I'm hearing good reviews of Dead Head Fred and Jeanne D'Arc on PSP... I plan to look into those. I've played through the new NHL 08, Tiger Woods 08, and TimeShift demos on the 360, and I'm kinda torn; they're all potentially great games but just seem to end up being solid and not really worth buying. NHL 08 has some fantastic graphics and unique gameplay, but the announcers are lame enough to make we wait to see what 2K Sports comes up with this year. Tiger Woods 08 feels like a really great golf game, but the graphics look pretty 'plasticky' and the controls (specifically putting) seem to have a relatively steep learning curve. Like NHL 08, this game has me waiting to see what the competition comes up with.
Moving on, TimeShift is really disappointing. I remember playing an early demo of this one in Windows a while back, before it was revamped for the 'next-gen' hadrware, and it seemed like a fun game that was coming along nicely. Now TimeShift seems like a fantastic game that has been oversimplified, borrows heavily from its competitors, and still isn't quite finished. Most notably, the time-shifting play mechanics are pretty much taken care of for you as your suit's computer automatically selects the best choice of slow, pause, or rewind unless you tell it otherwise, and that really affects the challenge and uniqueness of the game. There are a number of similarities to Half-Life (in the character interaction, scripted sequences, and story design), but then that's mostly just nit-picking on my part; I'd like to think the game does more to differentiate itself from the rest in the full product. Finally, the oddities: I noticed that one cool feature, the weapon grab (where you freeze time and steal an enemy's weapon right out of his hands) doesn't work very well if your ammo's full. The result of this bug(?) is the player finding himself wasting his time-shifting power only to have it run-out with an angry enemy at point blank range... Sweeet deal. At one point in the demo, there's a scripted event showing an enemy soldier executing someone. The game then suggested pressing a controller button to throw a grenade, but I thought that'd be kinda mean. Instead of blowing-up both the good guy and the bad guy, I decided to manually freeze time and take-out the enemy soldier. Well, I unloaded round after round into his frozen person, but it changed nothing and the scripted event continued as if nothing had happened once time un-froze. Consistency is important, kids. I'm still hoping the full game gets things right, because there is the potential for a hell of a lot of fun here.
So, I'm a Windows Vista Business man now. Nothing much is new since I last played with it, except that my FireWire Solo now works :) Adobe Audition 2.0 isn't compatible with the fancy Vista GUI, so Windows automatically downgrades itself to the Home Basic GUI, but that's not the end of the world. There are some real gripes I have though, like how Windows thinks the network connection is disconnected when it's just congested, or how there's no easy way to relocate the user folders (to another drive, for example). If I'm clogging the network with downloads on other computers, XP would keep going, albeit slowly; Vista, however, keeps disconnecting me, and that's especially annoying on Windows Live Messenger. Regarding user folders, in XP, one could simply change the target for the My Documents folder and voila, all is well. Vista's user folder structure is a little different though, and you can't easily move the whole user folder; only its subfolders :\
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