Turned out my PC rebooting problems were entirely due to the power supply and not related to the video card at all. Oh well, at least I got a GeForce 6600 out of it. It's interesting to me that a PC with an inadequate power supply would actually function 90% of the time. I could surf the web and do other non-demanding tasks on my machine with no problems. It was only when I tried functions that required more juice that problems arose. Oddly enough I didn't get any "blue screen of death" problems until I swapped out the video card for the GF6600. But I'd get weird glitches, spontaneous reboots, and other fun stuff. I finally added up the potential power draw of all the components in my system and it turned out to be surprisingly high. New power supply, and all problems fixed.

It's 7 AM on a Saturday and I've been awake for an hour minding the baby. She's eating apples and cheerios and watching tv. I'm buying video cards and checking up on the GameSpot servers. My housemate bought a video projector for the media room and we've got it set for a completely ludicrous 150" diagonal throw. Unfortunately it makes you acutely aware of the crappiness of every video format other than HDTV. We hooked it up to my PC (which has an HDTV card) for the Super Bowl and that was pretty impressive, except my PC kept rebooting itself. Hence the new video card. I probably need a new power supply too but I'm dirt poor right now so one thing at a time. I went to see Meat Beat Manifesto on Thursday. Probably the 37th time I've seen them live and it just never gets old. They're on tour now so make sure you go see them if they come to your town. I guarantee you have never seen a show like this one. My current favorite album is One Way Ticket To Hell... and Back! by The Darkness. It's like some ridiculous blend of Queen, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard and Spinal Tap. Produced by Roy Thomas Baker, who is probably one of the top 10 rock producers of all time (Devo, The Cars, Queen, Bowie, Cheap Trick... loads more), it sounds huge and polished with millions of layers of vocal and guitar overdubs (very very Queen). It makes me laugh. How can you not love a line like "You're beautiful and busty / But I'm a little rusty / I've forgotten what to do"? Or, a song with those metal staples, the Tubular Bells of Doom, and a lyric about going bald (the ultimate rocker nightmare!) Speaking of Queen, if you have a surround system, there's a surround version of A Night At The Opera which sounds unbelievable. I played Bohemian Rhapsody for my housemate, who is not a huge classic rock fan, and he was totally gobsmacked. I've been playing around with mixing my own music in surround. Kind of a drag since I don't have a way to monitor it at the computer, but it's also sort of a neat challenge trying to imagine how all the placements will sound. Probably like drawing with your eyes closed. When you finally get to open them, did it come out the way you imagined it would? At work I've been making unglamorous but necessary improvements to our user signup and ad delivery systems. Sounds dull but the weeks are just flying by. Every time I actually stop to think about how long I've been working here, or how long I've been married, or how I have a daughter growing up faster than my brain can keep pace with, it just makes me dizzy.

You can now upload your own user icon, profile icon, profile banner, and blog banner image files. Check out the "avatar & images" and "blog" prefs tabs. We store the files and serve them for you straight off our wicked hi speed network. No more messing around with imgbucket or similar. Hope you enjoy the new feature.

I don't know the last time I had a vacation. It was some time before my baby girl was born. I think it was after my honeymoon too, at least I hope so. I'm leaving (on a jet plane) tomorrow for London, England. I've never been there and I've been wanting to go since I was about 12, so this is pretty exciting to me. Even more exciting is that I'm being paid to go there to play a live show at an underground electro party. If any GS readers in London are old enough to go to bars, check out Alt Ctrl for info. I'm playing at 2.30 AM apparently. I've got some amazing tunes that I think will make people's heads explode. That's the plan anyway. You can catch a sneak peak of what I'm playing here (warning: 20MB download). This will be the first time I've been out of contact with the GameSpot office in a very long time. Normally I'm the guy that gets called when stuff melts late at night or on a weekend. I won't have internet access in England. I won't even have a cell phone. I gave a little presentation to the gang on how to fix stuff, though, and I know that I'm leaving things in the hands one of the most talented groups of people I've ever had the pleasure of working with. See you all next week. Be good. Don't break stuff!

My housemate is addicted to Ninja Gaiden Black, and it's all my fault. I put the Xbox in the downstairs media room while I was upgrading it (new bigger quieter hard disk, replacement dvd drive since the old one gave the "disc is dirty" message every 30 minutes or so). He ended up staying up all night playing. Don't get me wrong, it's not like either he or I are actually any good at it. We are Ninja Dogs through and through, and Ayane is constantly having to rescue our sorry butts. Last night I watched him fail to kill the tentacle boss about 10 times before he threw the controller against the wall in frustration. "It's not fun any more" he announced. I said, "That's a shame because the game is actually pretty cool." He said, "I can't believe there's no cheat codes or anything." I fired up the PC and started surfing. GameFAQs didn't have any love for me, but, a few minutes of hardcore Googling later, I found my salvation in the form of a game trainer. For those who don't know, "trainers" are Gameshark-like patches that override the programming of the game. In other words, it gives you cheat codes that the designers didn't specifically hide in the game. In the case of NGB, this trainer pack provides options like infinite health, infinite ninpo, infinite money, one hit kills, and much more. We put on infinite health, ninpo and one hit kills and fired it up. After some initial confusion over how to use it, we got it working, and MAN what a difference! The game is actually FUN again. Sure, there's absolutely no challenge at all in the fighting, but that's just fine with us! When you get to our advanced age, the biggest challenge in video games is actually finding time to play them, and then keeping your wrists and fingers from cramping due to carpal tunnel syndrome or other RSI problems. Personally, I get a lot of enjoyment from audio/visual experience of gaming, and if the gameplay is fun, that's icing on the cake. But so much gameplay these days seems aimed at teens with 20 hours a day free to spend playing and figuring out all the secrets. You could call me a casual gamer, or a crusty old fart who is stuck in the past, or a way-too-busy Director of Technology-slash-Loving Husband & Father, but that's just the way it is these days. I look forward to the day when my daughter is old enough to start playing the games, so I can let her get through all the hard parts, but that day is still far in the future. So, NGB with no challenge may sound stupid to some of you, but for me and my buddy, it was the perfect way to unwind for an hour after a week of work. We got to see the cool levels, the cutscenes, appreciate the audio presentation on the kicking 5.1 system we have, and there was still some gameplay left in the exploration and puzzle solving. Being able to take out an entire army of enemies in 10 seconds with nothing but some judiciously-aimed exploding shurikens is actually pretty exciting. Bring on the easy, short games!

I always said I would never be a mobile gamer. I laughed with smug superiority when Ed Helms on the Daily Show ripped on the Nokia Spiderman game: "It's a completely immersive... 1 inch by 3/4 inch experience... Really the old downside is you're a 36 year old man excited about playing Spiderman on your cell phone." Unfortunately it's my sad duty to admit that my name is Jon, and I am a mobile game-a-holic. Well, really it's only one game: Bejeweled 2. And it's not really a "mobile game" per se as you don't download it via a cell carrier. It's an app that I had to download and install on my Treo 650 the old fashioned way: with a hotsync cable. Watch me rationalize, isn't it charming. B2 (as we addicts call it) is the perfect puzzle game - you can play it quickly or get sucked in for hours. It has power ups. It has simple graphics that do the job perfectly. It has the classic "just one more try and I can beat my high score" addiction power. I play it while waiting for the train. I play it on the train. I play it after dinner. I can't STOP. Part of the reason is that I have a personal mission to destroy Ballgame's high score. But mainly it's just super fun, addictive, and doesn't leave me feeling a crippled wreck afterwards (like last night's Unreal Tournament 2004 session did). Damn you Pop Cap Games. Damn you Astraware! Now where did I leave off? Oh yes, on level 7 with 14000 points...

If you use the internet at all you can't have missed the rise of BitTorrent. With a decent net connection, the world's your TiVo. I missed the first episode of Lost, because I thought it looked stupid from the commercial. Someone told me it was actually really good, so I downloaded it off the net. It was great! So I programmed a season pass in my TiVo as normal and waited. Next week I watched it, but something seemed different. I downloaded the same EP the next day and sure enough, the downloaded version looked *much* better! Letterboxed, better colors, better detail. Turns out most people are using the HDTV broadcasts to create the internet versions. I'm paying something like $70 a month for DirecTV + TiVo and it's not as good quality as a 350MB internet download. Something is super wrong with that. Here's where the broadcast industry needs to go: Continue as normal with ad-supported broadcasting. No need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. In addition, make internet subscriptions available for those who want them. Offer the shows without commercials, in decent quality format. Maybe throw in some extra scenes or behind the scenes stuff as a 1-5 minute bonus on the end. Make it available day and date with the broadcast, or even a day earlier. I would totally pay money to know that I'm gonna get a near-DVD quality experience, with no commercials, no logos, no announcers talking over the credits, none of those annoying animated-bugs-with-sound advertising some movie of the week that there's NO WAY IN HELL i'm ever gonna watch popping up over the show itself. People are already buying lots of shows on DVD. I just don't understand that. How many times do you need to see an episode of CSI anyway? I think this could work. It won't stop people determined to download shows for free, but I think a lot of people would pay to not have to hassle with BT tracker sites that are slow/unavailable/being prosecuted by the MPAA and weird client software. What do you think?

For the last 2 years, gamespot has been running on a web platform that is mostly my brainchild. And for the last 2 years, E3 has killed us in terms of server overload. First year it was a fault in the code cache module that only showed up under crazy load (like, say, E3). It started leaking memory until the machines would croak. I remember sitting there with 6 windows open on each of the servers, hitting restart every 5 minutes to try to keep things going, until I figured out the root problem and pulled the module. Last year, no cache, but still plenty of problems, including some database code that was extremely inefficient. I fixed what I could, and The CNET IT team delivered us 16 extra boxes in record time. I kept telling them I only needed 2 or 3, but who listens to me. It takes so long to set up a new box that the show would have been long gone before all 16 were configured. This year we decided to take no prisoners. We started almost a month ago on beefing up the infrastructure. Our programmers scoured their code for optimization opportunities. We added machines to our existing data center. The real coup de grace though is that we set up 20 extra machines, at the other end of the country. Now if a missile strike takes out Northern California we will STILL be able to serve E3 content. (We won't be able to publish new content, because the master publishing system is in N. Cali, but oh well! Hopefully I will be annihilated in the nuclear explosion along with the publishing system, so I won't have to worry about setting up the new one.) Despite our best plans, of course, Monday was an insane deluge of instant messenging, delving into the deepest mysteries of unix and network internals, performance profiling, and last-minute recompilation and configuration changes. Somehow we got through it and served up almost twice our normal amount of traffic. I tracked down one of the lingering problems this morning and that seems to have put the east coast data center on the rails. Obviously I don't want to start relaxing yet because the show hasn't even officially started! E3 is a wily beast and she's always got surprises up her sleeve. Right now we're in the eye of the hurricane. Will the wind rip us to pieces? Stay tuned!

I had a two week break over the holidays/new years so I got to catch up on some games that I had abandoned. Far Cry (PC): I started this when it came out, got through about three levels and put it away. When I picked it up again I remembered why: this game is hard as a mother, even on Easy. I had to cheat once or twice and use the Save Anywhere trick just to get through it. I wound up skipping the boss battle with Crow entirely, after failing 50 times. (did I mention - on Easy!?) Lordy. Apart from that, I found myself rather enjoying it. The ending was strangely abrupt though. After playing it I decided to try to go back and finish Doom 3 but I think I'm just going to give up on it once and for all. The weapons are so chintzy compared to Far Cry's, and running around blindly in the dark is all sorts of no fun any more. Jet Set Radio Future (XBOX): I loved the first JSR on Dreamcast, although I never finished it. I'm not very far into JSRF but it's love all over again. Style, style, style. Good tunes too, although I'm so bad at the game that I have to hear the same ones over and over and over again. If I hear "Alison" or "Birthday Cake" again I may go insane. I'm gonna finish this one if it kills me (and given the way my arm is throbbing today, it may well succeed.) Simpsons Hit & Run (XBOX): Really old now but I'm back in the Simpsons mood since the Season 5 DVD set is out (Hallelujah! S5 best season ever? I'm thinking yes...) What a great game this is for Simpsons fans. So many obscure references crammed in. You can tell the developers were fans, or had some fans consulting, or something. I'm playing as Lisa (Floreda) and I just watched that one on DVD. "I'm not a state, I'm a monster!" "The only monster here is legalized gambling... I call him GAMBLOR!" Frequency (PS2): Diving even further back into the mists of time.... Well, I was cleaning out all my game discs as I'm moving the non-essential items to storage at the new house. I love music/rhythm games, and this is one of the best. Any game with a Meat Beat Manifesto track in it is worth the time of day, in my book. If you haven't fallen asleep yet from reading, happy new year!

So the video card saga is over. I bought a $10 video card chipset fan from Vantec which solved all my problems. And it makes my case glow with an eerie blue glow too! Finally I don't feel like such a chump for not having any funky illumination for my case's clear window. I got a few hours with HL2 in this weekend. Great game. Still amazing fun, even with my "ancient" GF4 video card. I wish I could run with some antialiasing though. Maybe I'll try 800x600 and 2x AA. I finished Halo 2. This is pretty amazing, because I don't think I've finished a game for years. The ending is, shall we say, abrupt. I didn't like that part so much, but the rest of the game was a blast. I started Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. The puzzles are great fun. The combat is irritating and cheap, even on Easy. The new "dark n edgy" attitude is a little on the cheesy side, but not too bad. The one thing I really hate is when you're in these boss fights, the Prince and his opponent will yell out stuff like "Now you die!" and "It takes more than that to hurt me!" It's not done well at all. For one thing, you're supposedly jumping around and swinging swords with all your might. The voice delivery should be like "It takes... (huff) more than... (argh) that... to hurt (pant) me!" But instead it just sounds like some guy in a voiceover studio yelling out a macho line, which is what it is.