I dunno...

It would seem as though I've solved NHL08 on it's normal difficulty setting... Perhaps I should restart on something harder. Some of the games have been down to the wire, so I'm guessing those're the ones I should've lost ;)

Anyway, I finished Jericho, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's akin to BioShock insofar as it really allows players to approach the game as they see fit, given a set of tools. It's linear and a little repetitive on its own, but players have the opportunity to make it something really interesting and dynamic. It's not a game that makes heavy use of advanced AI or physics or powerups, but presents a versatile toolset in a solid narrative with some of the most gorgeous architecture and lighting we've seen yet. The ending though... Wow... What a letdown!

I've since moved on to F.E.A.R.: Extraction Point (figured I should get around to it since Perseus Mandate just came out) and Call Of Duty 4. Both are pretty solid games (CoD4's presentation is really top-notch), but neither has really grabbed me and held on. I'm thinking of going back and finishing System Shock 2 and Indigo Prophecy to tide me over until the next big release.

Speaking of big releases, well, this isn't one, but Fading Shadows for PSP has really piqued my interest... It's a really interesting-looking puzzle game... Read more about it here.

I other news, the Maxtor (Windows) hard drive in my BSD/Windows box went bad... Right towards the end of a particularly large BitTorrent download... Grr... Since I use that computer as a workbench to service others, I opted to re-install XP on the other hard drive, relegating any open source operating system use to my laptop (IBM ThinkPad X22 running Debian 4 'testing'). Good thing hard drives are cheap these days... I won't be buying a Maxtor though. I've seen far too many of them up and die without warning over the past few years. That's just me though; I'm sure they're wonderful.

I also cleaned out some particularly nasty spyware and virus infections from two people's computers this week... It'd been a while since I'd had to deal with something like that.