Well, HL2 is available to buy now, and CS: S available to play. Personally I've never liked CS, partly because I'm not very good at it. I'm hampered by this PC, though; it jerks like a cheap hooker whenever there's a big gunfight. I'm getting a new laptop at the end of the month which is pretty powerful (3.2GHz, 1024MB RAM and a Radeon 9600) so I'll buy Half-Life 2 and CS:S, probably with the Source remake of HL1 as well, and see if I'm actually any good online. It'll be nice to be able to play something at high quality for once. The most powerful game this rig will play is the original Hitman, so you can imagine it's not going to run HL2 at all.

I don't know if any of you have seen the scans yet of the (UK) PC Gamer HL2 review; it got 96%. I'm told PC Zone gave it 97%. I'm looking forward to it, but what you have to remember is that a lot of magazines gave Metal Gear Solid 2 perfect scores, and that was nowhere near a perfect game.

Speaking of which, GameSpot gave THPS3 on PS2 a perfect ten. That's absolutely ridiculous.

Anyway I intend to buy HL2 with my birthday money, my birthday falling on November 22nd, a day before the official release of HL2.

Speaking of November releases, I have to wonder what Halo 2 will be like. It sounds OK, and I sort of liked the short bit I played of the original. However, I didn't think it was anything more than averagely good. Obviously it's going to be a long fight between fanboys. But I prefer not to let myself get drawn into those fights.

I never really liked the X-Box as a system. I'm not sure why, but there's something there which just doesn't add up. Perhaps it's something to do with the controller - I'm not bothered about the size, but it feels like an average PC pad. Plus all the buttons are in wacky places. I say controllers should be as simple as possible - I favour the PS2 pad in this respect. All the bells and whistles in a nice symmetrical and comfortable design.

Anyway, this Christmas is going to be a difficult time for me. Having a laptop which can run pretty much anything is going to make it difficult to know what to buy. Half-Life 2, natch, but there's also Sims 2, Doom 3 - I'm going to be stuck. I used my college network to download and burn a Doom 3 demo, so I'll install that on the laptop come October 29th.

Well, that's it for now. This is Infinik, signing off.

(P.S. Awfully ironic that the GameSpot spellchecker doesn't recognise 'gamespot' as a word. Even more ironically, it doesn't recognise 'fanboy'. Suggestions include: finis, NBS, nob's and Nanobots.)

(P.P.S. Or 'spellchecker'.)