Throughout my life I have always had a knack for buying temperamental PC's. It's an underrated talent but one that I seem to excel at. I can't remember the last build that work flawlessly from the word "go" and even if one did it probably broke within a year like the rest of them. Why they all insist on committing electronic hara-kiri is a total mystery to me. When it comes to computers I'm definitely a minimalist, only installing the bare essentials (and a healthy splash of games, of course ), never the junk that many people seem to plague their machines with. It never helps though; before too long the blue screens of death start appearing signalling the slow painful demise of that particularly piece of hardware. These aren't always fatal but even so it normally takes a few days out of my life fixing them up so it's just as inconvenient.

True to form my current PC decided that I had had a long enough run of mechanical good fortune and last Friday it rebelled and began to sulk in the corner. Basically, I was just updating my anti-virus software when it asked me a restart the computer for the effects to work. That I did, but when it got to the welcome screen the infamous blue screen of death appeared and after it had restarted again all I had was a black screen and an idling hard drive. It wasn't even loading into BIOS, so for the last few days I have been trying to fix the problem. Thankfully the hard drive was undamaged by this event (the thought of losing my photograph portfolio was unbearable!) so now that it is fully backed up I can really start fiddling around. My hardware knowledge is not outstanding not I've narrowed it down to 3 possible things: memory, CPU, and power unit. It may not be any of those things but I won't know until I test them. That's my afternoon gone.

It's particularly annoying from a gaming perspective as two of my most anticipated games of the next few months (Dawn of War II and Empire: Total War (see last journal entry for more details)) have both had to take a back seat until everything is fixed. And I was just starting to get into them too. I hate computers, and they hate me.

Oh well, hopefully this will all be fixed soon. I'll let you know what happens.

It's been a while since I've blogged anything game related so I thought I'd bust out the ol' keyboard and get crackin'. There's quite a lot to say really, far too much to put into one post, so I'll keep it as brief possible (not very likely though ).

Let's face facts straight away; I'm a PC gamer. It's been my main platform for many, many years and even though I have been getting into the 360 a lot recently (and, to a lesser extent, the Wii) I'm still a PC gamer at heart. A good thing too, because it actually sounds like it going to be quite a good year for the PC market. Gaming like Diablo III, Operation Flashpoint 2, Dragon Age are all looking pretty good, to name but a few, and show that there is still life in this supposedly "dead" system.

Strangely though, most of the games that I'm most excited about are from a genre that is still predominantly PC only. I've always loved strategy games, both turn based and real-time, and this year's batch is looking very tasty indeed. Things like Starcraft II and Demigod are looking very promising but there are two others that I'm going to focus on here, mainly because I went out completely out of character and actually pre-ordered them. That may not seem like a big deal to many of you but for me it is very unusual. Before these two I can't actually remember the last game I pre-ordered. It must have been years ago. Anyway, on to the games.

Dawn of War II, the sequel to Relic's massively successful Warhammer 40K title, is a game I've been waiting for with eager anticipation for many months. I have loads of happy memories of playing the tabletop version years ago so the franchise has always held a special place for me. The original Dawn of War's mix of fast pace, tactical gameplay was great and consumed more hours of my life than I care to admit, so when I heard that a new one was being made the adrenaline really started to pump. It will be really interesting to see how the developers have shook things up, particularly with the lack of base building. I know that a lot of the purest are upset about that but I'm actually really excited to see how it works. I've always thought that form of gameplay was more fitting for this universe anyway. I won't have to wait long to find out at any rate, as the postman put it through the letter box about 10 minutes ago so once I've finished this I'll be giving it a good shake down.

My anticipation for DOW II is but a fraction when compared to Empire: Total War however. I many have been waiting for DOW II for a few months but I've been anticipating Empire since 2002. Let me explain. The original Medieval: Total War was one of those defining games in my life. It showed a scale and scope which I had never seen before and the massive battles were captivating. It was truly epic and I loved it for that. It was also the first game I ever modded as well and there was one in particularly by the name of "Napoleonic: Total War" which really stood out. It was developed by a team known as the Lordz and focused on of the rise and fall of Napoleon during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Being the sad history loving freak that I am this mod was extremely engrossing. The level of care and detail that they put into it was breathtaking and really caught my imagination as few games ever had before. I started wondering what would happen if an official game was ever made and as the series started to evolve with Rome and Medieval 2 those hopes kept building. Finally, almost six years later, Empire was announced and my excitement levels went through the roof. The more I saw of it the more I wanted to get my hands on it. It's been a real obsession over the past year, as sad as that may sound. I know that there are a lot of people who are rather lukewarm about it because of its complexity, scale and general bewildering qualities but it's for those reasons that I'm so eager to try it. As soon as it was available I pre-ordered it because unless the reviews are absolutely devastating I can't see any reason why I would wait. I'm not a religious man but I'm praying with every fibre of my being that this will be everything that the developers claim it will. They have certainly been hyping it up, but any man and his dog can talk a big game but the proof is in the pudding. Creative Assembly hasn't let me down yet though so I'll keep the faith. not long to wait now!

I could write pages and pages about Empire but I've waffled on far too long already. I'll try and keep my entries shorter from now on.

Thanks for reading!

Well, I must be getting more active on GS as I've just received my 10th emblem! Yay! And what a nice one to get. It's the "Neighbourly" icon:

Sweet! Thanks for tracking me, guys!

It's nice to have found a group to nice people to hang out with and I'm looking forward to meeting a whole bunch more.

Anyway, in other news, I haven't actually been doing a huge amount of gaming recently (just too much other stuff going on) but I have been able to get into to Fallout 3 a little bit, which I'm loving. It is very similar to Oblivion obviously, but considering that is one of my favourite games of the last few years that's not a bad thing. It really does feel good, in a bleak, apocalyptic kind of way. I still have a long way to go with it though so I probably won't be able to finish it before uni finishes (which is less than two weeks away so that's not so bad).

At the moment I only have a few minutes at a time to really play anything so I'm just doing the ol' pick up and play thing. Not a bad thing right now though as it's given me a chance to catch up with some old friends, so when I saw the Metal Slug Anthology for the Wii reduced on Amazon I just had to get it. As you have probably guessed from my avatar I'm a bit of a Metal Slug fan so being able to revisit the series in such a convenient way has been great! So far I've played through 1 and 2 and about half way through X so it should keep me going until the end of the semester. If not then I'll just have to play it from start to finish all over again. It's a hard life. ^^

Edit:

Whoah! Scratch that! Make that 11 emblems! I just remebered that the Prince of Persia marathon so I now have that emblem too! Awesomeness! I can't beleive I almost missed it. So much to catch up with!