Well, today is Christmas eve. My brother is still hanging out with his psychotic I-don't-know-what-I-want-out-of-life on-again-off-again girlfriend. Mom is still running errands and starting preps on tomorrow's feast. My nephews are all in church. I should be gaming. Instead, I'm at the bookstore on my work laptop trying to get a couple of hours of off-site office time in.

Despite the fact that I brought Company of Heroes with me on this trip, as well as my Nintendo DS and two games, I am so close to finishing it that I have resolved to try and complete Soldier of Fortune II. I'm on the last mission, which only has about 4 levels to it. Despite the veritable arsenal I now have at my disposal, I am consistently driven back to using the M16 with M209 grenade launcher attachment. The long range shotty is still not long range enough, the AK lacks the M16s punch, the shotgun is for CQB only, as are the dual pistols. The OICW, while cool in concept is really just an overhyped assault rifle, as it is so ridiculously difficult to get off a grenade round (you have to scope in to the telescopic site, lase the target, adjust the range, then finally fire the grenade). Why they designed the weapon implementation like this when the M16/M209 is in the game and incredibly more efficient to use, I am not sure.

At any rate, despite the fact that the game was not revolutionary for its time, it is still entertaining , which is the foremost requirement of a game. The jungle levels were frustrating, but in the mission I just played, the lab levels were fun, as was the level inside the plane.

I'm over at my bro's house again using his internet connection. I put about four more hours into Soldier of Fortune II and I think I'm pretty near the end. But I am stuck, so one of the things I'll need to do while I'm over here is download the remainder of the walk through while I'm here. ...now I'm getting entirely distracted watching the Surreal Life marathon, so I'll wrap this up and try agian tomorrow...

Feh. The SCAD students living in my Mom's neighborhood have perhaps gotten smarter, or else there are just more of them with crappy equipment. Since my Mom does not have broadband, I get my connectivity at home by borrowing some bandwidth from the neighboring college kids. Well, the\is year, none of their signal strengths are strong enough to get anything done, so it will be early morning wake-ups to commute to my brother's to borrow his connection.

I didn't get any gaming done by the time I got home last night. I did do a little more work on my "Most Anticipated Games of 2007" article for my website. While banging away at it, I listened to the PCGamer Podcast. I'm hoping to get some time in Soldier of Fortune II today, and I'm going to download any Podcast updates from iTunes while I'm here at my bro's house this morninig.

I'm getting ready to get on the road and head home for the holidays. Going into my technology bag for the trip are my:

Asus Z96J Laptop (w/ Soldier of Fortune II and Company of Heroes)
Gateway CX2618 TabletPC (for work)
80GB iPod 5G
iPod Shuffle 2G
5 DVDs of recorded TV
Maxtor OneTouch III 100GB Portable Hard Drive (for work)
DiGiX Portable DVD Player Slate
Nintendo DS Lite Onyx (w/Need for Speed Carbon and Starfox Command)
32Mb FlashCard and 1GB USB Memory Stick
Latest Copies of PCGamer and Computer Shopper
Canon Powershot S50 Digital Camera

I'll post some reports from the road on how all this stuff works out. Until then Happy Holidays.
GJr.