One foot in the world of consoles

Hmm, this entry was going to be called 'One foot in the world of next-gen consoles', but seeing as all three major devices are now available (well, somewhat) I guess we can't really use that moniker any more.

Anyway, yesterday I traded five crisp, shiny £20 notes with a guy at work, and in return I lugged home a brand-spanking new Xbox 360. Twenty minutes or so after getting home, the beast was unpacked, plugged in and ready to go. Hurrah!

Thus far my only real gaming time has been with Gears of War (the only title I actually own right now - I'm very much open for suggestions as to what to buy/beg/borrow/steal next), and I'm beginning to understand what the fuss is about - For starters, the game looks beautiful, although I have to take out my PC gaming eyes somewhat and try and ignore the abject lack of anti-aliasing and decent texture filtering. The aliasing isn't too pronounced thanks to smart world design and High Dynamic Range rendering, but the lack of full-on anisotropic filtering is really poor considering the horsepower on offer in Xenos - The obvious mip-map boundaries and shimmering is awful. Ah well... More importantly, the game has been great to play once I overcame my phobia/ineptitude with game pads, and the layout of the controller is not far short of spot on, so kudos to Epic for that. My only worry is that the whole 'duck and cover' game play that is fascinating me right now is going to wear thin after a few hours of gaming.

Apart from Gears of War, I've messed around with a couple of demos a little - Sonic The Hedgehog, just to see if they ruined the franchise again (they have), and Dead or Alive 4, which doesn't look as pretty as I might have hoped. I've also downloaded the demo for Rainbow Six: Vegas (mainly because I'm a pixel whore and I remember hearing that it looks pretty somewhere), but I haven't checked that out yet.

Aside from my console gaming fun, my return to work in my 'real' job has been insanely busy, and I've also had further confirmation that my ex is a completely unhinged psychopath after calling me out of the blue to have some weird, rambling imaginary conversation so that her boyfriend thinks that something she can't be arsed to do is actually all my fault. Err, okay....

Oh, and if anyone wants to know my Xbox Live gamer tag, it's Hanners. Imaginative, huh? I don't see myself going for a Gold subscription any time soon, but you never know, and I still have a one-month trial to burn once I've got a few more games to actually use it with so feel free to add me.

It's fun to stay at the CCNA...

Last week saw Elite Bastards take a rare back seat in my life for once, as I was shipped off for a week of Cisco training - Of course, I'm not actually a CCNA yet (that would require taking an exam - Ugh!), but I do now have a head full of networking stacks, OSI models, routers, switches and IOS commands. All in all, it was really a good week, and I learned a tonne of stuff, so it was worth the early starts and driving to and from Southampton every day for a week.

Last week was also Christmas come early for me - My parents had decided to furnish me with a new laptop for Christmas, which was ordered last weekend, but had already turned up by Wednesday! So, I'm now the proud owner of a Dell Inspiron 6400, complete with Merom-based Core 2 Duo CPU, 1GB of RAM, Mobility Radeon X1300 and 1680x1050 wide screen LCD. All in all, it's a huge improvement over my previous laptop - It's thinner, it's quieter and it's faster. Considering the amount of DVDs and anime I watch on it these days, the wide screen LCD is a real boon, and I now have a system beefy enough to run High Definition video as well, which is becoming ever-more important. So, err.... Happy Christmas!

With a month to go before we celebrate the imaginary birth of the son of an imaginary deity, I can't help but wonder where this year has gone, it truly is frightening. I'll wax lyrical about how 2006 has gone and my expectations for 2007 some other time though, it still feels too early right now.

The coming weeks are going to be a hectic one of catch-up on the review front for me I feel, I've gotten so far behind between the Cisco training and taking time out for my G80 review that I have one Hell of a lot of work to do. Definitely time for me to refind my focus and start pushing forward with work aplenty between now and the festive season.

The G80 summit

Boy, has the past week been a blur... Almost non-stop benchmarking, IQ testing, reading technical documentation and writing. I've completely lost track of how much time I've sunk into my GeForce 8800 GTX review, but I just hope it's worth it! There's now light at the end of the tunnel though, and hopefully I should have the article completed and ready to go for Thursday if I can keep on trucking over the next day or so.

And that, really, is all there is to report. There's a certain love/hate relationship with such a new architecture from the reviewer's point of view - Love of playing with and understanding (and hopefully getting others to understand) the new technology, but hating the sheer quantity of work that needs to be undertaken in such a short period of time. It really does burn you out pretty quickly, but I have no time to rest once I'm finished with the piece - I now have a vast backlog of hardware to get through, ignoring other samples that are liable to come my way, and with a week long course for me next week my testing and writing time is going to be pretty limited.

Anyway, I've finally plucked up the courage to switch this 'Blog to the new beta version of Blogger (which ties in nicely to my G-Mail account), so let's see if this thing actually works!