*grumble*

Stranglehold and BioShock demos are out... And I'm in Iceland.

Hepping Boursdey!

I had a birthday the other day. Got Dead Rising for XBOX 360, Mortal Kombat Armageddon for XBOX, 300 on HD DVD, and a totally unexpected Canon PowerShot SD700 IS Digital ELPH with a 2GB SD card :)

Oh yeah!

I forgot to mention that I downloaded the Transformers demo the other day... And wow! What a pile! :) The graphics are alright (well, Bumblebee looks good, and the fancy lighting effects are decent; the enemies and environments, not so much), the controls when in robot form are passable, and uh... That's about it. The driving controls are loose and floaty to the point of hitting Alt+F4 (I believe that's Apple+Q for all you Mac users), the locked camera while driving is too low and supremely annoying, combat is terribly repetitive, the generic enemies look like giant cameras, and, worst of all, when checking the options menu to see how to transform, the command was linked to a function called "convert". CONVERT!? DON'T YOU MEAN, "TRANSFORM"!? SERIOUSLY, THE GAME IS CALLED TRANSFORMERS! These people couldn't've been that stupid... All they had to do to effectively realize a good game that fit their apparent design was rip-off Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown, and toss-in some giant transforming robots. I'm guessing development time constraints were the culprit here... Sad.

Anyway, on to happier things, has anyone been watching the video game retrospectives over on GameTrailers.com? They did one for Zelda last year, and are in the midst of Final Fantasy and Metroid retrospectives at the moment. It's a great bit of nostalgia if you're familiar with the series, and potentially an interesting history lesson if you're not. Episodes are 10~15 minutes each, and new ones are out each week. For the first time, I'm starting to see Web-based 'TV' as a viable entertainment option :) Five minute home movies with random release schedules just weren't doing it for me...

ENOS Lives, URNOTE... The "E" should be red :)

I finally got to spend some quality time with a PS3... Hooked-up to a 70" 1080p Sony rear-projection HDTV (via HDMI) and a 6.1 digital audio receiver :) The guy who owned the setup didn't have any full games, but he did have a bunch of demos (and I downloaded a few more while I was there). I played Blast Factor (kinda a lot like Geometry Wars; not necessarily a bad thing), Full Auto 2 (prettier and more full-featured than it's XBOX 360 predecessor), Gran Tourismo HD Concept (same old; very pretty), Heavenly Sword (God Of War, but less good!), MotorStorm (it opened with one of my favourite Nirvana songs, Breed :) ), Ninja Gaiden Sigma (like the XBOX game, but with more stuff and better lighting), Resistance (*yawn*), Ridge Racer 7 (it's Ridge Racer), and Virtua Tennis 3 (same as the 360 demo, but with more options and opponents). The menu system was the same as the PSP's, and everything was pretty solid and intuitive. The 60GB systems are available for $549 CDN at the moment, with add-on deals like MotorStorm for $20 or Enchanted Arms for $0.01, but I'm still in no rush to blow that kind of money... I wouldn't knock anyone for owning one though; Sony's got a solid platform with a lot of potential there; I could stand to have the install and load times a bit shorter though.

Moving on, I've been sick for the past week, and so I started a new career in Top Spin 2. This is the first time I've played it since it crashed during my first career tournament and saved my game with a loss recorded. Ergh. Well, I'm having a lot more fun this time, and the load times seem to be way more bearable (was there a software update?), and no more crashes. So far it's a lot of fun, if a touch easy, but still challenging enough to keep me interested. I just hope it's not like Virtua Tennis 3 (on PSP, anyway) where the opponents suddenly get frustratingly hard as you get to the upper rankings.

On an entirely unrelated note, when I last worked as a regular service technician, I was told about a data recovery company to refer certain desperate clients to. I'd heard stories of $400/hr bills, but never got any solid numbers back myself. Well, that corrupt filesystem I mentioned last time wasn't satisfied with the handful of digital camera images I'd managed to recover, so I sent him their way. He came back to me saying they had "good" news; that they could recover most of his stuff, and that it would be cheap! Only $850! :)

Demos 'n stuff...

I recently downloaded and played-through demos for The Bigs, Blue Dragon, The Darkness, and Stuntman: Ignition on XBOX 360. The Bigs didn't really resonate with me, as I was hoping for something more along the lines of NBA Jam or NFL Blitz; what I found didn't feel terribly different from MLB 2K7. Blue Dragon felt like a solid RPG with pretty graphics and a fun approach to combat, but it didn't really grab me... Then again, the demo offered little in the way of plot. The darkness was good visceral fun with really nice graphics and some cool twists to FPS gameplay; the level of immersion was right up there with the best of the genre. Stuntman is very pretty, a lot of fun, and just the right kind of frustrating; it didn't feel quite as impressive as the videos I'd seen online, but it's a good buy if the price is right. I also grabbed Juiced 2 and Project Sylpheed, but haven't spent any time with them yet...

On PSP, I've finished LocoRoco and Puzzle Quest, and both are must-buys. LocoRoco really is unlike anything you've played before and features amazingly endearing characters and music. Puzzle Quest, whether you own a PSP or a Nintendo DS is a fantastic RPG/puzzle game that'll keep anyone entertained for weeks, and constantly coming back for more. I've since moved-on to finishing Daxter and Crush, but I also picked-up the recent PSP re-release of the PSOne classic PaRappa The Rapper! I've been waiting for years to play that game, and it completely lived-up to my expectations. It's short (only six songs) and silly, but holy crap are the songs catchy! I just picked-up the soundtracks to both PaRappa 1 and 2 :)

Recent computer fixes have consisted of replacing a blown PSU (smoke 'n everything, apparently!), spending hours recovering digital photos from a SATA laptop hard drive sporting a corrupt filesystem, a bad power connector on another laptop, and a bad power adapter on yet another. Luckily, that last laptop is still under warranty.

Ooh, and my RAM upgrades arrived last week! My main system now has 2GB of DDR400 RAM running in dual-channel mode, my second system has 1GB, and the rest will be distributed throughout the family's desktops (currently running in 1GB and 512MB configurations).

Cooool!

I just heard about MenuetOS, and it sounds pretty awesome... It's a new OS developed from scratch, written entirely in assembly language! If this thing is functional enough online, it could knock-out Debian as my alternative OS of choice. Not only would it be faster, but it would have the whole 'security through obscurity' thing down pat.

Updates!

My main computer's fine and everything's back up and running on Windows XP there, the 2GB of RAM has shipped and should be here early in the week, and I decided to replace Debian with PC-BSD on my second machine for the time being.

Installation of PC-BSD was a breeze, but I did run into one problem upon the first boot. The system would freeze just after loading the drivers for my PCI SoundBlaster Live! card. I was able to get things going in "safe mode", and I noticed that it was also trying to load drivers for my motherboard's integrated audio chip even though it was disabled in the BIOS. I enabled the onboard audio and reinstalled the OS, and it installed no sound drivers. Sweet :\ So I grabbed the SoundBlaster drivers from the PC-BSD website, re-disabled onboard audio in the BIOS, and now everything's peachy. I'm using Opera to browse the web and, well, that's about it, but it's pretty nice! KDE is about the same as I remembered it and still not my preferred GUI, but it's pretty and functional. PC-BSD's package system, while not quite as self-contained as those found in some other OS offerings, is still pretty slick and really easy to use; of the Linux/BSD distros I've played with, it's probably most akin to Slackware's system. The only real gripe I have so far is that Flash 7 seems to be a little sketchy, and in this YouTube world, that just makes things slightly more annoying :)

Also, XBOX 360's backwards compatibility has been updated again! They fixed Jet Set Radio Future and SEGA GT 2002, and now I can play Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and Project Gotham Racing 1 and 2! Wheee! :)

Well, shit...

Windows XP seems to have died on my main machine, and I'm not sure I want to activate Vista on the second hard drive... A repair installation of XP didn't work, so my current plan is to grab a Linux distro and back-up my data that way; seems like a good excuse to try something new. I was thinking of going with Ubuntu 7.04, as it has been a while since I've installed Ubunutu. I guess I could go with another big one like Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, or whatever, but they're not really grabbing my attention. Gentoo might be interesting, but I'm not in the mood for that kind of potential frustration right now :) Perhaps I should look into PC-BSD... Anyway, the data seems to be intact, so I'm happy.

I also noticed some cheap 1GB sticks of DDR400 (various brands) at some local stores the other day (~$55 each), but they were all sold-out when I got there today. The cheapest they had was a 2GB OCZ dual channel kit for $149.99. I ended-up ordering two 1GB sticks of Crucial RAM online for $54.99 each; we'll see if they actually have them in stock or not :\

I finished Black (on my XBOX 360) this morning. I enjoyed the game quite a bit, and certainly recommend picking it up, especially since it can now be found for as little as $9.99 used. It's not the longest game, the story isn't particularly important, the AI isn't the brightest, and there's no multiplayer, but it's still great fun and worth a couple of plays through. Next up is Grabbed By The Ghoulies...

Progress...

Since my last post, I've picked-up a few more Game Gear, PSP, Dreamcast, and Windows games.

The Game Gear acquisitions entailed browsing the local independent specialty shops, and included Sonic The Hedgehog, Sonic Chaos, Shinobi, Virtua Fighter Animation, and Super Smash TV. The Sonic games are all solid, Shinobi is akin to the corresponding Genesis titles of the same era, Virtua Fighter's kinda dull, and Smash TV is an atrocity... But then I should've suspected that. Smash TV is a classic franchise, due largely in part to its control scheme (two independent directional controls, one for movement and one for attack). For whatever reason, the Game Gear's lack of buttons didn't register with me when I bought the game. Ergh.

On PSP, I've just-about finished Puzzle Quest (did everything but searching for runes/forging weapons) and LocoRoco, so something new is in order. Daxter and Crush are on deck, but I picked-up Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Marvel Trading Card Game. Ultimate Alliance is kind of boring so far and I haven't spent much quality time with the card game, but it's safe to say that neither has thrilled me.

As a nice follow-up to scoring NHL 2K2 for Dreamcast, I came across Tennis 2K2 just a few days later! This game is the best in its genre for the generation, and has been ported to the PS2 and PSP... And it was only $4.99! I suspect that the price may have been so low because the disc was kind of dodgy, but upon closer inspection, there was just some gunk on one section of the surface; so a quick wipe later, all was well.

On Windows, I've gotten back into Tomb Raider Anniversary, and I'm loving it. Croft Manor, specifically, is a wonderful gaming experience, and really sets an example for what I think episodic gaming should be like. I also snagged a copy of Overlord, and it's too much fun :) The mouse is a little weird (especially for "sweeping") after being introduced to the game on XBOX 360, but it's probably the better controller in the long run. The gameplay does seem to get a little stale after extended play sessions, but the graphics, writing, and pick-up gameplay is top-notch. This is the kind of title that should keep me wholly entertained for at least a couple of weeks of casual play.

Paying Respects.

Today, I bought a SEGA Game Gear with Sonic 2, NHL 2K2 for Dreamcast, and Body Harvest for N64. The Game Gear was a decent price and an important piece of my childhood; it was the first mildly popular (albeit relatively expensive) colour portable. Seemingly unattainable some 15 years ago, it was nice to pick one up for a song today. NHL 2K2 was the last hockey title on the Dreamcast, and is easily one of the better hockey games of the DC/PS2/XBOX/GC generation. Body Harvest is a game that was developed by DMA Design around the same time as another popular DMA Design game titled Grand Theft Auto. What's interesting is that Body Harvest, while focusing on time travel and alien invasion, shares a lot of gameplay design cues with the GTA series, but does so in 3D some three years before GTA went 3D on the PS2.

I just thought it interesting that I picked-up three bits of video gaming history today :)

Memory's the first to go...

I completely forgot to mention something very important in my last post here. The event omitted is so momentous that it warrants its own post though, so it's cool.

My friend Tim gave me a Puzzle Bobble MVS cartridge.

I am going to repeat that...

My friend Tim GAVE me a PUZZLE BOBBLE MVS cartridge.

I'm at a loss for words... I can't even hope to possibly come anywhere near adequately conveying the amount of praise and recognition this act deserves. Some of you may know this game as Bust-A-Move, or are familiar with similar games such as Snood; the MVS version of Puzzle Bobble is where it's at though.

Now all I need is another AES controller :\

You can plant sheep!

I've been on the lookout for a copy of Spider-Man 2 for XBOX, as I keep hearing it's a pretty fun game (and entirely different from the not-so-awesome PC version). I figured since it was apparently a "Best of Platinum Hits" title, that it'd be cheap and plentiful... Sadly this was not the case, and I'd yet to see it in any store since around the time Spider-Man 3 came out. Well, I was out in a mall, killing some time the other day, and I stopped-off at an EB Games. They had a used copy in good condition for a little over $20... More than I wanted to spend, but I splurged. Then I saw Odin Sphere. $50 new. I splurged again. I need to learn some self-control :\ It's a good thing that they both turned-out to be pretty good games! I haven't spent a whole lot of time with either, but Spider-Man 2's freedom of exploration and Odin Sphere's unique gameplay really promise to be a lot of fun. I want to mention that Odin Sphere reminds me of Guardian Heroes on SEGA Saturn in terms of gameplay and Astal (also a Saturn game) in terms of graphics... Those are very prestigious comparisons, by the way :)

I also downloaded Prince Of Persia and Pac-Man C.E. from the XBOX Live Arcade, and I'm probably spending more time with them than anything else right now. It's nice to see old games updated the right way. These are definitely worth the money.

I've finished Season 1 of Sam & Max, and I'm satisfied. While some episodes were better than others, some puzzles were needlessly frustrating, and the episode formula was a little repetitive as the season progressed, it was still full of hilarious writing, great acting, and good old classic adventure gaming. You can buy episodes from Telltale's website, GameTap, and Steam, or you can buy season sets from Telltale or retail stores later this summer.

More on Vista...

Lessee... After a few days, Vista's still pretty cool, but here're the issues that are keeping me from making it my main OS:

• Software makers aren't yet up-to-date. Programs that are designed for Windows XP and earlier that require administrator privileges are annoying in Vista, as it asks you to "cancel" or "allow" every time you run them. In the majority of these cases, this is the fault of the software makers, not Vista. Many applications have caught-up (WinRAR, for example), but they're not all perfect yet.
• Software overclocking is supremely annoying. I use RivaTuner to unlock and overclock my GeForce 6800 video card. I suspect that this is the kind of application that requires administrator access, and that means "allowing" it every time I restart Vista. I hope someone finds a workaround soon.
• Some copy protection schemes and software modifications aren't Vista compatible, even though the games they rely upon are. This renders the game unplayable. Ugh.
• Hardware support. My ViewSonic monitor's drivers don't seem to install, despite following ViewSonic's instructions to the letter and trying a number of my own methods. Similarly, my M-Audio Firewire Solo is still unsupported. These are minor annoyances though, as I wouldn't mind keeping XP as a secondary OS for audio production anyway.

So we're getting there, but not quite yet.

Anyway, moving on, I downloaded the demos for Shadowrun, Tenchu Z, Vampire Rain, and Overlord from XBOX Live. Shadowrun seems fun and unique in the genre, but I'm not much of a fan of the genre so I didn't do much past the tutorial. Tenchu Z looks very promising, but I hope things (menu, controls, animations) get a bit more polished before its release. Vampire Rain is a really cool concept (a Splinter Cell-esque team taking-down Vampires!), but it's so shoddily put-together that it's just robbed of any real fun. Sneaking around was alright, but combat was so painfully awkward that I won't be touching it again. I haven't played Overlord yet, but I hear good things... Stay tuned!

What I've learned from a day with Vista...

Windows Vista serves me about as well as Linux does. It's really good for web browsing, instant messaging, multimedia playback, and general optical media burning. It just works out of the box after a little set-up (drivers, programs), it's relatively secure, and it supports most of my hardware. Also like Linux, it's not great for gaming at the moment, doesn't support certain specific optical disk image formats, and it doesn't support some of my more purpose-specific hardware. The only real issues I've had with it so far have been in the form of the odd skip in MP3 playback through Windows Media Player and having a bitch of a time getting the Boot Configuration Data store (Vista's boot.ini replacement) to work with my old XP installation (in the same computer, on a separate hard drive). So no real show-stoppers yet, and it seems like a solid every-day desktop computing platform... I also thought it was cute how Vista Business doesn't install the packed-in games by default :) I'm excited about Vista though, especially after learning more about what's actually new about it. Ars Technica has published the first two parts of their three-part in-depth look at Vista, and it's a good read that shows just how much promise Vista has.

I haven't spent much time with Office 2007 yet, but it sure does look pretty, and I like the new menu system... I'll be back with more once they send me an Office product key that actually works :\

Let the fun begin! ;)

My copies of Windows Vista Business and Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise arrived!

I'm thinking I'll install them on my 3.6GHz P4 machine, as support is a little sketchy for the Radeon 8500 and SoundBlaster Live! in my 2.4GHz P4 Linux/XP dual-boot machine (which only has 512MB of RAM at the moment anyway). I won't be touching the current XP install on the faster machine, however, as support for games in Vista is still a touch sketchy and support for my M-Audio Firewire Solo in Vista is non-existent :) Luckily, I have this 160GB 7200RPM Western Digital IDE drive lying around that failed on someone else before, but tests-out fine now, so Vista should be a good way to test it more thoroughly. I'll keep you posted...

Convoluted!

So I haven't taken much time to play any games, though I did pick-up Tomb Raider Anniversary and Jade Empire Special Edition for Windows. I've been busy fixing people's computer problems all weekend, and I've got some stories and a new toy to show for it (well, those and some cash). First up is that 3.0GHz Pentium 4 I mentioned in my last post; It was hurting bad from the spyware and such, so I backed-up their important stuff and started fresh. Whoever built that thing must've been out cold, 'cause I was half asleep and noticed that the power fan was plugged into the chassis fan connector, the power LED was plugged-in as a two-pin connector instead of the three-pin connector the motherboard takes, and the RAM was installed in single-channel mode. I fixed those issues, installed a PCI fax modem, dusted everything, updated the BIOS, and from there it was smooth sailing. While I was delivering the finished product, I was offered one of these. I wasn't intimately familiar with the Dell Digital Audio Receiver, but I figured it was some sort of PC-to-stereo streaming apparatus, judging by the ethernet port on the back. Well, as it turns-out, I was right, but wasn't getting the whole story. You can actually use your home phone network to stream music to any room with a phone jack (or an ethernet hub/switch/router)! Pretty cool feature, but I'm currently using it in my bedroom (through an old router) to listen to my MP3s from my bed with a remote. It's a fun little toy, and was pretty expensive in its day (over $300 CDN after taxes!), so I'm happy to add it to my collection of random tech crap :) Now if only it ordered albums by track number instead of alphabetically :\ Making your own playlists using the device's interface is just a bitch.

The other stories are far less interesting. They involve troubleshooting one person's home network via text messages and installing a wireless router for another person. Wheee!

Stay tuned...

The revamped draft-saving function of Blogger doesn't seem to, y'know... Work :)

Anyway, I've picked-up the last three episodes of the first season of the new Sam & Max games, Unreal Championship 2 for XBOX ($5 new; Best Buy's marking-down their XBOX titles; looks awesome on the 360), as well as Burnout Dominator, Carol Vorderman's Sudoku, Chili Con Carnage, Crush, and MLB '07 The Show for PSP. They're all pretty much what one would expect from their pedigree; a solid racing game, a challenging puzzle game, a mindless yet fun action game, and a very pretty baseball sim. Then there's Crush... What a fucking cool concept... The gameplay, not the story. It's an action-puzzle game with a really cool twist that involves "crushing" the world from 3D to 2D and back again to overcome obstacles. It's difficult to adequately explain in a short space, but you'll get it immediately upon seeing it for yourself. Definitely worth looking-into that one.

I also just finished work on a horribly misconceived Pentium 4 2.4B system. Solid CPU on an Intel-based ASUS board, plenty of storage space (over 120GB), and a nice 17" Samsung LCD... But that's where the good news ends. I suspect the system started-out as a Pentium III-based box (judging by the Pentium III sticker on the front of the case), and was later subjected to a half-assed overhaul. They left Windows on the original 13GB 5400RPM drive and just slapped-in an arbitrarily partitioned 120GB 7200RPM drive (both Maxtor brand, both very noisy), and only installed 256MB of DDR RAM (8MB of which was shared with the integrated Intel 845 GPU). It was a mess, and Windows' integrity had been seriously compromised. I backed-up the important stuff, took out the 13GB HDD altogether, repartitioned the 120GB 40/80 for programs and data respectively, and installed another 256MB of RAM and a 128MB AGP4x Sapphire Radeon 8500LE. After getting a fresh Windows installation on there, things started crashing... Turns-out there were bad sectors galore on the 120GB. I tried "regenerating" the drive, but one (from the thousands found originally) bad sector popped-up again the next day. I wasn't sold on its reliability, so I got them a near-silent 160GB Seagate drive.

I'll be back with more once I finish the Sam & Max games (I'm really looking forward to Episode 5), and get to work on a 3.0GHz P4 system with 1GB of RAM that was brought to its knees by spyware.

"There are times when cake is not available, and instead we are destroyed. This is the deep poetry of the universe."

Why do I suddenly have the urge to spend in excess of $50 buying the same magazine five times?

Spluuurrrge!!!

It all started two days ago, while I was out wandering a mall to kill some time. It'd been a while since I'd had any significant amount of time to kill and a long time since I'd been in a mall, so I gave it a shot. I found myself in a Wal-Mart, watching some guy with a list of games dig through the new batch of $20 video game two-packs. Turned-out he was looking for a specific few that had trade-in values at EBGames of over $20 :) I ended-up stumbling across a copy of The Red Star for PS2 for $20. I've yet to see that game anywhere else for any price, so I'm glad I picked it up. This is a game that almost didn't get made, and it's sad to think so. It's an interesting new twist on the side-scrolling beat-'em-up genre (Final Fight, Streets Of Rage) with graphics and controls that are reminiscent of 2D shooters (R-Type, Ikaruga). The fact that it's based on a popular graphic novel just means there's even more to potentially enjoy. Definitely worth a look.

I found myself back out in the land of rampant consumerism yesterday to check back on a few good deals I'd seen the day before, and ended-up with Ninety-Nine Nights for XBOX 360, Mercenaries and Breakdown for XBOX (both backwards compatible on the 360), and Metal Slug Anthology and Killer 7 for PS2. These are just some titles I'd been meaning to pick-up if I ever saw them cheap, and the really nice thing was that none of them were over $20, save for Metal Slug which was $40 (regularly $45~$50). N3's kind of a boring game to actually play for more than 30 minutes at a time, but it is very pretty and has some beautiful cutscenes :) Mercenaries is just something I'd kept hearing good things about (Grand Theft Auto in a modern warfare setting), and it is a lot of fun. Breakdown, similarly, is another game I'd heard good things about, and they were right; boring graphics, convoluted controls (reminiscent of Trespasser, another game that aimed for realistic first-person immersion), yet wholly endearing gameplay that keeps you coming back for more. Metal Slug means I get to play Metal Slug 6 at home; that's all that really matters :) I'm not sure how I feel about the new backgrounds, but as long as it's better than 4 and at least as good as 5, I'm happy. Finally, Killer 7 is just weird. Very, very weird... And engrossing. I have no idea what's I'm doing or what's going on, and I barely understand the control system, but I get the feeling this is gonna be one of those games that's rewarding in the long run. Oh yeah, if you're on XBOX Live, download Aegis Wing! It's Free!

Ooh, I also picked-up The Fountain on HD DVD, and Firefly on DVD (it was $25; I had to). With the latest XBOX 360 HD DVD update, it's gonna be nice to be able to use my DTS decoder :)

Luckily, I found some work this past week that'll help pay for all of this! ;) I neglected to mention that the system upgrade I did last week only had one IDE controller but four IDE devices, so I picked-up a PCI IDE controller for them. Then I took a job that involved picking-out the best parts from three systems (300MHz Pentium II, 350MHz Pentium II, 500Mhz K6-2) and building the best possible system; he ended-up with the 350MHz PII, an Intel 440BX-based motherboard, 192MB of RAM, and a 32MB AGP TNT M64, all running Windows 2000 Pro. Finally, I did a clean installation of Windows XP on an AMD Athlon 3200+ system (nForce2 Ultra, 1GB DDR400, 128MB AGP8X BFG GeForce 6600GT OC); it was nice to work on a faster system again :)

...And I'm back!

I was off in the wilds of Northwestern British Columbia for a week, and while I did have Internet access at most times, I didn't have much to post here. My PSP kept me busy during my downtime on the trip (Puzzle Quest and Daxter, for the most part), and my IBM ThinkPad X22 running Debian 4.0 "testing" worked without a hitch. Stealing WiFi using the default network settings GUI wasn't particularly fun though.

Anyway, I've recently been devoting the majority of my console gaming time to Jak 3 on PS2, and I'm happy to say it's thankfully less like the misconceived Grand Theft Auto-inspired design of Jak II, and more linear like Jak And Daxter. I also downloaded the Monster Madness and Forza Motorsport 2 demos from XBOX Live; the former seemed a little shallow for what is supposed to be a full-fledged game, whereas the latter was a surprisingly deep and full-featured demo. I'm still a SEGA GT fan when it somes to more realistic racing games, but Forza 2 seems to be a very solid contender.

I performed a system rebuild (Athlon 1800+ to Athlon X2 3600+, new motherboard, RAM, video card, and power supply) and subsequent Windows XP repair installation on Wednesday. It was nice to get back into the swing of things now that my schedule has cleared-up, especially since everything went so smoothly.

Finally, I've been using Google Talk to make 'calls' to Australia, and I'm very impressed by the the quality and reliability. I couldn't get Windows Live Messenger's call function to work at all, though "voice clips" worked fine. Google Talk really strikes me as an instant messaging client that I'd like to use, but nobody else is ever online :\