Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney. With me tonight, once again, is Troy Goodfellow.

Good evening, everyone.

Also joining us is GameShark Editor-in-Chief and No High Scores blogger, Bill the Straw Abner. Bill, welcome back to the show. Thanks. Hi, everyone. How you doing? All right, so tonight we're discussing Total War, Shogun 2, a game that is being widely hailed

as both a return to form for Creative Assembly and also... All right, so tonight we're discussing Total War, Shogun 2, a game that is being widely hailed

as both a return to form for Creative Assembly and also an innovative new direction for a Total

War, particularly with its multiplayer.

Bill, let's start with you, because I saw you awarded this a very hard-to-come-by GameShark

A.

Where did this game win you over?

Well, I go back a long way with the series, back to the original Shogun, and I have been of

the opinion that ever since, I suppose, Rome, it's been sort of a steady decline for

the franchise. I thought Empire was a sprawling mess,

and while I was confident, that's actually the wrong word, I was hoping that Shogun too would be a

return to form. It wasn't something that was a guarantee by any stretch of the imagination.

I thought that they really captured everything that they should have tried to capture,

from fixing AI issues to just throwing so much detail into it. It was a labor of love project

more than it was, okay, here's just a bunch of stuff, which is kind of how I felt Empire was.

And then you throw in all the cool multiplayer stuff, and I saw no reason not to give it,

it's give it a very high score, whether it's an A, A minus, B plus, you know, that's actually

kind of irrelevant. But I thought it was as good as you could expect even though there are some

some AI holes which I assume we'll be talking about later but I just love it it's a

great great game so could you give some example like you know a little touch that gave

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