No, I wasn't in the E.R. with life-threatening injuries. My HTPC/gaming rig was "transplanted" into a new Antec P182 mid-tower chassis and hooked up to my desktop LCD monitor. The five-hour (I was watching the hockey games at the same time, gimme a break) operation went smoothly, and the new case is very nice, I have to admit. I've never been a big fan of Antec's aesthetics, but now that I own one of their cases I can see why people like them so much.

The case is solid: it feels like a tank with all of the components installed. Very heavy and very sturdy. It also features speed-adjustable 120mm fans all around for quiet cooling performance. I took out the middle fan in the bottom power supply/hard disk compartment, as they did in the SPCR review. However, I mounted my hard disk in the upper HDD compartment, and placed a Nexus 120mm fan in intake mode in the front middle position. The fan blows across the hard disk, then across the bottom of the Thermalright HR-03 heatsink on my video card and out the rear expansion slot vents. The VGA cooler is installed in "Type 2" (reversed) orientation, and has a Nexus 92mm fan on it. I also reverted to my Thermalright XP-120 heatsink for CPU cooling, which is capped off with another Nexus 120mm fan. I had been using the Thermalright XP-90 in the smaller HTPC chassis.

With all those 120mm fans, a few of them being Nexus, the computer is very quiet. I still hear the hum of air exhausting out of the top and rear openings, and maybe a hint of fan noise, but it's very good for an initial build. I use laptop hard disks, and with the soft silicone grommets included in the Antec hardware kit, they are fully silent. The case has numerous other features for extra sound/vibration reduction, including three-layer side panels and soft silicone rubber feet.

Perhaps my favourite feature, though, is the ability to run nearly all of the cabling behind the motherboard mounting plate, as seen in the last photo on this page from the SPCR review. It's amazing how tidy the interior of the case is because of this cable-routing trick, and airflow should be virtually unrestricted.

Anyone looking for a nice HTPC chassis? I have a black Silverstone LC17 available in excellent condition! I also have a black Silverstone LC04 in very good condition. Send me a message if you're interested.

My friends and I have been playing LAN and online multiplayer games for many years. The first LAN parties were probably Doom-based, and then Doom II and Duke Nukem 3D after that. Some Warcraft mixed in there for good measure. Those were the early days of network gaming (not counting BBS games, of course).

We spent hours building ad hoc LANs out of fussy old SMC and 3Com Ethernet adapters, 10Base2 coax cable and T connectors (don't forget the terminators!); tweaking IRQ and DMA settings in clunky DOS drivers; eating kilos of pizza and drinking litres of Coca-Cola to get us through late-night frag sessions. Serious geek stuff. Maybe even nerd stuff. Yeah, definitely nerd.

Games and technology evolved and it's now easier than ever to play multiplayer games online or on a LAN, and yes, we're still playing them, although usually without the Coke (beer is now the fuel of choice) and the uber-late nights. A 2am session on a weekend is now considered a very late night.

Some good friendships have developed through computers and video games, and a few of us have been playing fairly regularly over the past few years. With gamers forming "clans" to play together online, we thought we'd start our own and called it Great White North, or "GWN" for short. We've had ideas about setting up a website, message board, etc. for our little clan (3-5 members is the most we've had). LGX even whipped up a few logos for us. Nothing significant ever materialized, however. Well now Gamespot makes it easy to organize a little web space for our group, in the form of Gamespot Unions. I just discovered this feature a few weeks ago, and thought it'd be a good way for the GWN to create a web presence and give us a forum to throw ideas around.

So without further adieu, I present the official Great White North Gamespot union! (This link will give you a message about the union not being established yet, until all four of our Charter Members confirm their membership. Soon!)

Oh, and on another very loosely-related note, the damaged Lian-Li case that I ordered last week from NCIX has been accepted for RMA, full refund. WOOT. I'm thinking about picking up an Antec P182, based on a recommendation and review from Silent PC Review about it being very suitable for building a quiet PC, which is essential for me if I'm to be able to leave it on all the time as a Windows Media Centre server. It's also much cheaper than the Lian-Li cases, a big bonus. Let me know what you think!

At last, after several attempts, I beat the last remaining Rock Band Solo Tour song on Expert, called "Green Grass and High Tides" by The Outlaws. It has two long solo sections making up probably 75% of the song's total length, the second of which is probably about 50% of the total song. I've figured out some fancy "tapping" patterns on the solo button section of the guitar for getting through the hard, fast parts of the solo. That solo button section really comes in handy, I don't think I could get through the song without it.

It's an awesome song, so much fun to play, and fun to listen to as well. There's a good YouTube video of someone playing the song through on Expert and earning five stars. I was only able to get four stars, but a little more practice and I think I'll be up to five.

By defeating that song, you earn the "Lord of the Strings" achievement for beating the Expert tour on guitar, but intuitively, they also give you the achievements for beating the Hard, Medium and Easy tours as well, so you don't have to go through all of those songs three more times just to get those achievements. Nice!

After that I played some "ranked" matches online, in "Tug of War" mode. It's the first time I've played online with Xbox LIVE, and was pretty fun. Tug of War sees the two opponents battling back and forth on alternating, and sometimes unison, sections of the song, with the "rope" being a graphical bar at the top that points more towards one player or the other as they best their opponent's skills. By winning five of these matches in a row, I also earned the "Tug of War Streak" achievement. I beat a few higher ranked players and got my ranking up to around 7,500th overall and level 25. The best players on the Leaderboards seem to be level 35 through 40.

I tried in vain again last night to get video to stream from my file server (running FUPPES) to my Xbox 360. I think I've installed all the necessary libraries for video decoding, and FUPPES seems to find and catalog my H.264-encoded MP4 files, but the videos don't show up at all on the Xbox 360. It says there are no videos available. I'll have to keep trying.

I managed to get FUPPES to list the songs in an album by track number, though, so it wasn't a complete waste of time. That was accomplished easily enough by checking out the latest version of FUPPES from the SVN repository and recompiling.

Ideally, I'll get Windows Media Centre going on my PC for watching TV and movies and listening to music on the Xbox 360. It's nice to have music streaming directly in the Xbox 360 Dashboard (via FUPPES), because it can play in the background while you're doing other things. Media Centre has a nicer interface, though, including browsing movie posters and album covers, and can also provide other applications to the Xbox 360 such as MCEBrowser, a web browser that you can use from your Xbox 360 by connecting to a Media Centre server with the plugin installed.

So I completed the Guitar Hero II tour on Expert on Saturday evening by finishing off the last two songs, "Hanger 18" by Megadeth, and "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

I'd previously attempted "Hangar 18" a few times and not been able to get through the extended solo section about two-thirds of the way through the song, but this time I beat it on the first try. There's been a bit of practice in the past couple weeks, maybe that helped!

"Free Bird" is an odyssey, to say the least. The game even asks, "Are you sure you want to play Free Bird?" when you select it from the list. It prompts you no less than three times to reconsider, and says "Only real Guitar Heroes can play Free Bird". I guess I must be a real Guitar Hero now!

The song begins easily enough, with a nice mellow introduction of the main melody, some pitch-bends and hammer-ons, but easy as far as Expert songs go. About a third of the way through the song, though, we encounter the first of many solo sections. The first few weren't so bad, as I'd saved up my Star Power until then and had no problem getting through the hardest parts, but it only gets faster and more intense after that, with less opportunity to collect easy Star Power sequences. I think the final solo sequence must be somewhere in the range of five minutes long, it just seems to go on forever! There was one point where I hit an easy Star Power sequence just in time to save myself from being booed off the stage, which allowed me to continue and eventually complete the song (first try!). It's a great song, and if you haven't played it yet, you should get to it.

Psycho and I went to the mall after hockey on Saturday to look for some games at EB Games. I bought Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for PC. He almost bought Call of Duty 4 on Darth80's reco, even though I was saying he should get it for PC instead of Xbox 360 because you need a keyboard and mouse for FPSes, in my opinion. He was also going to get Mario Kart Wii but held off to get MLB 2K8 later on, since we've been playing that a lot lately. It's a good game, notwithstanding a few annoying bugs (read/watch the Gamespot review for more info on that). The analogue stick controls are much more intuitive than the button-mashing of most (all?) other baseball games, and add an extra element of skill to simple things like throwing the ball to a base. It also has an extremely deep Franchise mode, including a 100-round fantasy draft, which I haven't gotten into yet, but he has.

I finally got FUPPES working correctly to organize my music by artist and then album in the Xbox 360 Media menu. It still lists songs within an album alphabetically instead of by track number, though, but that's all that's left to figure out.

The Lian-Li PC-A10B case I ordered from NCIX last week arrived on Friday with a big dent in the side (thanks Purolator). The box has a hole in the side and it looks like someone dropped something on it, so I RMA'd it this morning. It's a bit of a blessing in disguise, I guess, as hopefully they'll give me a refund so I can look again for the exact model I want. This one was a compromise as it's not as quiet or compact as the model I want. NCIX doesn't carry the PC-V1100 Plus II that I wanted in the first place, hopefully I can find it somewhere else in Canada.

LGX+ and I played some Guitar Hero III last night in co-op mode and scored a couple of achievements. When he left, I took another stab at the achievements that I mentioned in the last blog post, "Who Needs the Power" and "Star Mania". After a good warm-up playing co-op mode, I was ready to take the challenge!

The first one, "Who Needs the Power", was fairly easily accomplished on around my third attempt, scoring 201k on "Cult of Personality" on Hard without using Star Power. "Star Mania" on the other hand, was still challenging. "Through the Fire and Flames" on Expert is very difficult, but after about five attempts I was able to activate Star Power the required three times to earn the achievement. I still can't get past the "Synth Death" section of the song (around the 53% mark) without failing, but at least I got the achievement.

While I was at it, I figured I'd attempt some other achievements. It didn't take long to earn enough money to buy the sole remaining character (the "God of Rock") from the Store, earning the "Got 'em All" achievement. I then attempted to do "Whammy Mania", which requires you to use the whammy bar on every held note on "Number of the Beast". This was very difficult--I didn't know there were so many short held notes during the solo sections of that song! It's difficult to use the whammy bar in time before the note ends, and since I was playing on Hard difficult, there were a lot of notes, so I thought I'd try it on Easy. That gave me the idea to play through the career mode on Easy to earn that achievement. Then I figured that I might as well kill two birds with one stone and do the Easy career with "Lefty Flip" on: playing left-handed, guitar flipped 180 degrees! It took quite a while, but I eventually did it, earning the "Easy Rider" and "Hendrix Reborn" achievements. Then I went through and made sure I had all songs "five-starred" to earn another achievement, "Axe Grinder".

I noticed that it was definitely easier to whammy the held notes on "Number of the Beast" on Easy, since it had so many less notes and they were a bit slower. After a handful of attempts I was able to earn the "Whammy Mania" achievement that I had tried earlier.

A busy, but fruitful, night!

I've been playing some Guitar Hero III on the Xbox 360 lately and redoing things I already did months ago on the PC, like beating the game on Hard, just to unlock the achievements in the game. I really like the idea of these achievements, and the fact that all the games (all the ones I have, anyway) have them makes you want to play the game in different ways or with different goals--even games you've already played for a long time.

Last night, I tried to complete "Who Needs the Power", which is 200k points on "Cult of Personality" without using Star Power. Well the closest I got was 196k (on Hard). It seems that it's only possible by doing extremely well on Expert, or by doing the song perfectly on Hard. I don't think I can complete the song on Expert without using Star Power, it's got a ridiculously hard and long solo, but on Hard I could probably ace the song if it all came together at once. Some times I would do the solo perfectly and screw up something easier, like the first longer hammer-on phrase at the beginning, other times I would ace the rest and mess up a couple notes on the solo. Just can't seem to get it all perfect all at once.

A few nights ago I tried to do "Star Mania", where you need to activate Star Power three times on "Through the Fire and Flames" on Expert. I nearly got it every time I tried, but just couldn't quite do it.

However, even after failing many times, I kept trying, just to earn a little badge on my Xbox profile and some useless gamer points.

Which brings up the subject of these gamer points--what exactly are they for? My friend says they're nothing, just for bragging rights or whatever. I think Microsoft should let you convert them into Microsoft Points for purchasing things through the Xbox Live Marketplace. That would give people more incentive to play the games longer and try to unlock all of the achievements. It would be cool to earn some kind of tangible reward for playing your favourite games for hours on end. Like maybe you could download some new songs for Guitar Hero, or some bonus maps for Call of Duty 4. Or even rent a movie for free to unwind after that long gaming session. I guess I need to do some Googleing to find out what they're all about.

The biggest question is, though: do I replay the game on Easy and Medium and try to gold star every song to unlock more goodies? It's a huge waste of time, no doubt, but those profile badges and gamer points are tempting!

So why not write a blog on here? I've updated some other sections, like Games, Contacts, Images... might as well keep going!

I've been playing video games for what seems like forever. Ever since my dad bought my brother and I an Atari 2600 way back when I was 6 years old I think, 1981 was it? I still remember the Asteroids tournament they had at Devonshire Mall that year, where they had like forty 2600's setup in the middle of an open space, all playing Asteroids. That was awesome.

My mom, a teacher, brought home a Commodore PET computer once in a while from school, and we loaded games off the tape drive and played them in green-screen goodness. That was actually a really fun machine to play on.

I eventually got a Commodore Vic-20 and played a few games on it, although they were pretty boring compared to the ones on my friends' Commodore 64. The C64 was about as awesome a gaming machine that existed at the time, perhaps the best. It got me interested in computers, too. However, they were expensive, and so were the peripherals like the floppy disk drive, printer, and monitor (although you could simply use a TV with available composite video input), so we never had one at home.

Throughout grade school I went over to friends' houses and played games on their Commodore 64s, Nintendo, TurboGrafx-16, Sega and Sega Genesis. My uncle had a ColecoVision, and I thought it was a good system, with games like Donkey Kong and Looping. Of course, I played a bunch of video games at the arcades, which was mainly the corner store near my house, or the 7-Eleven near my friend's house. My friends and I eventually became friends with the owner of a large arcade in the city, and help him organize tournaments in exchange for loads of free games-that was the best.

Much later on, in Grade 11 of high school, my parents bought an AMD 386 DX-40 PC "for the family". Well I was the one who used it almost all of the time. A friend got me into BBSes, downloading games, and just generally messing around with it, figuring it all out. I read loads of Windows magazine, learning about all the available hardware and software, and spent lots of time playing (relatively) early PC games. The DX-40 was a fast machine, better than the Intel 486 SX series, but eclipsed by the Intel 486 DX series.

A PC upgrade didn't happen until a few years later in University, when I bought a used Intel 486 DX-33 from a friend. The CPU was later upgraded to a Intel 486 DX2-66, purchased from another friend. I was using it for school programming projects, Internet access, office applications, and of course, gaming. Gaming started to become more of a priority, and so I eventually splurged and bought a brand-spankin' new Intel Pentium 166 MMX and a 3Dfx Voodoo (the 6MB version!) video card. This was a revolution in terms of performance and graphical capabilities! We were playing a lot of Doom II, Duke Nukem 3D, and then Quake--GL Quake, to be precise... how unbelievable was that game? But perhaps the most significant game of my career came shortly after this: Unreal. The game I'd been waiting for all my life! Using the power of the Voodoo, then later a 32MB Diamond Stealth Riva TNT2 Ultra, Unreal and its descendants changed my life (for better or worse, I still don't know!).

That same PC was later upgraded to an AMD K6 233 courtesy of another friend, then another whole-system upgrade to an AMD Athlon 800 "Thunderbird" which gave way to an Athlon XP 2400+ then an Athlon 64 3700+, and now, finally, an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600.

Video cards have come and gone, starting with the lousy onboard VGA (maybe 256KB) of the 386 motherboard, then a 512KB Trident (I think), a 4MB S3 Virge DX, the aforementioned 3Dfx Voodoo and Diamond Stealth TNT2 Ultra, then a (mediocre) 64MB GeForce 2 MX400, a (also mediocre) 128MB GeForce 4 MX440 8x, a decent 256MB GeForce FX 5900XT, 512MB GeForce 7600GS (chosen for its passive cooling for use in my HTPC), and currently in use is a 640MB GeForce 8800GTS.

A couple weeks ago I finally picked up an Xbox 360 Elite, only my second console (the Atari 2600 being the first!), and have been playing some fun games on it: Rock Band, Guitar Hero II and III, NHL 08, and MLB 2K8. I like that I can stream music and video from my PC and Linux server to it, and it may well replace the HTPC, which will be disconnected from the TV this week and reattached to my desktop LCD monitor for PC gaming, the traditional way!