Hobgoblin (Wychwood)

Name: Hobgoblin
Label: "The Unofficial Beer of Halloween - Season of Mischief"
Brewery: Wychwood Brewery
ABV: 5.2%

Tasting notes: "Listen up, Hobgoblin is the Unofficial Beer of Halloween. No Hobgoblin, no Halloween, it's as simple as that. But I'm bored of all the tasteless paraphernalia that comes with this time of year so I'm asking you to help me smash for cash. Go to my website, choose your weapon & smash the hell out of my pumpkin parade, the best destroyer wins! www.wychwood.co.uk/smashforcash"

Game: So I played the above "Smash for Cash" game on the Hobgoblin website. It was rubbish. I even smashed for a spooky 666 times to see if that won me a prize, but no. Cool limited edition bottle label for Halloween though.

Game rating: 1 turnip out of 10
Bottle and beer rating: 9 pumpkins out of 10

Dryneck (Wychwood)

Name: Dryneck
Label: "A golden beer to wash away the drought"
Brewery: Wychwood Brewery
ABV: 4.0%

Tasting notes: "The perfect beer to quench the driest of throats. Mosaic hops release a combination of berry, fruity & citrus blasts resulting in a mouth-watering golden beer to wash away the drought."

Game: Join us over the coming week for all the best gaming related news coming out of E3. E3 stands for Excellent gamEs Enformation - this includes three E's so they shorten it to "E3" to sound cool.  And obviously "News" stands for Notable Events, Weather and Sport so we can sort a couple of them out now: Weather - Hot (LA in Americas init), Sport - no football or anything because it's about video games.

Dirty Tackle (Wychwood)

Name: Dirty Tackle
Label: "A solid looking amber beer - Ruck and maul & grab the ball"
Brewery: Wychwood Brewery
ABV: 4.0%

Tasting notes: "Avoid the scrum & make sure you score an early try with this winning full-bodied malty beer.  It's clean citrus aroma will tackle your taste buds & kick it's opponents into touch."

Game: There's something a bit wrong with Mass Effect Andromeda but it was still enjoyable for the most part. The main issue for me though was the priority missions seemed under-cooked and the experience was padded out with some of the most inane fetch quests ever committed to video game. Was too much development time spent on multiplayer rather than making sure the single player campaign was on point? If so then STOP. STOP STOP STOP. It's a Mass Effect game. A single player story driven RPG at it's core.  If there's demand for a multiplayer experience set in the Mass Effect universe then do that as well, but as a standalone game like Titanfall or Star Wars Battlefront. CD Projekt Red showed everyone how it's done with Witcher 3. Do it like that in future please.

Final definitely definitive rating: 6.5 / 10 (could do better, see me - Ed)

Piledriver (Wychwood Brewery)

Name: Piledriver
Label: "Classic English Ale - Rockin' All Over The World - From the makers of Status Quo"
Brewery: Wychwood
ABV: 4.3%

Rating: "Two legends collide to produce a beer for drinking all over the world. Inspired by the re-release of Piledriver, the first album they produced themselves, Quo have created their first beer with Wychwood Brewery. A traditional malty amber ale balanced with a bold fruity hop character."  Not a massive fan of Status Quo admittedly, but they're good at music... and now beer!

Game: I've played about 90 minutes of Murdered: Soul Suspect and it turns out I've not bought a pudding! It's a great game! It's quite creepy but there's a nice slow, relaxed pace about it as you explore the crime scenes and build up the story. Some reviews are moaning (in a ghostly way, obviously) about how you can't walk through everything or into every house. Stupid. Games have to have some boundaries and these are perfectly explained in the game. 7.5 / 10