of similarities - set on a tropical island where you take over enemy strongholds - but it's much bigger, more varied and is pretty funny in places. There's a GTA / Crackdown vibe to it. One of my favourite games ever.

Sorry about that, the Fallout 4 comment made me assume you'd finished it - it's a pretty old game. The story is so appalling, I've never considered it spoiler-worthy. I'll be more considerate in future.

You've got to be kidding! I thought Far Cry 3 was an utter turd of a game. There's only one type of mission. Once you've attacked one base, you've basically seen them all. Sniper rifle, pick them off from a distance, finished. Stupid regional accents - why do half the islanders talk like Kiwis? And why can't you go on a murderous rampage? If you run over about three civilians, the game *kills you* for being naughty. The main character is a whiny little shitbag and all his friends are scum. The only decent character - the mohawk dude - you kill in a ridiculous dream sequence. And the final boss fight is a quicktime event. Also, the two worst endings ever. Honestly, it's just a weedy, fun-free rip-off of Just Cause 2. That's 10 times the game Far Cry 3 is.

If you build a big sewage plant there, I'll happily divert Rhodes's toilets directly into Shebby's backwaters. Rhodes is powered entirely by wind and has just made its first million.

City is going pretty well. I called it Rhodes, so it will either be a shining beacon in the region or I'll fill it full of criminals and let them burn it to the ground, depending on how things go this summer.

Sent you a friend request

Sure, I'd be up for that. I've got a region on the Europe West 6 server called Summer Mill Valley that has a lot of empty sites already, but if you want to start a fresh one, let me know where to find it. How about basing it on the new Edgewater region? I haven't tried that, and it looks like all 7 cities there can interact.

There's some cool stuff in it. I saw one guy who had a little bubble over his head saying he was going to kill somebody, so I followed him all the way to the crime scene. He was inside for an awfully long time, but when he came out the deed had been done. The neighbours started moving out, so I demolished all of their houses and built a crime HQ in memory of the unfortunate victim. Definitely too small, though. I want that entire area for my city, not a little piece of it. I wouldn't mind trying the theme park DLC but I have nowhere to put it, besides starting yet another new mini-city. Didn't they fix the water table problem? I'm sure I read that it now gets replenished by rivers and rain, but haven't played for a while as I've become hopelessly addicted to World of Tanks.

I've got it. Pretty good, really. The high-tech money-making city in my region had a bit of a mishap with a nuclear power station, so now it's gone all brown and radioactive and I can't fix it. I've also got a casino city that loses huge sums of money each day, a filthy city set up specifically as a giant landfill site, a woodland city that's quite nice but is currently being strip-mined for ore, and an oil-rich city that exports murderers to the rest of the region. Shame the cities can't be bigger. I'd like to have all that in one single area, but instead you have to split it all up because you run out of space so quickly. Also the cities only interact with each other in groups of four, so if you build one in the wrong 'block' (as I did) then it can't share resources with the others.

Fair enough. I was just a bit disappointed with the article as it's little more than a summary of a couple of old Daily Mail stories, and I don't think it does the front page any favours. There's original research and punchy comment in various threads on here that is more deserving of promotion.

That's properly weak. It can't be from a professional writer. It's basically an extra long forum post, and not a particularly insightful one. The only sentence worth picking out, on Shebby's MGP 'pensioner' comment: "The fans did not take well to this callous remark over one of their most committed players." Seriously? I thought people had been calling for MGP to be axed for years.

PC / Mac owners, try Surgeon Simulator 2013 on Steam. It just had me crying with laughter, it's so ridiculous. You control a hand, using the mouse to move it around and five keys to open and close the fingers. It's like trying to pick things up when you're absolutely wasted, except here you've got to grab surgical instruments and open people up to do operations. During a heart transplant, after accidentally injecting myself with anaesthetic, I managed to hack my way down to what I assumed was the correct organ. I gave it a good yank and out came the patient's liver, so I draped it over his face for safe keeping while I went back in. Second time I got a lung, which I dropped on the floor (butterfingers) and the guy eventually died of blood loss while I was trying to retrieve my wristwatch from inside his chest cavity. It's the only game I've seen where there's an achievement for giving somebody a neckscarf made of his own intestines. Loads of Youtube videos of it, it's well worth watching and even funnier to play.

Well, I suppose 16 fps is basically unplayable. The 660 should be pretty good. A massive difference from the 520 anyway! I only got the 670 because I was looking at upgrading my 2004 vintage iMac, and had budgeted for a new one of those. But then Apple decided to glue the case together so you can't ever upgrade the RAM or hard drive, and remove the disc drive so I can't copy all the CDs I buy to iTunes. So for the price of a new iMac I got a much higher spec PC, installed Mac OSX on it, and there's the added bonus of being able to run Windows games now.

What kind of card have you got? Even if you switch everything off I don't think you're missing out on much. As far as my two runs of the benchmark go, I wasn't exactly amazed by how it looked on Ultra or shocked by how it was on very low. It has that familiar Unreal Engine look - it's definitely not something like Crysis, where you get a huge increase in quality (and hardware requirements) when you turn up the settings. It just gets a bit sharper and less jaggy.

It's about the same as an Xbox cost when they were new, and a lot less than a PS3 was, so not exactly outrageous when you consider it outperforms a PS4. That's how I justify it to myself anyway. Bioshock finally unlocked but now it's too late to play. I ran the benchmark utility though and it averaged 65 fps on 'Ultra DX11 with diffusion depth of field' at 1920x1200 resolution. edit: Just tried it on 'very low' settings at the same resolution and it still looks great (218 fps) so it's not a game that's going to require a graphics card upgrade. I'm totally enjoying this PC gaming thing - never owned one before, the last games computer I had was an Amiga.

I can vouch for the GTX 670 as a good graphics card. I've got one of those and it runs Sim City really nicely on maximum settings, plus almost anything else I've thrown at it. Battlefield 3 gets 60 fps with everything except antialiasing maxed out. There's the odd exception. Arma 2 - that's 25 fps and it looks terrible. Also the preorder bonus for Bioshock Infinite was a copy of Bioshock 1, and it barely runs. When it doesn't crash on launch, it's maybe 5 fps. Probably a Windows 8 problem rather than anything to do with the hardware.

I loved the first one but wasn't so keen on Bioshock 2. Protecting the Little Sisters, you set up traps and stuff, then the first wave of enemies would set them all off and it would be a plain old gunfight. Plus, despite being supposedly the one thing in Rapture that nobody messes with, there's no feeling of power. You're basically as weak as the human character in Bioshock 1. Bioshock 2 was made by a different developer though. Infinite should be better, I hope. It's preloaded on Steam now, just sitting there, taunting me.

Anyone tried the new Sim City? Loads of people have been having problems connecting to the servers, and there's been an internet keanstorm about how evil EA is for forcing people to play online and messing up the launch, but... It's brilliant! It's digital crack. The idea of Sim City always appealed to me more than the reality, as in previous games I'd run out of money or get bored, but this is loads of fun and really easy to get into. I've logged about 20 hours on it since Saturday. Last night it wouldn't load my save, which was a bit of a bugger, but that's the only thing that saved me from wasting another evening in front of the computer. It was all up and running again this morning, and I've spent most of the day at work thinking about improvements to the four cities I've got on the go. If anyone's interested in this, there are lots of free slots in my region and I am currently exporting crude oil, computer chips and murderers.

I hated Far Cry 3. Despite being an 'open world' game, the missions are highly scripted, and if you don't play the exact way the game wants you to do it, you fail the mission and the game reloads the last checkpoint (very, very slowly - there is a lot of staring at loading screens). You can't just go anywhere you want to blow off steam, like in GTA. One time I started setting villagers on fire, which was mildly amusing, but then the game decided I was having too much fun so it killed me and reloaded the last checkpoint. Every character - particularly the main one - is utterly hateful. I wanted them all to die. I think I chose the 'bad' ending, so at least I sort of got my wish there. Probably didn't help that I was playing the Xbox version, which is technically appalling. The framerate is so bad, it's like a slideshow. There's a bit where you have to swim to a ship, which you can see a little way off shore, but if you zoom in to see how many men are guarding it, it just vanishes. I honestly don't know why people raved about this game - it's a big-budget turd.

Brilliant interview in the Guardian today. Really hope he wins. http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/sLkyXaCyVM0ne3RtcOrYA_w/view.m?id=15&gid=sport/2012/nov/23/ricky-hatton-vyacheslav-senchenko&cat=most-read

What was it that happened after the Pacquiao defeat to make him retire in the first place? Fair enough, he was horribly exposed and took a pretty brutal beating, but he'd still be a big draw in Manchester against lesser fighters. There was a lot of talk at the time about how he should quit for the sake of his health and never fight again. Strange how he could go from being so highly rated to having people worry about him getting killed or whatever after just a couple of defeats.

Man alive, some of the puzzles in Fez are ridiculous. Most of the alphabet stuff I've seen so far is pointless ('good food', 'watch out for black holes') but I found an area with a word puzzle, and the answer, well, it's so obscure I could have spent a million years hammering away at it and never got there. Looked it up on the internet and I still don't get how you're supposed to figure it out on your own, and neither can the people who answered the question on gaming forums. They're all speculating, 'well, maybe it's this or maybe it's that'. I think the developer must have released the answer somewhere because nobody could have got it on their own. I might just have had enough of this game.

The dog and fox is the hint. Don't know how much of a spoiler you want, but it's a well-known phrase involving them and using every letter of the alphabet...

Hey, I just figured out the alphabet! In a small area with a fox and a dog. This game keeps getting better, really enjoying it.

I don't know how you're supposed to do all that stuff like decipher the codes and maps, but the platform stuff is great. I enjoy making it all click into place. It's the kind of game Nintendo might have made if they were still any good.