Santa’s checking his gaming list

Battlefield 4 + Premium membership

I have been playing shooter games forever, from Star Wars Battlefront 2 and Halo all the way to Counter-strike and Call of duty. The battlefield series has always interested me, and I almost splashed out for Battlefield 3. However I either never seemed to have the money or time and therefore my time to play this seemingly awesome game had passed. Yet with the release of Battlefield 4, the next instalment in this series, major steps forward seem to have been taken and an improvement of an already good game. With levolution, updated graphics and generally sick maps, this looks like a shooter I would really enjoy, but at a combined value of £80, this bundle is quite an investment. If I had enough money, this would be first thing I would buy, on the other hand you never know might actually just get this game if I save up enough!

Alienware 18

If I had more money than sense, this would be the gaming laptop I would go for. Alienware is known to be one of the best manufacturers of gaming laptops (if a bit on the pricey side), and use some of the best ingredients for their products. Costing about £4,000, the Alienware 18 includes a full 1080p 18’’ screen, 2 Nvidia GTX 780M (one of the best GPU’s on the market at the moment, 32GB of RAM, the list just goes on. Everything that is considered the best on the market. Every game you could think of, this game could run it very comfortable on the ultra graphics settings and not drop below 60 frames per second. Using the Alienware 18 would make playing any game an absolutely great experience. Also, that lighting doesn’t look half bad, now does it!

Planetary Annihilation

I myself am quite an avid strategy gamer. Being the first genre of games I really played intensively, I have gone through all kinds of variations on the tried and tested approach. Therefore this game, which has been on my steam wish list for quite a long time, seems like exactly the kind of game I would enjoy. However for 40 (at some points actually 80) pounds, I find this would be a bit much to spend on an unknown quantity regardless of its apparent epicness. Furthermore at the moment it is in Beta, meaning it could be buggy. The risk is just too high that I’m throwing a significant amount of money down the drain for me to really warrant purchasing it. However if money was not an issue, this would be one of the games I would totally go for.

Astro Gaming A50 Wireless Headset

Audio is a very important aspect of gaming. In fact the quality of your headset can be the deciding factor between you hearing your opponents footsteps and killing him, or him sneaking up on you and knifing you! This is indeed true for shooters and other online games, however even for other single-players games, the atmosphere that excellent quality music and sound is paramount to a great gaming experience. For my choice of Headset I go for the A50s, which are 300 pounds a pop, but make up for the price impressively. Dolby 7.1 surround sound and wireless just make these puppies a joy to use, and should make any audiophile drool. Also they not just limited gaming, and make great general use headphones. So if I was crapping gold, this is one of the first things i would buy!

CS:GO Box Keys

If I had an absolutely enormous amount of money, and really couldn’t care less, I would buy about a thousand CS:GO keys. A quick explanation of what they are: if you play a round on CounterStrike there is a random chance that you are assigned a box of loot, which you can only open if you buy a key. Within these boxes they have some absolutely epic decals and skins for some of your most common guns. They do not add anything to the game play, except for the visuals of your gun change, which if you are dominating make you feel that extra bit more like a badass. However at 1.50 a pop, which relatively low chance of actually getting what you want, the risk versus reward is way to high. Yet if I really couldn’t care less, I would just buy a boatload of these things