Just a short one here. The single biggest piece of absolute sh*t software that I have used is Roxio Creator Plus - Dell Edition. Currently in Thailand for work, and I want to back up about 700 photos to a DVD in case my lap top dies.

So I try and create a disc that you can use drag and drop, and make it readable on other PC's. Simple right.

Wrong, everytime I put this disc in, I have to open up the stupid Roxio program and enable the stupid option. How f*cking stupid are you Roxio. This software is an absolute dog, and I hope you are kicked in the testicles repeatedly. A dog with no legs could have created a better program than the absolute dribble that has been loaded on my work laptop by Dell.

I hope you burn in hell Roxio.

Can you tell I'm a little annoyed by it.

Ahhhh, Mass Effect. Has there been a better space game made than Mass Effect. In my opinion, not bloody likely. It takes what KOTOR did and increases the playability and action to a level KOTOR could not do on the original xbox. The first hour of playing through the game, I was thinking "this is just KOTOR but with better graphics" but the more you play it the more you come to see the subtle differences and improvements they have made.

While it is not perfect, the inventory system sucks - especially when selling items in a shop, it really draws you in with a decent story and compelling fighting that improves on the "roll a number behind the scenes and determine if my attack hits" play of other RPG games. And I also have to give a huge compliment to the developers for their work with the lip syncing. Some of the best lip movement to voice acting in a game EVER.

I'm currently on my second play through with an Infiltrator after playing through with a Soldier/Biotic (forget the actual name of the class). Looking to try and get my 1000 achievement points out of the game, and I'm currently on 640.

If you like space games and/or RPG you must buy this game and play it to death. Best space game ever made (with Elite and KOTOR and close equal 2nd).

This will be short and sweet - and directed to the 80% of morons out there who are incapable of spelling and/or using the English language correctly when posting.

1. Learn to spell - or resort to using firefox 2 and the built in dictionary. And when it underlines a word in red, perhaps you might like to right click with your mouse and check the spelling. Unfortunately one of the suggested corrections is not "You are a moron" so it won't tell how illiterate you are (you may have to figure that one out yourself).

2. Think about what you are writing and re-read before pressing post - it seems like the majority of people who post just randomly press keys and then hit the "post" button. This only serves to prove what an idiot you are, and really destroys any credibility you hope your argument/comment has. It's called grammar people, learn how to use it.

3. Stop using numbers/symbols as letters - contrary to the belief of under 15's, this does not make you look cool, and you are not original. "Look ma, I can spell n00b" "That's nice Timmy, now stop licking the paint". I hope the people who do this try it on their resume, and then enjoy their stellar career working at McDonald's for the rest of their life.

I could post others, but then I'd be wasting my time on a group of people who would not have the intellect to understand it anyway. Bye bye for now all the Timmy's out there.

Xbox 360

I'll admit in the past I was a bit of a console philanderer (PS1 and N64, PS2 and Xbox, to name just a couple) but I am now a faithful one console man, the Xbox 360. The reason for this. Too many unfinished games. When I had two or more consoles from the one generation I had way too many games that I did not finish on one or both of the consoles that I had. This to me is just criminal.

I must very shamefully admit that I own GTA: Vice City and San Andreas on the PS2 but have hardly touched either of them for one reason or another. Both of those games are fantastic (more so Vice City for the unashamedly 80's flavour) but because I had plenty of games on two consoles to finish I just did not get around to putting the effort in to finish both of them.

Therefore I have just gone with the 360 for this generation of consoles. Several reasons for this which I've listed below. Now this does not make me a Microsoft or 360 fanboy, far from it, it's just my choice to make sure I am able to finish more games more completely.

• I'm a little bit of a Halo fan, and I wanted to get Halo 3
• The PS3 in Australia costs $1000. Yes for those who are not in Australia that is correct. We continually get ripped off on the gaming front on both the consoles and game prices, but I'll save that for a separate rant another day. I basically just could not justify $1000 for a games console, even though it would be a cheap blue ray player, but then there's the whole next gen DVD argument going on.
• I like the live service that the xbox has. It is rather a fantastic service, although somewhat diluted in Australia.
• There just are not that many games that are console exclusive these days, so in the end it just does not play that much of a big deal. The only games I'd like to play on the PS3 at this point are God of War, Final Fantasy, and Metal Gear. But I don't have to play them, and can live with missing them. GTA4 is coming to the 360 so that is fine with me.
• Just not convinced about the Wii at this stage. Would love to try one, as I think my wife would like it as well,just not sure how much it would offer to somewhat serious gamers.
• The achievement point idea on the 360 is great. I love trying to get all achievement points out of a game and increasing my gamerscore.

So that's about the crux of it. Just one console for me so I can try to finish more games. If I were to get a second I'd probably go for the Wii, as I'd just love to get my wife into some easy gaming that the Wii-mote offers. Let's hope I continue to remain faithful for my gaming sanity.

Oh broadband where art thou!

Just have to say quickly that I have been non-broadbanned for about 4 months now, AND IT JUST PLAIN S*CKS. Not only for online gaming on my 360, but just for the fact that my gamerscore and achievements are not updated and dial up Internet connection. Oh dial up blows.

What annoys me is I worked my butt off to get the black pearl cluster achievement on Hexic HD only for my score of 354K+ to not be recorded on the world wide leader boards which I'm sure would have put me up there nicely.

Once again I say not having broadband S*CKS.

Even though I have my Oblivion addiction going along nicely at the moment, I am having trouble getting on to the 360 at the moment because shock horror - my wife has been gettign on to it. Having recently acquired Texas Holdem Poker my wife is starting to get hooked on it.

Is the thing I have been hoping to occur for a long time finally going to come to pass, will my lovely wife join me on the game playing wagon. I can't realy see her playing Gears of War or anything like that, but the fact the she is willing to give games a go is very encouraging. She even got onto Guitar Hero II the other day when I brought it home which was quite fun to watch as she tried to play Cherry Pie.

Here's hoping that her gaming involvement continues.

Oblivion

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. What an absolutely brilliant game. So brilliant that it is sucking my life away with the amount of time I am spending on it. I am currently up to about 270 hours of game time on the game, as I am wanting to suck every last achievement point out of the game and complete every place that I find in the game world. It's just causing me too many late nights at the moment.

I have even gone to the level of creating a spreadsheet with all of the caves/places/Oblivion Gates that I have found and recording whether I have cleaned them out or not. Yes I am going a little bit crazy over it. But how can one not go crazy over a game that is so immersive and rich as Oblivion. For a game that was released at around the same time as the 360 the amount of work and polish that Bethesda has been able to fit on to one disk is phenomenal. Sometimes I just find myself standing around with the character and looking at the scenery thinking, I can't believe I can see the central city from here, up on top of this mountain.

Admittedly I am an RPG nutter from way back, but the attention to detail this game has really blew me away. If only I had a HD TV to play the game on, which is something I continually cry about into my bourbon.

Length of Games

On the subject of Bethesda packing in so much content on to one DVD, the question must be raised why the hell other game developers produce such questionably short games. When I am laying down $100 AUD for a game I want value for money, not something that will give me satisfaction for 10 hours and then finish in a blaze of non-glory. The multi player aspect is something that improves the length of game time - hello Halo 2 (and good to see multi player co-op over broadband coming more into play) but on the single player side of things I want something of substance and a reasonable length, 15-20 hours at least.

Maybe Oblivion is just one out of the box on that front, because I have read in a forum of one player being up around the 1100 hours mark in the game. That is just so crazy it is scary (secretly I wish I had the time to put that much into it, but I do have to sleep each day).

Achievement Points

I must say that the introduction of achievement points in the 360 has kept me playing games longer than I normally would in the effort to get those points. I think it is a great idea to extend the life of a game and the effort put in. I managed to get the black pearl cluster in Hexic HD which is something I am rather proud of, and hope to knock off the 100 game addict achievement at some point as well. Where ordinarily I would not come back to the game, getting these points entices me to try. Very good innovation.

I don't, I just don't get it. I was thinking about this topic the other day, and thought seeing as I had not put anything into the journal for a while, I may as well ramble my way on here. What is America's preoccupation (read hypocrisy) with the naked body appearing on television and more importantly games.

For example the biggest scandal to come out on television in the last couple of years in America is 'Nipplegate' where Janet Jackson "accidentally" flashed a whole breast (minus nipple which was covered) on television during half time of the super bowl, and the 'good american people' suddenly go into an uproar about indecency...blah blah blah. Showing a bit of flesh in a games is also considered a big no no, with games that attempt to do so (the average BMXXX and Playboy Mansion) being frowned upon. However this is not mainly about games but overall multimedia entertainment.

Yet this comes from a country where everyone has the constitutional right to carry a gun, huge amounts of movies are produced depicting various acts of killing, torture, and pain, not to mention that copious amounts of games that are developed solely on the basis of killing something, or more importantly someone. And now we have a game hitting stores that allows you to play as a cop who can get addicted to drugs of varying degrees of substance abuse and danger. As I said before, I just don't get it.

The message that I seem to be getting from American society is that it is OK to kill/torture/main someone, take a drug of dependence, or act in any other way that does not benefit society, yet as soon as it comes to seeing some flesh, oh my goodness cover your eyes. Here is yet another component of the hypocrisy, with America being one of the biggest producers of pornography in the world, but we can't show any flesh in main stream media.

Don't get me wrong, I love playing games where you run around shooting the hell out of other people, and I won't say no to a good porno, but I know the difference between fantasy and reality and where the line should be drawn, and making a game that includes drug dependence just crosses it in my books. I'm glad I live in a country that still views that as wrong.

As I said at the start though, the hypocrisy that I see..........I just don't get it!

To finish a game, or not to finish a game, that is the big question.

I wonder how many people are in this boat. You buy a new game, get it home, play it to death for a while and then put it aside because something else comes up. Of course, you have yet to finish that game completely and as a little bit of time passes you don't really play the game any more and you just don't finish it.

Then of course a new game comes out that you just have to buy (this happens so often) and the cycle repeats itself, meaning you end up with a lot of games that you just have not finished. Hell, I bought Metal Gear Solid 2 last Xmas because I got it for a great price, and I have not even touched it yet.

I have plenty of great games that I have not finished yet. Can you believe that I have not completed all the standard missions yet from GTAIII. This game has been out for years and is one of the defining games of the current industry, yet I have not even given it the courtesy of playing it right through to the end of the last standard mission.

Something that has been mentioned in the forums, is for an additional column for the My Collection page of GameSpot that indicates whether you have finished the game in your collection. I suggested one further to also have a text field that you can add a small comment, like you've finished it 100% or something.

Eventually my aim is to complete all the games I purchase. Which means that when the uni semester is over, I'm going to be really kicking into the games in an effort to start chalking up more on the completed section of the list I keep in a spreadsheet. This of course must also happen while I get Halo 2 and play it to death, and any other decent game I feel like purchasing. Is my work cut out for me...............I damn well think so.

As far back as I can remember I've always played games (board games, card games, computer games on the first hand held's, Atari, commodore 64, the list goes on). So you could say that gaming and a competitive streak started in me from a very early age.

You've got to question how that affects a person, like I have been doing lately, because quite frankly I just can't get enough of playing games. If I was being paid to review or test games then this would be a good thing, however when you don't have the luxury of living out the fantasy of millions of gamers, the need to play games can often be detrimental to your emotional state.

Like now for instance, being 10:51 pm, I could either be catching up on a lot of uni study that I am behind in, spending time with my wife, or catching up on sleep that never seems to be caught up. Instead I'm writing in a journal about gaming, and also wanting to play the X-Box, PS2 or getting on to NWN on the PC and actually trying to finish the game.

I guess it all comes down to will power and whether you feel you are doing the right thing, but one would have to question how a person ends up with an almost constant need to play games, almost to the detriment of everything else. Is it, like I've alluded to, the fact some people are playing games from such a young age that they just do not know how to stop when they reach their adult life, or is it the result of an over active mind that just needs something to challenge it continually.

I don't have the answer, perhaps if I could get motivated I'd take a risk, get a government grant and study the cause and effect of gaming on people from different age groups. But hey, that would mean I'd spend a fair bit of time watching people play and not doing it myself so that just can't happen.

It's interesting though, the rise of gaming and in particular gaming consoles in the last 10 years. Does it have to do with the fact that people are bored and just looking for something to do, or is that fact that people want an escape from reality and need any other reality to immerse themselves in. Maybe it's a combination of the two, but as their are many other things that people can be doing instead of playing computer games, it makes me think there's something a bit more complex behind it (subliminal messages anyone - for those conspiracy minded people out there). But this journal entry is not for figuring it out.

Well that's probably all the rambling I'm good for today, well not true, but all I could be bothered putting into coherent words. Who knows if I'll write in this journal again, but I think it's quite a good idea from GS that just compliments an already impressive website.

If anyone reads this, hoist a drink with me. If no one reads this, it's a bit like the tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it, does it make a noise.