Maybe I'm doing it wrong...

Virtual Boy number two started displaying horizontal lines in the left lens. Only an isolated incident so far, but still... :\

I'm at the final battle in Virtual Boy Wario Land (found all the treasures), and finished Wario World last night (found everything but one red crystal and two heart pieces in the final level). I didn't like how the final level in Wario World was considerably more challenging than the previous seven; not because it was too hard, but because it was noticeably inconsistent with the rest of the game. The final battle was kind of a joke, too; the previous two battles were much more challenging and epic. Anyway, Metroid Prime is up next on GameCube, but I need to stop by my brother's place to borrow his copy... I'm excited!

I took some more time with the SEGA Superstars Tennis demo on 360, and concluded that I still don't like it. Top Spin 3 was much more fun, but is definitely gonna take some getting used to. The controls, while certainly a new direction, were not as counter-intuitive as most review sites led me to believe. The Bourne Conspiracy demo was fun, but felt a little dry and repetitive by the end... And that's bad for a three-level demo. Dark Sector was the same. Despite being very pretty and having some interesting new gameplay elements, it felt like a mishmash of Gears Of War, BioShock, and Wolfenstein. Not a bad game, but just not cohesive and polished enough to really grab me. I also didn't appreciate certain unexplained deaths or the boss battle that gave me little indication of whether or not I was doing any actual damage, though perhaps these issues are addressed in the full product. Ninja Gaiden II, however, was very cohesive and super polished. Pretty much what I expected, and more forgiving than the first one, I'll pick it up once I get around to actually playing through the first one. Battlefield: Bad Company, Too Human, and Civilization Revolution are next in line...

Oh, and it looks like I'm building a sweet Photoshop/Lightroom computer for someone! Current specs are as follows:

• Asus P5Q3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP @n
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450
• Four 2GB sticks of OCZ DDR3 PC3-12800
• Two 10,000RPM 74GB SATA hard drives
• Two 7,200RPM 500GB SATA2 hard drives
• 512MB Sapphire ATi RADEON HD 3870
• Antec TP3-650

...And a sweet LaCie LCD. We're trying to keep the hardware inside the tower around $2000 while still allowing room to grow. That motherboard supports 1600MHz FSB quad-core CPUs, up to 16GB of 2000MHz DDR3 RAM, and CrossFire support (apparently CS4 will be able to take advantage of GPU power).