My assumption is no...

However it's wednesday afternoon and I don't have anything to do until later this evening so I figured I'd start up one of these blog dealie-o's and spew a few rants for anyone tuning in.

I suppose since this is my first post I should say some things about myself that I didn't mention in the profile. I use to play a lot of console games however sadly my consoles are in shambles now. My PS2 stopped reading all discs late last summer, games, cds, nothin. Then mysteriously my xbox disappeared from one of my guy's house last thanksgiving That put an effective end on my console gaming right quick. I still have an n64 and ps1 somewhere around the house, but now I mostly play computer games.

This leads me to my first topic, jumping back into computer gaming after being away since 2003 gave me quite a rude awakening. Apparently the computer I bought no more than 2 years ago is now a flaming POS. Thank you dell for the shafting. Granted it is partially my fault as I did not build the computer specifically for gaming, and had no idea about AGP and PCIe motherboard upgrades back then. I still bought one of the higher end models at the time and upgraded pretty much everything, but I don't think dell offered motherboard upgrades, at least on this model. I wasn't expecting to make it through college on the computer itself but I figured I could just upgrade when it was necessary ya know? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

So I walk into a store 2 months ago looking for a new graphics card. I was more excited than a fat kid for a pie, I can finally play FEAR I thought. I got the game for christmas but it was unplayable on my old nvida geforce 5200 fx, even with the ram upgrade. So you can imagine my frustration when the sales rep tells me PCI is dead, and the best card I can get is still sub par by today's standards, also I might as well build a new computer... Wonderful, that really made my day. And so there FEAR still sits on my shelf, collecting dust. While I play the games I still can on my 5200fx. Chalk it up to ignorance or lack of research on my part, but I still feel dell served me up quite a raunchy shafting. I'm plannin to hold off on building a new computer until later this fall when Crysis and Battlefield 2142 come out so I can make sure I get a system that will work and be able to upgrade for the next few years. Wishful thinking? I hope not...

On a better note I finally saw Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children last week. Pretty good movie overall, however it really only appeals to people who have played the game. I was glad they didn't totally tank it like how the Rock massacred Doom, which was laughable at best. One thing though was the remnant leader's snide one syllable laugh that he constantly did through almost the entire movie. That got annoying pretty quick, and also Barrett seemed to have some serious crazy eyes goin on. Besides those small quibbles I personally liked it, cool fight scenes, and a decent plot.

Anyone else have a great urge to play the game after watching the movie?? That was the first FF I ever played and one of my first rpg's all together. Last time I played it was ‘99 when I was young and probably didn't appreciate the story as much as I should have. Unfortunately I realized late last week I sold my copy a little over a year ago. So I set out last weekend on a mission to find another copy, only to find, like many other gamers that apparently were on the hunt before me, that none of the resale shops in the area had it anymore.

Once I looked it up on amazon I realized why the clerk at Gamestop had such a big smile a year ago as he handed me 10 bucks for my original black label (not greatest hits), mint condition, complete with instruction manual, FFVII copy. I’m certainly hope I’m not the only one who is kickin themselves for trading in that game now, cause I feel dumber than ever. Oh yah FVII copies like that now, by the way, go for the hefty price on of 100 dollars used on amazon.

You better get the $%*& outta here if you think I'm going to pay that. I found a few cheaper ones on ebay, however still ridiculously expensive for a game that's almost a decade old. So I called around to my friends but pretty much everyone's copy was either trashed, lost, or they sold it also. I did find one dude with a copy for the PC, which I didn't even know existed before Monday. I figured whatever, and went over to buy it off him early yesterday.

Let me tell you, it was one hell of a wrestling match to get that game to work on xp. I spent about 2 hours yesterday afternoon searching for patches to stop the game from crashing all the time. Finally I found the animevamp's xp patch and along with the Truemotion update, those seemed to fix the crashing problem for now. Lets hope it stays that way since I'm only 2 hours into the game. Great game, I would of rather played it on the PS1, but hey I’m glad to have found a copy period.

That’s enough ranting for the time being. If anyone has any questions or comments feel free to leave em. Until next time peace.

e