Le Tour De France! Cycling at its finest, every year 22 teams go head to head in a gruelling 21 stage ride across the French countryside to find out which team are the ultimate cycling champions! But does this carry over well onto my wonderful Xbox One? Well, I set my gears to max and headed off to find out!

Coming out of Cyanide Studios, who are already well known for their previous outings into the cycling world and other sport based activities (Blood Bowl, anyone?), this title is the second Cycling game onto the new gen consoles (the other, being Le Tour De France 2014). With a recent spat of AAA titles being released into the wild, I can't help but feel that this may of been the wrong time for this to be released, but with its almost niche selling point, I'm also unsure that any other time would of been right.

I jumped straight in, the tutorial is relatively simple which was a breathe of fresh air for someone who can barely remember how to ride a bike (however, its said that it never leaves, I'm willing to test that theory), with a voice over explaining the different terms for non-cyclists and what each appropriate button to press to perform said actions. When climbing, hammering the A button gives the cyclist a attack boost to go up the hill, and when coming back down (my favourite part), the player can adopt an aerodynamic position to gain that extra couple of feet on the opposition. In the flat sections a button can be held to follow an opposition player or a team member, which basically just auto-pilots until you want to take over again or said leader decides to attack and race for the sunset. On top of all this, choosing when to devour some tasty drinks or gels to keep your energy high is also an important part to play (hitting the wall is never fun, in any aspect of life).

At any point when not attacking, the player has a team communications option where you're able to give commands to fellow team mates or take their tiny bodies over completely and ride for them. I feel this is a good move from Cyanide, as holding a button purely to follow an AI for 3-4 minutes on the flat sections can become all rather boring. On top of this, sadly Le Tour De France doesn't look all that appealing, with what felt like huge frame rate hits at times and generally a lacklustre resolution and polish.

There are a few other games modes but not many, with a Pro Team section which is more of the management side, earning money as you participate in your team so that more riders of higher calibre can be hired, ensuring that your managed team are balanced so every situation can be handled. Along with this is a Challenge mode, which is exactly as it sounds, race to the finish as fast as possible.

Overall, if you're into cycling then I've no doubt that this is right up your street, however for anyone who has no real interest in cycling will sadly fall off quite fast, as its repetitive nature and almost grinding from the start feeling didn't leave too much of a mark on my memory. A good continuation for Cyanide, but I can't see it being attractive enough to bring in a wider audience.

If you like my little writings here, you can find me on Twitter right here and if you'd like to put this in your Xbox download queue, you can do so right here.

NB. Sorry there are no pictures with this one, my Xbox One's OneDrive did not want to play fair, sorry!

So I recently dived into a very highly recommended series by Sarah J. Maas, starting with the first book Throne of Glass.

Throne of Glass is a book following Celaena Sardothien the world's best assassin, she is spending a year in the slave mines of Endovier after being betrayed and caught. However the Crown Prince offers her a deal, her freedom in 4 years, if she represents him in a tournament to find the King's champion (aka: personal killing machine). Celaena seems very closed off and not very willing to make friends or allies while she is participating in the tournament but much to her (and everyone else's) surprise she manages to win a few people over, melting her icy heart.

So the only thing I knew about this book was that it was a Young Adult book and this didn't bother me too much as I tend to venture back into various YA books from time to time. Many Booktubers that I watch recommended this one and as the third book comes out in September I thought it would be a perfect time to get involved in the series.

I was pleasantly surprised, I knew I would probably love it because of fantasy elements and I am sucker for books about assassin's, but I didn't realise quite how much I would enjoy it. I ended up reading it in 2 days and found myself completely lost in Sarah J. Maas's world that she had created. There were elements of romance which normally I find quite hard to read as I'm not a romantic person, however they were portrayed in a much less exaggerated way than most YA books.

I found Celaena's character absolutely perfect, she was as badass as they described her, but also had her flaws and vulnerabilities, which proved that she isn't indestructible for the world's most deadly assassin. And we learn that she has also faced her fair share of horrible past times. I found that Maas had made Celaena's character a strong, powerful and independent young lady which is a great protagonist to have for it's target audience. It's not very often I get to read a book about a kickass female assassin anyway...

I loved her attitude towards her love interest in the book, she is sarcastic and not willing to let herself seem venerable to this person, she was very self aware of the situation and what people might have been thinking of her.  I think this is a great way to help the reader get into the mind of Celaena and understand her on a more personal level, just by showing her attitude towards the opposite sex could make the reader apply this into situations they might find themselves in.

I also found myself completely involved with the main storyline, I have not had that 'can't put this book down' feeling since I read American God's last year, and the story within this book really kept me going, a few plot twists were happening at the same time which meant I HAD to stay up way past my bed time and read another 5 chapters. I just fell in love with each and every character in their own way.

I could honestly sit and talk about this book for hours upon hours, I just loved it. I am now making my way through the second book (which will probably only take another few days).

I would recommend this to anyone who may be into fantasy YA books, and if you can bare a slight bit of romance every now and again then pick it up. It's a super cheap book and an excellent easy read, especially in this beautiful heatwave we are having in the UK!

I recently picked up Stardust after falling in love with other Neil Gaiman works, and this novel was just as magical. The setting and pace of the book make me think of christmas, especially those cold winter days when you're tucked up inside with a hot chocolate - so it's a definite re-read for next winter.

In Stardust we follow Tristan Thorn, who lives in a village called Wall which is where we are shown that this is the 'normal' world, and anywhere outside of Wall is the world of Faerie - these two worlds do not meet except from once every few years.

We see Tristan make a promise of finding a 'falling star' to the girl whom he believes is his one true love. Normally people are not allowed to venture outside of Wall until that one fateful day every few years, however Tristan is an exception. And he embarks on his adventure to finding this falling star, meeting various people (and creatures) on his journey and finding out he has a little Faerie inside of him afterall...

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and once again fell in love with Gaiman's magical words, and when people ask me which Gaiman book to start with I will now say this one. I was also pleasantly surprised as to how different this was from the movie - I know I probably shouldn't have watched the movie first. However after reading the book I have now realised that the film did not do it justice at all, the book had this magical feeling throughout and I felt as though you got a much better understanding of Tristan especially.

I found that the underlining love story within the book made it enchanting and gripping, especially as I am not the biggest fan of romance novels. The only thing I can say is if you don't like sex in books, this does have a few explicit sex scenes right at the beginning of the books.

As I said before if you want to fall in-love with Gaiman's wonderfully hypnotic writing, then start with Stardust as it's an easy and wonderful read and will guide you into Gaiman's novels easily.

1.     Mario!

2.     Legend of Zelda

3.     Breaking Bad

4.     Game of Thrones

5.     Harry Potter

6.     Labyrinth

7.     Howl’s Moving Castle

8.     Sailor Moon

9.     Marvel

1.  Science!

It's been a while hasn't it? Well Lauren and I are back! I have now officially finished University so I can have more time to review and get my game on with my video editing.

I wanted to firstly give you guys a bit of an overview of our time at MCM, now I just want to start by telling you that I took hardly any pictures because I forgot to bring a spare battery and I spent lots of time impulse buying and hugging all of the fabulous people I'd met.

Once again the event was overbooked for the Saturday, you think the event planners would have had a bit of an inkling by now and either changed their venue or just stopped selling tickets after a while - however the layout was much more manageable this year, and easy to navigate.

I spent lots of time at the Insert Coin Clothing stand helping those guys out and making sure I flaunted some of their awesome clothes. However there were some really niché stools there this time, which were selling some awesome handmade JRPG bits and pieces (I may have over-spent...lots).

So rather than doing a formal blog post for this event I thought I'd just post some pictures myself and Lauren had taken throughout the day on Saturday as we spent lots of time just wandering around the Hello Kitty stand...

As a massive fan of simulation games, dating and drag queens how could I possibly refuse to review this masterpiece?

All credit for images go to Playstation

One of my most raved about games of the past 4 years is Bastion, when Supergiant Games announced they were bringing it to PS4 I obviously jumped at the chance to play through it one last time...or three.

I was fortunate enough to spend last week juggling University paperwork alongside a very interesting paper based game brought to us by Dissident Logic...

So we forgot we had a spare Final Fantasy XV demo code until today, and we would love to share it with a lucky couple of people who haven't had a chance to get their hands on one! We have a code for both PS4 and Xbox One.



Make sure you leave either an email address or twitter handle that we can contact you on, and good luck Kupo!

As most of you seemed to love my Ghibli addiction last year, I have decided to show you my most recent tattoo, a Ghibli mural piece (mainly Miyazaki films)

If you buy Disney DVDs, Blu-rays or games you should definitely check out Disney Movie Rewards.

If you are interesting in Mystery Boxes full of geeky swag then check out my Zbox Unboxing for February.

It is an awesome box, and my Youtube channel is full of different Mystery Boxes on the market if this one doesn't tickle your fancy.