Click here to listen to the Replay show.

We also took time to revisit Sensible World of Soccerand look back at some of the video gaming highlights of 2004.

I’d had several aborted attempts at playing Dead Rising before, as I picked it up a few years ago when I bought my first 360. Each time I was thwarted by what I thought was a pretty daft save system.

I kept on re-rolling my character and trying again but each attempt followed the same pattern. I’d get to a point pretty early on in the story where I’d either die helping Brad fight the boss in the food court or I’d complete that section and then die before I got back to a save point. The convicts riding round in their machine gun equipped jeep were responsible for an annoying amount of deaths.

It’s only after revisiting the game for Replay that it’s finally clicked with me. The feature of being able to salvage the experience from my aborted playthrough and roll it back into a new character helped ease me back into the game, as did just focussing on following the main story path, at first, rather than wandering off to follow every scoop I was presented with.

But the main thing that helped me enjoy the game was chilling out and not trying to do everything perfectly; treating the playthrough as an experience and going with the flow, rather than constantly reloading and doing each section again and again, trying to nail it spot on.

It was only then that I realised how great the save system actually is. When your health is critically low and you’re escorting a group of survivors it really makes you make the hard choices. Do you stop and try and help out the survivor that’s been swamped by zombies, risking all of your progress since you last saved, or do you leg it to the nearest save point and save your own skin? Do you desperately try and save every one of a group of survivors, or are you satisfied with a loss or two along the way as long as the majority make it out alive?

If you could save whenever you wanted then you just wouldn’t experience these choices, or the situations certainly wouldn’t be as tense. The save system doesn’t add anything to the story missions (which still should’ve included some decent check-pointing) but it does add an awful lot to the experience of surviving in the mall.

I’m glad I managed to learn to like the game. Although I messed up the story, in my Replay playthrough, I still made it to the end of the game and I’m looking forward to revisiting the title in the future to try and improve on my performance.

Click here to listen to the Replay show.

We also took a quick look through some of the games released in 2001 and went through the nominations for March’s Replay (Rainbow Six Vegas, Bully and The Club)

If you’d like to get involved in TGS Replay next month then pop along to The Gamer Scene Forums.

Click here to listen to the Replay show.

We also find time to share our gaming highlights of the year 2000 and make the nominations for February’s game of the month.

My game of 2000 was Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. A strange choice, perhaps, considering the other possible contenders but it’s a game I look back fondly on as being both a decent first person shooter and also a effective (and different) use of the Star Trek license. My nomination for February’s Replay game was Overlord. I don’t think it’s got much of a chance this time round.

If you’d like to get involved in TGS Replay next month then pop along to The Gamer Scene Forums.

Click here to listen to the Replay show.

We had a lot of fun recording the podcast and reminiscing about the days of tape cassettes and rubber keyboards. My choices for the trip down memory lane were The Hobbit, Head Over Heels and The Great Escape.

You can find out details of how to play all the games we chose and can post your comments in the 8-Bit retro section of The Gamer Scene forums.

(MP3 Download)

As well as the Replay game of the month we also spent quite a bit of time talking about the development of the Tiger Woods series of games and Nintendo’s Wii Motion Plus.

If you’d like to vote for your preferred game and play along with the Replay crew next month, pop along to the CrankyGamersUK.com forums.

(MP3 Download)

My nomination for next month’s replay game was Marvel Ultimate Alliance although I’d be quite happy to check out Xan’s choice of Oblivion’s Knights of the Nine DLC and also Dit’s Test Drive Unlimited selection. Anything except Call of Duty 2!

If you’d like to vote for your preferred game and play along with the Replay crew next month, pop along to the CrankyGamersUK.com forums.

The focus of the show was on the PS3. I was a big fan of the Playstation 2 (it was my first console!) and, like many people, I can’t help but be disappointed with Sony’s performance selling and marketing the Playstation 3. It’s a brilliant piece of kit but they just haven’t pushed it as well as they could’ve. As a person more interested in “casual” titles, I’m particularly annoyed at how they’ve let Nintendo come along and steal the market they built up with the PS2. Those are the type of things we talked about on the podcast.

It was a great experience recording with Xan and Sinan but I ended up but feeling a little disappointed in my performance. That’s not a comment made in an attempt to receive reassuring complements, it’s just a realisation that, as someone who is self-employed working from home, I no longer spend a lot of time involved in deep, weighty discussions where I need to organise my thoughts and formulate my opinions as I’m talking. It’s something that I need more practise at and get back doing again as it was a key skill in my former line of work. It’s quite nice to realise these sort of things in a stress-free hobby situation.

Anyway, enough of the self-analysis… If you want to listen to two interesting blokes (and me!) discuss Sony and the PS3, pop along to Sinan’s You Have Lost! site and download the podcast. Please remember that we are all PS3 owners who love our consoles and there is a limit of just how much you can mention in an hour long show.