Took me quite a lot of time getting here, even though I visit GS and read news there several times a day. How easy it was in the beginning. Le sigh. Anyway, Grand Theft Auto IV is here and I am simply amazed. Also very happy it actually DID live up to all the extreme hype and that I didn't tire of it within two days. Unfortunately I got MLB 08: The Show not long after, and my playing is now split between the two. Too bad I only get a couple of hours of real game time every work day. How I long for my lazy student days...ahem.

I would like to be paid for not doing anything but stay at home and watch films and play games and write stuff. I have four hours at home after work, before I have to go to bed. That's actually not a lot at all. Certainly not enough to keep my gaming skills intact. :-)

I bought a PS3 a few weeks ago. Then I had to buy an HD LCD telly to go with it. I am now starting to upgrade my DVD collection into a Blu-Ray one. Since I have 850 films and countless TV series, this may take a while. After all, I hadn't quite finished upgrading from VHS to DVD yet. ;-) Still, the PS3 is fantastic, and I am really looking forward to all the new games coming its way. I may never leave the house again.

So I couldn't wait more than a day since my whining about not having the means for a new computer, and bought the parts for a proper upgrade. I could hardly believe how wonderful the graphics on the aforementioned four games were on that spanking new graphics card. Better cherish it while it's still new. The whole machine will be outdated soon enough...

I went back to play The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age on the PS2 some weeks ago. This time I'm spending a lot of time levelling up so that most of the characters have all the possible upgrades available by the time I'm 2/3 through the game. Yum. I would very much like to upgrade my computer, though, and play some of the newest games in much better quality. I own Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights 2, Medieval 2: Total War and Gothic 3, all of which are long-awaited games and all of which I can hardly play...well, at least not near how it was meant to be played. And then perhaps Spore will be released soon...or in a few years' time. At least I would like to be prepared.

I may have done something stupid. Yesterday, as I was feeling rather bored at work, I started thinking about Final Fantasy X again. I haven't played it for ages. I thought I should probably start again and this time have a better strategy, especially involving levelling up as opposed to running along the storyline. Much like what I recently started doing with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. So I went back home and found the game and the memory card and started by deleting all the old savegames, apart from the last one. Apparently I have already played it for 86 hours. I'm guessing at least 10 of those hours have been spent in pause mode when there's been something else I've had to do and not a save point to see. The last timestamp was August last year, so I've been away for a while. It took me three minutes of gameplay until I remembered how much I love the game. So I even got up earlier than usual to play a bit before going to work today. I bet most of my day will be spent thinking about the game. It is a bit sad, but I've always been like that. Ooh, and this time around I let Tidus be called Tidus.

Yep, the first thing I did when Oblivion popped through my mailbox was to (install the game, and then) make my own class. It was supposed to be called Subtle Mage, but due to lack of space it became Magus Sub, lol! So I'm now playing with a rather pale-looking man claiming to be a lower rank learned man. Wonderful. At least the game is highly entertaining and it turns out I'm much better at fighting in Oblivion than I ever was in Morrowind. Which is a good thing, since I hardly ever dared enter any dungeons or any remote places that could be dangerous, because I'd always just die anyway. This time it's actually fun going out into the unknown!

I first played Maniac Mansion back in the very early nineties. I usually didn't get very far, about one third into the game or so. But it was enough for me to get to know most of the characters involved in the storyline. In 1998 I found a pack of ten LucasArts adventure games on CD-ROM in a shop outside of Antwerp. When I got home I installed all of the games and had lots of fun. However, I remember installing both Sam and Max Hit the Road and Maniac Mansion's sequel Day of the Tentacle without actually playing the games. Today I finally sat down and started playing Day of the Tentacle, which was a typical LucasArts adventure game with lots of humour and quirky puzzles. I solved the game in one go (with some help from GameFAQs, I might add - the age of the Internet has made me a bit lazy compared to my die-hard Sierra On-Line days (I have played through Police Quest (the original Amiga and DOS versions) five times) when I solved everything myself. I just don't have the patience any longer. Mind you, I did wait a long time before visiting GameFAQs today. Nevertheless, the game has been solved at last and it was worth it! I would recommend Day of the Tentacle, actually!

So I downloaded the demo yesterday, played it twice today and uninstalled it just now. A bit boring, actually. Just as well I cancelled my preorder, I suppose.

My dearly beloved Norse Monk/Shadowdancer, Timon Siger, was removed from my hard drive the other day as I uninstalled Neverwinter Nights and all the expansions. As I was halfway through the last chapter of the Hordes of the Underdark expansion, I found myself only playing to get through the effing thing, and found that I had lost interest in the game itself. So I quit and uninstalled the game. Gave me quite a few extra gigs!