It took six attempts to get the install to work off the discs when I tried about 2 hours ago. You'd run the installer from the disc, Steam would throw an error saying its too busy to handle the request, and the installer would die. Upon checking the 'My Games' tab you'd see Empire Total War trickling down from Steam, not from the disc.

To sort this out, exit Steam, and re-run the installer from the disc and select the re-install option - if Steam throws another error about being too busy try it again. You'll need have a patch to download from Steam but that isn't too big.

Trying it on my second machine 30 minutes ago was a bit better, Steam again said it was too busy but upon the second attempt the install worked properly, so it looks like the servers are getting a bit better.

Why bother? Installing from the discs is faster than downloading 15GB off Steam, which at the current rate would takes days...

Like previous Total War games this feels a bit glitchy - in fact it has crashed once.  Load times are also a bit on the long side.  Performance other than that seems great, runs flawlessly at 1920x1200 here with the detail maxed out (Windows 7, Core 2 Duo @ 2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM, Radeon 3870) and yes the game looks stunning.

The demo has one land battle, the Battle of Brandywine Creek of 1777, which historically takes place on the British march to Philadelphia.  But also, best of all features naval battles hurrazz!  Again only one in the demo, the Battle of Lagos in 1759 during the Seven Years War.  In both battles you play as Great Britain, I've heard quite a few of our separatist friends complaining about that already.

Impressions: good easily up there with the previous games in the Total War series and already I have to say better than Medieval 2 (no matter how cool slaughtering King Harold in 1066 was).  But I'm a little worried about the AI.  After attempting to send my cavalry a couple of miles down river to flank the rebel's artillery and seeing them completely wiped out by infantry hiding in the woods (argh) you might of expected me to lose, after all sending my infantry in, across a river, against dozens of 16 pound guns in a very well defended position doesn't sound too clever.  But for some reason the AI sent their infantry out to attack mine, which were already nicely formed up and positioned behind a hill to try and avoid their artillery.  So for some reason the AI shot themselves in the foot and basically wiped out most of their forces.  So yes - the AI is still questionable.

The biggest addition is of course naval battles!  We've not had naval battles in a computer game like this, ever.  There's literally no comparison.  Although there's less strategy involved then the land battles you do need to keep an eye on things, such as the wind direction as I've lost one battle by allowing my fleet to break up too much, and the French picked off the few stragglers before I could turn my ships around and get back there as the wind was against me, other than that all you need to worry about is keeping your guns facing the enemy ships - but this is where I have a problem, the ships turn way too fast, which means you don't get penalised as much for screwing up as you can get your ships back into position too fast.

To sum up, despite my niggling issues I have with it this game is looking to be fantastic, easily up there as a potential game of the year.  Now I just have to wait a week and a half for the full game to be released.

War rages throughout our lands. Only the bravest heroes dare strike the Horde where it hurts them most. You are among such heroes.

The blows you have delivered to the leadership of the Horde will open the door for our final assault. The Horde will bow down to the might of the Alliance.

Your deeds will not go unrewarded. Ride on proudly!

-- Your King

One Black War Bear for my troubles.

For those wondering - we encountered virtually no Horde resistance, at least none that could slow us down as we stormed through all the Horde capital cities.

Fact: Windows Vista on launch was around 5-10% slower than Windows XP for gaming, this was largely due to video drivers not being as mature.

10% isn't even noticeable, I'd happily trade 10% for video drivers which don't take out the entire system when they crash thanks to them running in User Mode in Windows Vista instead of Kernel Mode like they do in Windows XP.

Fact: That gap was closed months ago, and now in many benchmarks Windows Vista is faster.

From ExtremeTech:

They also benchmarked World in Conflict, where the two were dead level.

Conclusion: there's no difference, and if somebody wants to get picky and argue Windows XP must be faster, kindly point them in the direction of some benchmarks.

So I've got a few suggestions, I hope Viacom love looking through my history, they'll see that I enjoy some good World of WarCraft videos now and again.

Let's start off with World of Offline Gaming, Christmas Time in Dun Morough, Leroy Jenkins, WoW player scolded by parents over Ventrilo, FUNNY Real-Person world of warcraft and of course finally the Rise of the Dragonstar guild's official Alterac Valley battlesong.

If you've got any other suggestions you can use to flood people's viewing histories, feel free to make them below.

In a study recently published in Cyberpsychology & Behavior it was found that out of 1,347 games of Unreal Tournament 2004 (not pictured above), the red team won 55% of the time. Mihai Moldovan a neuroscientist at the University of Copenhagen, hypothesises that the colour red is a psychological distracter, at least for men.

I must say I am somewhat disappointed, here was me thinking the last 10-15 years of my gaming life I was undefeatable, now I know it was all because I chose red - my favourite colour back in the old days.

Although saying that, it would seem to me that the opposite should be true in strategy games (which I probably play the most), as you would be looking at your own bases/cities/units etc more often than your opponents. I'd be interested to see any follow up research looking at a strategy game.

I think it's time to bind "I played red before we knew they won more you noobs" to a key, and find out a way to paint my armour red in World of WarCraft - well that's not likely, but at least my guild tabard is mostly red.

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT? The Moon!!!!! Ahhh Jesus.

For us to see the Earth facing side of the Moon completely illuminated, it must be opposite the Sun in the sky. In daytime like this picture shows it is impossible to have the Moon fully illuminated.

In reality the Full Moon will be rising just as the Sun is setting and vice versa - opposite positions in the sky.

So here's the Moon a little later on, and if we look at the compass in the bottom-left of the display we see the Moon hasn't moved a sodding inch in the sky. Despite the fact the Sun has now clearly moved below the horizon.

Next thing I look for is an accurate sky, I was expecting the stars to be thrown randomly into the sky if they couldn't be bothered simulating the Moon properly, I must say I was pleasantly surprised. Here's Cassiopeia, Perseus a quick look around the sky and everything else seems to be in order.

Well until I realised that Polaris is directly overhead. *bangs head on desk*

Now I'm led to believe by this game that I'm on an island in the South China Sea. I would expect Polaris to hang around near the horizon. Polaris being directly overhead means this island, this lush tropical island is set at the North Pole. Then of course if you're at the North Pole why is the sun even setting in the summer? It should remain above the horizon the entire day doing a lap around the sky, and vice versa in the winter.

I was looking forward to seeing some of the southern skies I never get to see in real life, now the stars I see is what I'm stuck with, being at the North Pole means they'll never rise, nor set, that and this big ball called the Moon which hovers over the same spot of the Earth will seemingly always annoy me.

How are they going to explain this? The aliens have teleported this island to the North Pole, yet somehow my funky GPS map thing shows me as being where I'm supposed to be, that the aliens have altered the climate of this island and that they've attached the Moon to the top of a really tall tower on the Earth and put a light bulb inside of it so it!

Yeah right!!!

I have a suggestion for Crytek or EA, I recommend you employ me as your astronomy and/or science advisor on your future projects. Technically speaking it wouldn't take a lot of work to correct this.

You'd need to attach the sky and the Moon to the same thing which makes the Sun move, and move the Moon opposite the Sun, or change its phase to a more accurate one. I would settle for that.

However this wouldn't be accurate for very long (using the in-game binoculars you could spot that the Moon isn't moving properly against the background stars in an hour or two game time). Unless of course you model the Moon's orbit around the Earth properly, which wouldn't take much, and if you're going to do that you might as well model the Earth's motion around the Sun too, that will allow the background stars to move against the Sun as they should do too over the course of a year.

Flight Simulator has been doing this stuff correctly for as long as I can remember. I expect Crysis, one of the best games ever to do the same, this totally ruined the game for me! :-(

In addition to my review on Gamercast I have to add: If you're buying Crysis to use as a sky simulator or an astronomy program I have to strongly recommend against this, there are other freeware applications out there which do a far better job.

I'm getting it patched up to date, just in case I cannot resist any longer. I'll have to play with Dudeanov, as my new main character (can't remember his name) is married to Catlyn, and he isn't allowed to go out without her.

Details page about it, it comes with 13 liveries, covering things like the US Coast Guard, RAF, and the Tokyo Police.

This is me trying to fly the thing over Yeovil, quite an easy helicopter to handle; it doesn't fly all over the place seemingly uncontrollable like the light weight Jet Ranger which came with Flight Simulator X. Saying that though, I still crash-landed on my first attempt.

Another notable addition is the Boeing F/A-18, which as far as I can remember is Flight Simulator's first (at least in over a decade) high-performance military aircraft. But no you can't actually shoot down the civilian air traffic with it, but you can try and land on an aircraft carrier.