GameSpot does not want you to criticize their advertisers, no matter how much they deserve it. If you do, you will be punished by having your comment removed and points taken away. Not that this means much of anything to me, but some people here might find this reason enough to not say what they really feel, which is a shame.

GameSpot is struggling to survive, as are all web-based media whose very survival rests on the ever-shrinking advertising revenue they generate. That is why you are not allowed to criticize GS' advertisers when posting comments about the "news" that is published here. Oh, and do not try to criticize GS for what they publish, either! GS is very sensitive and cannot stand having their editorial choices questioned by mere readers.

So, the moral GS would like for this story is do not say anything about GS or their advertisers that is not complimentary. That isn't the real moral, of course, but it is the one GS hopes you take away when you get those ToS Violation emails, which never tell you what it is you posted that was so grievously wrong or morally reprehensible.

I will not be buying the Orange Box. I really like Half-Life 2 and Episode 1. I have already purchased them once so that I could play them whenever I want to. I do not feel the need to purchase them again just to get Episode 2. I don't care about Team Fortress 2 and I don't care about Portal. I was willing to buy the Black Box to get Episode 2, but there is no way in Hell that I am going buy the Orange Box and end up with another copy of HL2 and Episode 1! Everyone I know that wanted HL2 already has it, so I would be stuck with additional copies, which amounts to wasted money. I hate wasting money, so that isn't going to happen.

The ESRB handed Rockstar an Adults Only (AO) rating for their upcoming title "Manhunt 2". Because this title was only coming out on Sony and Nintendo systems, which do not permit AO-rated games for their systems, Rockstar has a limited set of options available to them. In case you're wondering, Microsoft does not allow AO games for its consoles, either.

Option one, which would be a best case scenario for Rockstar, is to appeal the ESRB rating and win an Mature (M) rating for Manhunt 2. An M rating would allow the game to be released as scheduled.

Option two would be to tone the game down enough to make it to the M territory. This would mean a delay in the release of the game, but the game would eventually be released. Given the nature of this game, this may not be a realistic option.

Option three, rework the game and release it on the PC. It will still have an AO rating, which would keep it out of just about every retail outlet on Earth, but it could potentially be sold via digital distribution channels or Take-2 could sell it directly to consumers.

The option I'd like to see Rockstar and Take-2 choose is what I call Option four. Option four is to not release the game at all and seek some counselling for the issues that are clearly sitting at a slow boil in the employees of Rockstar and Take-2.

Why do I say that? Because no one in their right mind would think a "game" where the object is to maim, torture and kill people for fun is a game that should be made, let alone played. Yes, many other games feature killing the enemy. Those games, however, usually have an objective above and beyond mass murder for the sake of committing mass murder, such as rescuing hostages, saving the country and saving the world.

Manhunt 2 has no redeeming value. It does not make a socially relevant statement. It is in no way "pushing the envelope". Manhunt 2 is nothing more than an exercise in extremely poor taste on the part of the developers and extremely bad judgement on the part of Take-2. I am completely against censorship, but I am equally against just plain senseless.

As some of you may be aware, I have Road Runner as my Internet access provider. As you may also be aware, I have been less than ecstatic about the service I have been provided by this subsidiary of Time Warner. Nothing illustrates this better than the visit I had from a Road Runner tech this afternoon.

My Internet connection was being its usually flaky self this week. After having no connectivity all day Wednesday, I made an appointment to have a tech come and see if he could determine why Road Runner sucks so badly, at least at my house. As is typically the case, once I made the appointment, everything started working. It worked for two days straight, which is unusual at my house.

So, thinking that Time Warner may have actually gotten their act together, I canceled the service call. You can probably guess what happened next. If you can't, I'll tell you. My Internet connectivity disappeared within an hour of my canceling of the service call. To say that I was not happy would be a severe understatement.

My wife was willing to call Time Warner for me and see if she could get the appointment reinstated. Since I was extremely upset with Time Warner, I agreed. She was able to get the appointment back on the books for today without much trouble. Had I called, I probably would have gotten us banned from using any Time Warner service ever again.

The technician arrived at about 1:30PM, which happened to be within the 11:00AM to 2:00PM I had originally been given for today's previous appointment. The tech checked out the modem, the signal amplifier in the basement, and the connection outside. What he found nearly sent me into an apoplectic fit.

It turns out that there are two cables coming into our house. One is for the television signal and one is for our broadband Internet connection. In the four years we have lived here, we have had at least six visits regarding out Internet and/or television service. None of the previous technicians ever found that the two cables were mis-connected at the box on the side of our house.

The reason they were mis-connected is due to the fact that they were mis-labeled. How they got to be mis-labeled is a mystery, at least to me. The important thing is that they are now correctly connected and this correction should improve the performance of both our television and Internet services, not to mention my blood pressure.

I'm a bit of a pack rat, just ask my wife. I am, however, pretty selective in the things I keep. For example, I keep all the boxes to my hardware and software, but I do not keep most of the dozen or so magazines I subscribe to much longer than two months. This particular habit has proved quite valuable a number of times, particularly when I am selling hardware I no longer need.

The reason I bring this up is two-fold. One, I have a scanner that came with a slide adapter that a friend just happens to be interested in purchasing from me. This particular scanner is about seven years old. Had I not kept everything that came with it, including the box it originally came in, I might not have been able to sell it. Selling it gets it out of my basement and makes my wife happy, which is a very good thing.

The second reason I bring this up is that, while looking for the slide adapter for the scanner I sold, I happened across some true gaming gems from the days of DOS. For those of you too young to remember DOS, think of Linux, but without graphics. Those of you old enough to remember creating autoexec.bat files for individual games and having to know the memory address ranges required by your sound card will probably remember the games I stumbled across this evening.

The first gem I came across was Might & Magic III: Islands of Terra. I remember spending nearly a hundred hours playing one of the milestone games in a storied franchise. I also found a copy of the very first Alone in the Dark game from back in 1993. Back then, this game was ahead of its time. Heck, there are gameplay elements in this game that still hold up today. Clive Barker's Undying is the only other game I've played that had the same "jumping out of your skin" impact that I experienced playing Alone in the Dark.

Alone in the Dark also had a very clever copy protection mechanism. The game included a little booklet filled with images of objects in the game. In order to start the game, you had to correctly tell the game the page number of the object it asked you for. No StarForce, no checks for virtual drive software, just a simple question that could (at least then) only be answered if you had a complete copy of the game.

I know that I won't load and play my copy of Alone in the Dark. I have too many fond memories to subject one of my favorite gaming experiences to the harsh reality of today's hardware. While Alone in the Dark was a ground-breaking game in its day, technology has a cruel way of turning nostalgia into something far more sinister. I'm leaving my nostalgia safely tucked inside the cardboard box it came in.

The talking heads (and those that speak from another, lower, portion of their anatomy) will offer up their typically half-baked theories on this, each one more half-baked than the last. Some will point to Virginia's fairly lax gun laws and blame them, even though he could have made his purchases in any state in the Union. Then there will be the candidate's for President making what they believe to be perfectly sensible remarks, no matter how off-base those remarks might be.

What no one with political aspirations will do, however, is call for stricter gun control measures at the Federal level. This is because they all want the votes of the NRA membership. Backing gun control at the Federal level is political suicide, unless your last name is Kennedy.

What all these candidates will do, though, is jump on the violence bandwagon and start blaming violent media in all its forms, television, movies and video games. They will do this because it is easy, not because there is any scientific evidence that links violent media, in any form, to causing violent behavior.

The mainstream media will jump on this as well, for the same reason. They have no end of sound bite producing 'experts' ready and willing to espouse the same tired arguments to anyone and everyone, whether they are willing to listen or not. Given mainstream media's dislike for actual debate, anyone willing and able to refute the barrage of blather will be left standing in silence, unheard and unwated by the media powers-that-be.

The saddest part of this terrible tragedy will be in the zero-sum effect it has on politics, gun laws, and sensationalized media. Six months from now, this will be something you can ony read about if you do some pretty diligent searching on the Internet for archived articles and video clips. This is my fear and I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong.

Silverfall was released this week and should be sitting on a store shelf right now. The amazing part about this is that the scheduled release date was 3/27/2007. That means Atari released Silverfall a week early! When is the last time that happened? S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was released this week, as well. It, however, has been indevelopment for years and was originally due out back when DirectX 8 was new. Plenty of mention is made of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s extended development time, but no mention at all (that I am aware of, anyway)  has been made of the fact that Silverfall shipped early. Why is that? 

Saturday morning started off in a typical fashion. I checked my email, paid some bills online and read some online comics. I then shut down my PC to go out and run some errands with every intention of returning and installing my new FX-60 and 8800GTX. I got the CPU installed without issue, but the graphics card (which is nearly 11 inches long) required some time and effort to finally get onto my ASUS A8N32-SLI motherboard. I hit the power button on my case and waited to see if I would be rewarded for my efforts. What happened next was the stuff of nightmares. There was a slight whine, which I believe was coming from the fan on the 8800GTX, and everything seemed to be going in the right direction. Then, there was a pop. The pop sounded very much like the one you get from bubble wrap (the big bubbles, not the little ones). Then I saw a small puff of smoke. I immediately pushed on the power button, which is supposed to kill the power after a few seconds. In the two seconds I was holding down the power button, I heard a succession of three more pops, each one louder than the last and accompanied by more smoke. I then hit the switch on my PSU and killed power to my system. After a bout of cursing, I opened up the case and looked for what had fried. My first concern was for my new video card, followed closely by my concern for my new CPU and hard drives. I took the video card out and could not see any damage nor smell any burnt components on it. I did find something underneath it on the motherboard, however. At first, I didn't recognize it, because I hadn't seen one rolling around loose before. It was only after I picked it up that I recognized this little cylindrical shape as a capacitor from my motherboard. It wasn't until after I removed the CPU and heatsink that I saw the extent of the damage. Four of the capacitors around the CPU socket had blown. I proceeded to replace the non-defunct motherboard with an MSI RX480 Neo2-F motherboard I had received on Friday in the same package as the FX-60 CPU. I got everything reinstalled, hit the power button and nothing happened. Thinking that perhaps my 1100W Tagan PSU had been fried along with the motherboard, I replaced it with a 650W Spire PSU I had used prior to the Tagan. Still nothing. I figured that perhaps the power switch had been a victim of the overload event and I would need to use a different case. At this point, I had already spent four hours trying to rebuild my PC, including the time spent on the initial upgrade. After asking my wife if I should press on or wait until tomorrow (Sunday). She suggested waiting. She's smart like that. So, Sunday morning I took a look at the four cases I have in the back of the closet in my office. While they aren't bad cases, all of them would provide the same challenge to installing the 8800GTX that I had experienced the previous day. That reality, coupled with my need to purchase a replacement mouse for my wife, led me to conclude that I would be best served by seeing what the local Best Buy had on hand in the way of cases. While I was at it, I figured I would get a new power supply, too. I went to Best Buy without much of an expectation of finding a case that could accommodate the 8800GTX I was still hoping would be functional. I walked in and went over to the very meager selection of cases and power supplies. Fortunately for me, one of the three cases on the shelf was an Antec 900. This case comes with four fans installed; three 120mm fans with blue LEDs and one 200mm fan in the top! All of the fans have a three-way switch on them, which I set to Low on each fan. It has nine total bays, all of them 5.25" with two removeable cages of three 3.5" bays each. This would allow me to install all five of my hard drives, my floppy drive, my Creative X-Fi I/O Drive and both of my optical drives in such a fashion that I would have no trouble getting the 8800GTX installed! I also picked up a new Antec TruePower Trio 650 power supply and my wife's replacement mouce (a Logitech LX300). It took me the better part of Sunday afternoon to get everything installed into the Antec 900 and the wiring is a complete mess, but my PC booted on the first try! Things weren't all rosy, however. Having a different chipset on the new motherboard confused the heck out of everything. I was able to get GRUB working again (Linux boot loader that let's me choose to boot into Linux, XP or Vista) and then I was able to do an in-place upgrade on XP to get it working without losing any of my data or reinstalling any applications. Once I got the motherboard and network drivers installed in XP, I was able to go out and re-apply 68 security updates from Microsoft. Everything seems to be working just fine now.

Today is the day Microsoft officially launches the consumer versions of Vista. Microsoft will be spending a fairly large fortune in marketing campaigns to let you know just how wonderful Microsoft thinks Vista is and why you need to have it. Don't be fooled. You need Vista like you need a bullet in your brain. Microsoft will tout Vista's increased security and ease of use, two things that have traditionally been mutually exclusive. Vista doesn't change that paradigm. In fact, Vista gives that paradigm several new twists by making it harder than ever to use your PC the way you want. Installing new software? Be prepared to click "OK" many times per program you want to install. You see, Vista doesn't think you're smart enough to install software that won't compromise or harm your system, so it will ask you over and over again to validate the action you are undertaking by clicking on the "OK" button every time the program you are installing wants to copy an executable file to your hard drive. Not once per software package, once per file with an exe extension. Thinking about using your PC as a media center? You'd better make sure that the hardware in your PC AND the devices you want to connect to all have digital connections available. Vista's built-in DRM will downgrade the quality of copyrighted content played over an analog channel. That means your 30" LCD monitor might end up playing your HD DVD back at 480p if it and your video card are not HDCP compliant. Oh, and forget about EAX coming from your Creative X-Fi sound card. Vista doesn't support it and Creative hasn't released a new driver to remedy that lack of support. I've stated this before and I still believe it to be true: Microsoft just may do to itself something that no competitor has been able to do, push people to a different OS.

I will no longer use FedEx or buy from any store online that does not give me an option not to use FedEx! FedEx has jerked me around for the last three days over a package that should have been delivered on 11/28/2006. When I called to inquire as to why my package hadn't arrived yet, the 'helpful' young lady on the phone said it was because of the local weather. The weather didn't get bad Wednesday until well after 4:00PM. Thursday was pretty bad, so I gave them a pass on that day. But, yesterday was sunny and clear all day long! Hell, FedEx delivered two other packages yesterday, one in the morning and one in the afternoon!

In the meantime, I have received two other deliveries from UPS on days that FedEx claimed local weather was an issue. The part that really pisses me off is that the package FedEx HAS NOT delivered is part of a $1500 set of parts I'm selling to a guy in Brazil. Now, I may lose that sale, but still be stuck with the parts for it. Yes, I can sell the parts to someone else, but that isn't the point.

I am done with FedEx, period.