Stay tuned...

The revamped draft-saving function of Blogger doesn't seem to, y'know... Work :)

Anyway, I've picked-up the last three episodes of the first season of the new Sam & Max games, Unreal Championship 2 for XBOX ($5 new; Best Buy's marking-down their XBOX titles; looks awesome on the 360), as well as Burnout Dominator, Carol Vorderman's Sudoku, Chili Con Carnage, Crush, and MLB '07 The Show for PSP. They're all pretty much what one would expect from their pedigree; a solid racing game, a challenging puzzle game, a mindless yet fun action game, and a very pretty baseball sim. Then there's Crush... What a fucking cool concept... The gameplay, not the story. It's an action-puzzle game with a really cool twist that involves "crushing" the world from 3D to 2D and back again to overcome obstacles. It's difficult to adequately explain in a short space, but you'll get it immediately upon seeing it for yourself. Definitely worth looking-into that one.

I also just finished work on a horribly misconceived Pentium 4 2.4B system. Solid CPU on an Intel-based ASUS board, plenty of storage space (over 120GB), and a nice 17" Samsung LCD... But that's where the good news ends. I suspect the system started-out as a Pentium III-based box (judging by the Pentium III sticker on the front of the case), and was later subjected to a half-assed overhaul. They left Windows on the original 13GB 5400RPM drive and just slapped-in an arbitrarily partitioned 120GB 7200RPM drive (both Maxtor brand, both very noisy), and only installed 256MB of DDR RAM (8MB of which was shared with the integrated Intel 845 GPU). It was a mess, and Windows' integrity had been seriously compromised. I backed-up the important stuff, took out the 13GB HDD altogether, repartitioned the 120GB 40/80 for programs and data respectively, and installed another 256MB of RAM and a 128MB AGP4x Sapphire Radeon 8500LE. After getting a fresh Windows installation on there, things started crashing... Turns-out there were bad sectors galore on the 120GB. I tried "regenerating" the drive, but one (from the thousands found originally) bad sector popped-up again the next day. I wasn't sold on its reliability, so I got them a near-silent 160GB Seagate drive.

I'll be back with more once I finish the Sam & Max games (I'm really looking forward to Episode 5), and get to work on a 3.0GHz P4 system with 1GB of RAM that was brought to its knees by spyware.

"There are times when cake is not available, and instead we are destroyed. This is the deep poetry of the universe."

Why do I suddenly have the urge to spend in excess of $50 buying the same magazine five times?

Spluuurrrge!!!

It all started two days ago, while I was out wandering a mall to kill some time. It'd been a while since I'd had any significant amount of time to kill and a long time since I'd been in a mall, so I gave it a shot. I found myself in a Wal-Mart, watching some guy with a list of games dig through the new batch of $20 video game two-packs. Turned-out he was looking for a specific few that had trade-in values at EBGames of over $20 :) I ended-up stumbling across a copy of The Red Star for PS2 for $20. I've yet to see that game anywhere else for any price, so I'm glad I picked it up. This is a game that almost didn't get made, and it's sad to think so. It's an interesting new twist on the side-scrolling beat-'em-up genre (Final Fight, Streets Of Rage) with graphics and controls that are reminiscent of 2D shooters (R-Type, Ikaruga). The fact that it's based on a popular graphic novel just means there's even more to potentially enjoy. Definitely worth a look.

I found myself back out in the land of rampant consumerism yesterday to check back on a few good deals I'd seen the day before, and ended-up with Ninety-Nine Nights for XBOX 360, Mercenaries and Breakdown for XBOX (both backwards compatible on the 360), and Metal Slug Anthology and Killer 7 for PS2. These are just some titles I'd been meaning to pick-up if I ever saw them cheap, and the really nice thing was that none of them were over $20, save for Metal Slug which was $40 (regularly $45~$50). N3's kind of a boring game to actually play for more than 30 minutes at a time, but it is very pretty and has some beautiful cutscenes :) Mercenaries is just something I'd kept hearing good things about (Grand Theft Auto in a modern warfare setting), and it is a lot of fun. Breakdown, similarly, is another game I'd heard good things about, and they were right; boring graphics, convoluted controls (reminiscent of Trespasser, another game that aimed for realistic first-person immersion), yet wholly endearing gameplay that keeps you coming back for more. Metal Slug means I get to play Metal Slug 6 at home; that's all that really matters :) I'm not sure how I feel about the new backgrounds, but as long as it's better than 4 and at least as good as 5, I'm happy. Finally, Killer 7 is just weird. Very, very weird... And engrossing. I have no idea what's I'm doing or what's going on, and I barely understand the control system, but I get the feeling this is gonna be one of those games that's rewarding in the long run. Oh yeah, if you're on XBOX Live, download Aegis Wing! It's Free!

Ooh, I also picked-up The Fountain on HD DVD, and Firefly on DVD (it was $25; I had to). With the latest XBOX 360 HD DVD update, it's gonna be nice to be able to use my DTS decoder :)

Luckily, I found some work this past week that'll help pay for all of this! ;) I neglected to mention that the system upgrade I did last week only had one IDE controller but four IDE devices, so I picked-up a PCI IDE controller for them. Then I took a job that involved picking-out the best parts from three systems (300MHz Pentium II, 350MHz Pentium II, 500Mhz K6-2) and building the best possible system; he ended-up with the 350MHz PII, an Intel 440BX-based motherboard, 192MB of RAM, and a 32MB AGP TNT M64, all running Windows 2000 Pro. Finally, I did a clean installation of Windows XP on an AMD Athlon 3200+ system (nForce2 Ultra, 1GB DDR400, 128MB AGP8X BFG GeForce 6600GT OC); it was nice to work on a faster system again :)

...And I'm back!

I was off in the wilds of Northwestern British Columbia for a week, and while I did have Internet access at most times, I didn't have much to post here. My PSP kept me busy during my downtime on the trip (Puzzle Quest and Daxter, for the most part), and my IBM ThinkPad X22 running Debian 4.0 "testing" worked without a hitch. Stealing WiFi using the default network settings GUI wasn't particularly fun though.

Anyway, I've recently been devoting the majority of my console gaming time to Jak 3 on PS2, and I'm happy to say it's thankfully less like the misconceived Grand Theft Auto-inspired design of Jak II, and more linear like Jak And Daxter. I also downloaded the Monster Madness and Forza Motorsport 2 demos from XBOX Live; the former seemed a little shallow for what is supposed to be a full-fledged game, whereas the latter was a surprisingly deep and full-featured demo. I'm still a SEGA GT fan when it somes to more realistic racing games, but Forza 2 seems to be a very solid contender.

I performed a system rebuild (Athlon 1800+ to Athlon X2 3600+, new motherboard, RAM, video card, and power supply) and subsequent Windows XP repair installation on Wednesday. It was nice to get back into the swing of things now that my schedule has cleared-up, especially since everything went so smoothly.

Finally, I've been using Google Talk to make 'calls' to Australia, and I'm very impressed by the the quality and reliability. I couldn't get Windows Live Messenger's call function to work at all, though "voice clips" worked fine. Google Talk really strikes me as an instant messaging client that I'd like to use, but nobody else is ever online :\