The Legend Of Princess

I'm nearing the end of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. Despite employing an overall structure very similar to that of its predecessor, this game feels a lot less streamlined. I've yet to decide whether that quality makes it more epic or more frustrating. There are times when I love Echoes, but other times have brought me dangerously close to putting one of my WaveBirds through the TV...

Moving on, I picked up Drakan: the Ancients' Gates, Gungrave: Overdose, and Stretch Panic for PS2 on the cheap.

Oh, and if this (Jan. 24) is how The Adventure Of Link played, I definitely would've finished it by now :) If I ever get a Skunkboard, I'm totally making a game like that for the Jaguar... Though it'll probably end up looking more like Bloody Zombies.

Trade

I traded that stuff in for Bug Too!, Clockwork Knight 2, and Zoop, as planned, but then they had also acquired a boxed copy of Hover Strike and sealed copy of Flip Out! (yes, there's an exclamation point in the title). Yes, I bought both of them. No, I don't buy everything I see. I passed on loose copies of Checkered Flag, Evolution: Dino Dudes, and Val d'Isere Skiing & Snowboarding as well as boxed copies of Brutal Sports Football, Club Drive, Flashback, Supercross 3D, Syndicate, and Troy Aikman Football :p

Oh, and I bought Painkiller: Triple Dose for $10. I love that game.

Echoes

I came across an old Dell with a Pentium 4 2.8B (2.8GHz, 533MHz FSB), so I swapped that CPU with my 2.53GHz part and gave the Dell a new home with a friend. Personally, I'm impressed that I've been able to get by on 2002/2003 tech for this long! It wasn't until Assassin's Creed hit Windows that I found my self having to drop graphics settings down to truly ugly levels just to get things running smoothly.

Anyway, continuing from my last post, R-Type Dimensions is sweet! I especially like the "crazy" camera angle. Additionally, I'm about half-way through Metroid Prime 2 now.

Moving on, I recently picked up a second copy of Wolfenstein 3d and a copy of Game Guru for 3D0, a second (boxed) copy of Raiden for Jaguar, House Of The Dead 1 & 2 Return for Wii for $15, and a new-in-box Nintendo e-Reader for $15. I'm planning on trading my first copy of Wolfenstein 3d, my loose copy of Raiden, the e-Reader, and my manual-less copy of Bug Too! for Saturn for complete copies of Bug Too! and Clockwork Knight 2 for Saturn as well as a boxed copy of Zoop for Jaguar. I'm expecting at least $60 on the trade-in (which is about what I paid for it all in the first place), so it's all gravy.

Demos

The F.E.A.R. 2 demo is amazing. I'm a big fan of Monolith, I loved the first game, and even slogged through both mediocre expansion packs, so this slick and dynamic update to the original is a wonderful treat. Forget everything else; this is the action title that has me excited more than any other right now.

Legendary, like Fracture, Dark Sector, and TimeShift, is a solid action title that relies on an interesting gimmick that doesn't really carry the game beyond the bargain bin. I really like the setting, so I'm sure I'll play the full version at some point...

Resident Evil 5 is pretty good. It looks like a nice update to Resident Evil 4, but then I haven't been able to really get into a Resident Evil games since Resident Evil 2 Platinum on Windows. I had fun with this new demo, but much like its predecessors (and Dead Space), I just don't see myself spending much time with Resident Evil 5.

Skate 2 felt like Skate, but then I haven't spent much time with either, so I'm just gonna hold off the sequel until I've finished the first one.

I'm currently downloading the R-Type Dimensions demo; this one has me excited out of pure nostalgic goodness, especially since I picked up the original for TurboGrafx 16 not too long ago.

I can't try Halo Wars yet since I only have a silver account on XBLA, but I've been meaning to finish StarCraft and WarCraft III for years now, so I won't be losing sleep over putting off Halo Wars.

Old Stuff

I'm thinking of trying NetBSD on my old Rev. A iMac G3, and FreeBSD on an old 1GHz Athlon system I have lying around.

Redundancy

Our Second Dell PowerVault 110T VS 80 tape drive died last week, so I've been looking into alternative back-up solutions. New tape drives are starting around $1000, but I can pick up used DLT 7000 drives (70GB compressed instead of the 80GB the dead drives supported, but our tapes will still work; our nightly back-up is under 25GB) for $30. The problem is that they're external and have 68-pin ports, whereas our server only has a VHDCI port. The required cables cost more than the drives, and I'm not sold on the reliability of the used drives anyway. The current direction I'm heading in involves nightly system back-ups to an IDE drive in the server (for easy access), as well as to a networked RAID 1 array elsewhere in the building. On top of all of that, I'd like to back-up our most important stuff (databases, mail stores) to a USB drive that isn't always connected to a power source and will be stored off site. Sound good?

Mark Sinclair Vincent

Anyone else recognise Vin Diesel's voice-over work at the three minute mark? :)