Below is my buying the [Chef's Hat] off Derek how exciting! Hi Derek how are you doing?

Now at long last I can wear my new silly hat in raids, and show everyone how much low level rubbish food I can cook, and more importantly how quickly I can do it.

What did you expect me to start pumping out Fish Feasts? Damn those things are expensive and time consuming to get the ingredients, too pricy for this Night Elf.

Below is me proudly wearing my new hat over the frozen wastes of Northrend.

What's next? Well that goofy looking Kalu'ak fishing rod of course! Only 22100 odd more reputation to go.

By making URLs out of corpses. Sigh.

New features:

Walk through highly detailed submarines in the new first-person view and access every part of your U-boat.

Interact with your crew, watch them perform their daily jobs and experience the tension and fear inside the U-boat through the new advanced order system.

Choose your own strategy and select your targets with a new objective-driven, dynamic campaign.

Open new locations, upgrades and resupply possibilities, while the Allied ships adjust dynamically to your approach. Your actions will directly impact the evolution of the campaign.

Prowl the waters with a brand-new user interface. Now, every beginner can successfully command a sub while remaining free of confusion. In expert mode, experienced players will be provided all the necessary information and controls to command the sub completely on their own.

Experience the most realistic and immersive Silent Hunter ever created. Improved environment graphics create a powerful level of immersion as you operate authentic, highly detailed U-boats and fight against surface ships.

Let's hope they don't make it too arcadey so any monkey can play. I would embed a trailer, but until they have a trailer where the crew are speaking German, not English with a bad American accent there's no point.

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.