So i finished bioshock at around 12:30am, which was like.... 20minutes ago, and it rocked pretty **** hard.... This game completely lived up to how much i'd hyped it up for myself by raving on about it to my friends pre-release, and the demo strengthened my conviction that this game was going to be great, and it was. It had a very good twist, and the gameplay was superb, as was the atmosphere. I'm just sad that its over lol.

I'm sure i'll end up playing it over tho considering that i got an ending thats not the good one heh.

So yah, bioshock was freaking sweet.

The demo was awesome, short but awesome. This game will probably be as good as i hoped it would be.

Graphics are amazing too.

Just had to say that lol....

So, since my last blog i have leveled my World of Warcraft Character to 70 and now i dont know what to do lol. I could raid, i could pvp, but right now i dont feel like doing any of that. Not because i'm bored but because there is alot of stuff that i could do and i just dont know where to start. That and the fact that i dont earn xp anymore is a weird feeling. Somehow when i turn in a quest only to get money and no xp even tho i'm at the level cap it just feels off for some bizzare reason. I'm sure i will get used to it though.

As some people may know by now, i now have an xbox 360. Yes... after all that ranting **** i actually bought the microsoft console. Kinda hipocritical huh?.

Meh, i'm happy with the console so far and so far my cpu hasnt burnt out so i'm happy. I swear that that is the reason why these things 3 red light. Cause the cpu's burn out or because microsoft uses shoddy heatsinks and fans to cool the cpu or something like that. I mean the smaller process will help for sure when they finally go to it but.... 90 isnt unmanagement with a proper cooling solution.

Out of the 7 games i currently own for 360 i've only finished 2 though. The Darkness and Gears of War, but with gears of war i didnt even make any real progress in the game until a friend and i played it Co-op. I just couldnt be bothered playing it on my own.

So besides all of this i've been reading thomas covenant... I've read another 4 chapters of it today, and am enjoying it so far. For a while i couldnt find the motivation to read but i got what i needed again when i decided to read clive barkers cabal again.

Alright, so long time no blog....

I started writing one a short while ago but something happened with gamespot's posting process and i never ended up posting it. So i'll start over. I will admit that the reason why i havent been here for a while is partially because of world of warcraft, although it beg's the question as to why i was able to maintain my myspace and facebook and not my gamespot page hehe.

Anyhow, i'm currently level 68 on my character, which means only 2 more levels before i reach the level cap for the expansion pack. But for now i'm taking a break. But for how long?, i dont know yet... i'll play it by ear and see what happens. I want to take at least a week though. This is the longest time i've played WoW without quitting, but i know that if i dont slow down and take a break now, i'm going to end up burning myself out.

I think the thing i've enjoyed most about playing WoW this time around is being able to talk to Jimmie Regularly. Flan will known Jimmie as hermit from Gamerz Unite. But i have met and made quite a few new friends too on the game, who are hella fun to talk to.

So besides WoW, i picked up resident evil 4 wii edition last monday, i was doubtful while purchasing it though. I'd played the PS2 version and loved it and its extra's, and had only finished it once so i hadnt over played it, but i wasnt sure if i was wasting my money or not. Well considering i dont have the ps2 version anymore and i wanted an excuse to play my Wii since i never do, this provided a good one.

Much to my surprise, the motion controll's in the game are great and to me do not feel tacked on or lame. Aiming is easier than ever and i find that things i found a little tricky to do on the controller are alot easier now. For some reason when i was playing this game on PS2 i used to have problems sometimes timing a melee kick after knocking an enemy off balance and pressing the button at the right time. With the Wii controll's this all seems to be easy. Getting headshots is easy and efficient and your response time seems to be reduced quite a bit which is good for me being normally a mouse and keyboard player on PC with shooting games.

its a pity that the Wii isnt a more powerful console however, cause i would have loved to have seen Resident Evil 5 on wii with motion controll's also, as much asi want to play RE5 on any console, i'm gonna feel weird going back to a normal controller after this.

The game includes the extra's out of the ps2 version with the gamecube versions graphics, which are an improvment over the ps2 versions that i had a while back.

All of this said though, i wouldnt say that this game is an essential purchase if you have already played the game, but i definatly think its the best version of the game you can get. So any wii owners out there that havent played this classic before, should definatly check it out. Or if your a douche like me and you sold your copy on another console and feel like playing it again, definatly pick it up. As for anyone else, rent it out first to see if you dig it.

I've still been holding out on which console to get out of the 360 and ps3.... I know the 360 seems theo bvious choice cause of the games, but i'm afraid to buy one cause of the problems that seem to plague it. Most of the games i want to play are cross platform anyway but.... i dont know.

Truthfully i would have had a 360 by now if i was motivated to do so, but i'm not.... too paranoid.

So... i have quite a few games to play at the moment that i've barely touched, like MGS Twin Snakes for GCN, MGS2 for ps2, MGS PO for PSP, and a few other games. I'm even tempted to reinstall planescape torment and finish that classic again.

Anyhow, thats all i have to say for now.

Game on!

The only reason why I didnt see Colton online after i told him to do the driver clean then reinstall is because i said "it might delete the installer we just dl'd with the new drivers" and he thought that i'd said that it would or not to use the same installer again. So after he restarted after the driver clean he didnt try installing the drivers again, and his internet just happened to not be working at the time so he couldnt tell me what was going on.

As soon as he installed them after the driver clean everything worked fine. And he gained an average of 20FPS on his game, a good improvement.

 

So i went and got myself worked up over nothing lol! 

So this is how it went down.
My friend Colton a guy i met on world of warcraft was having some problems with his frame rate in the game. I automatically went into problem solve mode. I used to work at a computer shop in town doing work like this as a tech so i thought i might be able to help out.

First i asked him whether he made a habit of frequently updating his video card drivers. He said no so i proceeded to explain to him where to download the latest "ATi" Drivers for his Radeon X600pro and how to install them.
When he came back on Vent he explained that his Windows UI was now running all laggy. I have experienced this before so i suggested to him what had worked for me in this situation. I got him to uninstall all ATi Graphics drivers, Restart his PC, Run Driver Cleaner Pro with the mode set to "ATi" and restart his pc so he could install a fresh set of drivers just incase windows was having a driver conflict with left over files from the past install.

I havent seen him on vent or msn since i asked him to try that. Imagine how **** i feel right now. Graphics drivers are just supposed to work especially if you havent changed video cards and are just updating, this isnt some form of arcane procedure reserved for the tech geek's..........

So lately i've been playing World of Warcraft Burning Crusdade, a friend of mine gave me one of thier accounts for free so i've been playing on that and it just happened to have a burning crusade expansion registered to it.

 I've been playing a Dranaei Priest and so far i'm level 26.

I've also been getting my feet wet with metal gear solid. I now own MGS 1 twin snakes for gamecube and MGS2 for PS2. Both are awesome games but i find the Gamecube version a little easier to controll especially when peeking around corners then shooting for some reason.

 In other news my MGS Portable op's preorder still hasnt come in and i'm quite annoyed by that, i have added valkyrie profile lenneth for psp to my list of psp games, and my video card blew up for my pc so i had to borrow one until i finish my pc. Which wont be much longer anymore since my hand is forced to hurry up a bit more about it since icant borrow this 6600 forever obviously.

Before the xbox came out.... to me you were a little weird if you were a microsoft fan. Why?. Because before the xbox came out you had probably been exposed to microsoft through windows unless you were from a long line of mac users or were using linux. There was also the aspect that to keep up in the information technology industry or went to college and where using thier PC's in tandem with the one you used at home. While you can get office and what not on mac, i'm speaking in a generalist way of thinking, for the average computer user. Which leads me to my next question, how could you have been a fan of a company that made an operating system that you were theoretically forced to use and didnt have any other alternatives if you were to co exist in mainstream computer society?.

Which brings me to another aspect of this discussion: People who excitedly get new Windows Operating systems on the day its released. Wake up call people, it is cold hard fact by now that Microsoft Operating systems are horribly buggy and broken when thier first released, why havent people learnt thier lesson by now. Vista is no exception to this rule.... , People who preorder MS Os's are just as funny.

Which makes me curious, what was everyone thinking when microsoft announced the xbox?, what caused your anticipation?, the fact that you thought microsoft were masters of software therefore the xbox would be good, or was it the power of the hardware that drew your attention. I'd really like to know, because based on microsofts other work where did all the hype come from. I'm not saying that everything microsoft does is doomed to fail. The 360 is kicking some serous ass. But i'm just saying, given the instability and security issues of windows what was it about the xbox that had everyone excited before it was released. Was it the power?, was it the games?, was it something else?

I have always wondered this and would like peoples oppinions on the matter. If people want to know what i thought, here it is:

"Microsoft are making a gameing console eh?, they sure do need thier fingers in every pie it seems.... " and then later "yeah the xbox thats that system thats only good game is halo or something" then later i got one and the situation had greatly improved, but it wasnt until after i got fed up and sold mine that things started to pick up. Luckily the 360 is doing alot better. But what gave anyone anything to go on back then?. 

So my stuff from play-asia actually arrived today after the general manager of play-asia noticed my situation and set things straight.

He explained that normally they dont give out UPS tracking numbers because if you commit credit card fraud and actually know the card holders address, once the merchandise has been shipped, you can actually use the UPS tracking number to reroute the parcel to a different address. Thus fooling play asia into thinking that the cardholder and recipient are of the same address but in fact are not.

While this does make some sense. It also pisses on the little honest guy who needs to contact UPS and cant get a word out of them because you dont have your tracking number.

He told me that he had spoken to this staff however to prevent this from happening to me again, he further extended his appologies by giving me some store credit that i can use no matter how expensive the item is. (the free coupons they send out with orders normally only allow you to use them if the item you are buying is $50 USD or more.)

I immediatly contacted UPS with my tracking number and they told me that for some reason my parcel had encountered an exception and for some reason had been kept in brisbane for a number of day's without even being attempted to be delivered, she then proceded to tell me that she had sent a note through to the depot telling them to dispatch for delivery as soon as possible.

I was contacted by UPS this morning telling me that the hold up had been caused by an internal communication difficulty between 2 different postal branches who use different tracking messages which mean different things in different offices.

He explained to me that on UPS brisbane depots end they read it as meaning that i had to go and pick it up from thier depot. But infact it meant that the courier had to pick it up for delivery. Reading the tracking message i can somewhat understand how you could get confused if both sides werent in complete knowledge of each others procedures but it still seemed a bit stupid.

He told me that he had set the parcel up for regional air so that i would get it the same morning instead of on monday. Which was pretty nice considering how long i'd already been waiting.

In response to Lance_C's comment to my last blog entry.... I honestly dont understand what planet you live on (i mean that in jest not as insult). Play-Asia is far from expensive. I bought phoenix wright 2 from them while i was getting an import game cause i reasoned (might aswell while i'm getting the other stuff), and saved myself $43 Aud on the game. Play-Asia wanted $30 AUD for it, a local retailer wanted $73.

When i bought Street Fighter Alpha 3 max i got it from play asia for the same amount as PW2, Local retailer wanted $79 AUD.

And as far as service goes, this is the first trouble i've ever had with them and as soon as the manager caught wind of it he fixed it immediatly and compensated me. 

No offence but i kinda laugh when people like americans complain about the prices of games because they get them much cheaper than we do even after the conversion. Larger western countries are spoilt especially the US. I by no means know what its like in the netherlands tho lance so i cant comment directly on your situation. 

Anyway, now that i have Dj Max Portable 1, a PSP hardcase, and PW2 in my possession i have plenty of gaming fun ahead of me, even tho i have by no means finished with Dj max Portable 2!. Even so.. i picked up Lunar Knights today for the DS... my first ever Hideo Kojima game. 

I ordered DJ Max Portable along with a PSP carry case and Phoenix Wright 2 last tuesday. I had had experience ordering with play-asia before when i ordered DJ max portable 2, Street Fighter Zero 3 and a DJ Max Portable 2 poster.

In the past i have always gotten my stuff shipped via economy air mail and its worked out great for me every time, arriving 5 days after ordering. Which is pretty good for postage from hong kong to australia.

Then this time i thought i'd be impatient and pay for courier via UPS, i wish i never had....

This courier service is supposed to take 1-4 working days it still hasnt arrived. Play-Asia refuses to give me a tracking number for it for "security reasons" and has a live UPS tracking feed setup to my "my account" page if i click on the order number that contains the goods i ordered in this shipment.

The first time i started to worry was when the tracking said that it had arrived in brisbane on friday (its thursday now).

Brisbane is 2 hours drive from my house. But the package still hasnt arrived. So now i get this message on my live tracking that:

"

Shipping Type: UPS Shipping Weight: 0.63 kg
Live UPS shipping data Apr 24, 2007 16:49:00 AU BRISBANE UPS INTERNAL ACTIVITY CODE;AS REQUESTED, THE RECEIVER WILL PICKUP AT A UPS FACILITY AT THEIR CONVENIENCE. THIS MUST BE WITHIN 5 BUSINESS DAYS

"

Here you can see that it says that i have to pickup the package from some depot within 5 days. The only problem is i havent recieved anything in the mail saying to call a certain place to know where to pick it up and when i call UPS they refuse, flat out refuse to talk to me about anything to do with this parcel because i dont have a tracking number. And as i have said before Play-Asia refuses to give it to me. The last UPS person i spoke to (i've called 5 times now), called my claim and story dubious at best and said she was disconnecting my call.

There is no way anyone could have tried to deliver it to my house between the time of ordering and now... I have been home all day every day, noone could have come without me knowing and if they had there would be a slip with a number to call in the mail.

I dont know who to be angry with more, UPS or Play-Asia since its Play-Asia's fault that i cant enquire at all about this mess. And UPS assures me that Play-Asia is liable to give me the tracking number. That wouldnt surprise me because every thing i've gotten from Amazon via UPS has given me a tracking number at ship date to use to track parcel's at my leasuire besides the onsite tracking service they provide live feeded from the UPS site.

I have a feeling that UPS is going to hold my stuff for 5 days and i'll be powerless to do anything about it then they will probably return the stuff to play-asia or something like that, and i wont get a refund.

I'm so frustrated that i feel like crying but i cant do that even i am so i dont know that i can bearly breathe.