Despite my initial skepticism on GTA IV, that's pretty much all I've been playing over the past week. Grand Theft Auto IV is a lot of fun and is notably better than the previous iterations even though I can't wholly put my finger on why. The open world part is fun, and the story so far is done pretty well. And let us not forget the multiplayer. So if you ever see me on, feel free to join up or invite me to play some multiplayer. I will say the game is very addicting.

I finally was able to get my music collection of my dead hard drive so I was definitely happy about that. The thought of losing the collection I've built up over the last 5 years was definitely scary so I'm glad I now have a backup solution in place as well as my now 1.6TB worth of space on my server. All I now need to do with my server is populate my SVN trees.

I'm thinking I should have gotten NASA to recover my data. After what they did with the one hard drive on board Columbia, they should be able to get data off anything.

Tags: harddrive, server, gta

Well this week started out rough, and at least is ending on a slightly better note. I finally got my website up and running again after hours of getting pissed off at why it wasn't working. Stupid configuration issue.

Anywho, i've been playing Brawl and so far its about what I expected from it. I think it was a little overhyped, but its definitely a good game, and one I would recommend to anyone who has a Wii or wants a good party game. Online multiplayer isn't the greatest...still has a few too many bugs, but I guess I'm spoiled by what XBOX Live brings to the table. It seems that Halo 3 has been the 360 game of choice as of late. Surprised not many of my friends are playing Vegas, but with Vegas 2 coming out on Tuesday, I guess I can't say I'm that surprised. Don't want to get Vegas'd out before the sequel comes out.

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 I'm definitely looking forward to. The original was in my opinion one of the best, if not THE best strategic shooter for the 360, and maybe even one of the best beyond that but I'm not going to get into that right now. The seamless co-op will definitely be a thing of beauty to actually be able to play the full storyline with a friend. That was one of my beefs with the original, albeit a minor one, that you couldn't play the true storyline with a partner. Sure you could run the maps, but no cutscenes, none of the true story of the game itself. As I look over at my game shelf, I just realized I still never beat the original Vegas...oh well, one day maybe. I still like the multiplayer aspect of the game though, not fast paced shoot 'em up like in Halo or CoD4, but an actual use strategy and cover to defeat your enemies. I will definitely be giving that a try.

Tags: thoughts, gaming, brawl, vegas

So I think pretty soon I'm gonna get started on the next redesign of Darker Nemesis. After looking into a lot of things, I have a list of items I want to add to the site. Not all of them I know how to do, but that's where the fun lies, learning new ways of doing things and getting them all to work together. Photoshop is probably going to be somewhat involved in this as I want to give the site less of a blocky feel and thats not so easy to do with just CSS. I also have a list of other things to add and modify.

I started last night trying to see if I could set up bugzilla on my server to try to create a list of things that I want to do for the new version. Might be a little overkill but it would help me track what I wanted to do as well as bug reports for the current version.

I also now have visual studio and Microsoft SQL Server set up to start preparing to build my media datatbase site. I'll be using ASP.NET and SQL Server for that one instead of PHP/MySQL.

On a completely different note, it has now been 2 weeks since I've had a working XBOX 360, hope Microsoft gets me mine back soon before Rainbow Six Vegas 2 comes out.

Tags: website, thoughts

The weekend went well. Busy but not in a bad way. I ended up getting pretty far in Uncharted, but man are parts of that game difficult, I'm stuck on one part right now that I just got so frustrated with I called it a night.

Friday night I hung out with Crystal which was a great time, watched Club Dread.

Saturday my buddy Brian came over with his computer and we pretty much gamed all day playing games ranging from Golf, to Rise of Nations, and even Team Fortress 2. It was kinda nerdy I guess, but it was a lot of fun. He saved my ass in Rise of Nations, Armada 2 we pretty much just romped in, Golf he beat me but I was happy I managed to get 1 under being it the first time I played it. TF2 was well, TF2.

Sunday was just a relaxing day that I layed back and just relaxed, played a little WoW, Uncharted, and worked a little bit on my website mostly adding the social networking buttons to my entries.

Now its Monday and I'm back to work. Here's hoping the week goes by quickly.

Also, I haven't figured one thing out yet, I embedded the flash videos from my camping trip into the entry, but it errors if you don't have www.darkernemesis.com as the address, so if you're getting errors, it's probably because you have the URL as darkernemesis.com instead of www.darkernemesis.com, I'm still trying to figure out why its doing that.

Tags: uncharted, ps3, lanparty

So I just dropped off my XBOX 360 at UPS today to be shipped back to Microsoft for repair or replacement. I'm kind of hoping they end up giving me a new version of the 360 as a replacement. The new chips run cooler and of course with the new ones, you get HDMI output as well. Looking at it from a business standpoint it makes sense as well. The new systems have a lower failure rate which would mean having to replace fewer systems. It's gotta be cheaper then sending out more of the 1st gen 360s that are said to have as high as a 30% failure rate.

Either way, it does kind of suck and I'm hoping I get mine back soon, I want to play some Vegas, COD4, and I definitely want to start up Mass Effect. In the meantime though I have plenty of other options. I still need to beat Uncharted and of course Super Mario Galaxy, and of course World of Warcraft. But even outside of gaming world, I got other stuff I would like to work on. I'm looking into redoing my blog manager for this site, I just sstarted setting up my media database and web portal for my games, movies, music, etc. I decided for that I'm going to use ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server to switch things up as well as delve more into the technology. I'm also going to be delving a bit into game design so even without the 360, I'll have plenty to do.

Tags: thoughts, xbox, rrod, projects