Things that make you go, "Hmmm..." or "Grrr..."

I recently played through the Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic demo, and now it's definitely on my shortlist of upcoming games to keep an eye on. The Source engine (Half-Life 2, SiN Episodes) is looking fantastic, and the gameplay is like Oblivion with less freedom, but way better combat. The demo was awfully short (even with the unofficial saved game that lets you continue playing past the official end), but great fun; totally worth the download if you have the bandwidth to spare. Interestingly, this demo made me realize something about my video card: An overclocked, unlocked, AGP8x GeForce 6800 is now officially a mid-range part. I could either play the game with HDR and medium-high video settings, or without HDR at just about maximum video settings. The difference wasn't terribly pronounced (high-res smoothness vs. dynamic lighting effects), but it reminds me that an upgrade will be in order before too long. Hopefully it'll be at least another year or so before I'm forced to do anything though, since the next upgrade means a whole new platform; I've pushed Socket A and Socket 478 to their limits with my Athlon XP 3200+ and 3.6GHz Pentium 4 AGP8x rigs.

Aside from PC gaming, I've been spending some quality time with all of those console titles I keep writing about. I'd like to talk specifically about Burnout Revenge. It keeps 'crashing' on my XBOX. I am one of the apparently unfortunate souls who has been blessed with a Thomson DVD drive. From what I've heard, this particular drive is problematic for most, and often has issues reading discs. Now, I've played a lot of different titles on that XBOX without issue over the years (the only times I really noticed any problems were with Panzer Dragoon Orta and Shenmue II, but they were rare at most), but Burnout Revenge gives me the 'dirty/damaged disc' error pretty consistently. Grrr indeed.

Oh, and really quickly, I picked-up God Of War and Gran Tourismo 4 for PS2 for $19.99 CDN each (regularly $29.99 each) at Best Buy thanks to a price reduction and some coupons! Haven't touched Gran Tourismo 4 yet, but God Of War is great fun so far (I'm only at the second save point).

Finally, I got kinda bored the other day and set-up static IPs for every potential connection on my home network. That's ten IPs... And counting? :)

P.S. I'm working on a really exciting project (well, exciting for me and any hardware nerds reading this) that should be just about ready sometime early next week. Watch this space!