Vegemite!

There's a tube of Vegemite sitting on my desk... It was a gift, and I have yet to open it.

Anyway, I finished BioShock today, and I'm impressed. The graphics are great, the art style is truly awesome, "big daddies" are really cool, etc... You've probably gleaned at least that much from elsewhere online. What really stuck in my mind by the end was the truly dynamic gameplay coupled with a wonderfully intriguing storyline. The story grabbed me immediately with the introduction's voice-over, and having played previous "Shock" games, I was expecting some interesting twists and turns. The morally ambiguous choices the story presents players with don't really affect the gameplay mechanics as much as they do how players feel about their role. As the game progresses, you'll have plenty of cash, weaponry, tools, and a wide array of biological modifications regardless of the choices you make. At first this glut of powerups bothered me, but then I realized that it actually gave me freedom. Instead of specializing in hacking and setting traps or stealth or raw firepower and being locked into that style for the whole game, you're free to employ any combination of approaches simply by tweaking your loadout. Yeah, that seems like a lazy kind of way for the developers to go about it, but in a game so morally charged, that freedom really helps bring out the player's true motivations. There's a great big sandbox to play in, but the developers have managed to squeeze it into a pretty linear narrative; the results are truly engaging.

So, now that that's out of the way, (and after reading this) I'm finally sitting down and playing through Panzer Dragoon Saga on my Saturn. Everything else is on hold, save for mindless games (Lost Planet) and portables (Hot Shots Golf).

Speaking of Hot Shots Golf, that's where I've been spending most of my PSP time since I've been stuck on a boss in Daxter and am still slowly progressing through Crush.

On a completely unrelated note, I decided to move on from Adobe Audition (not fully Vista compatible, kinda clunky, not exactly industry standard, etc...). I was going to give Pro Tools (M-Powered) a shot, but it's not Vista compatible until the next version... Same goes for Cubase. Ableton, however, plays just fine with Vista, so I'm giving that a go. Sure, it's overkill for what I do, but it works, and it certainly is pretty :)

Ooh, and I did a Vista re-install not too long ago after an annoying video card driver debacle. Mostly my fault, but not worth the trouble of fixing manually. Anyway, since the clean installation, I can no longer safely remove devices by left-clicking on the system tray icon. Right-clicking to bring up the menu or doing it from Windows Explorer works fine, but not left-clicking the system tray icon. Erg. Also, since AVG's scanning engine doesn't play nice with Vista and the number of false-positives got annoying, I've switched to Avira's AntiVir... Seems to do the trick without breaking anything.