Current location:	late for work
Current mood:	geeky

Teh musics are done!
Today I finished ripping all of our CDs. Some rough calculations put it right around the 300 CD mark.

Now I can listen to a bunch of stuff that I haven't heard in a while. This makes me happy.

In other news... I gave up on Ninja Gaidan Sigma. When it comes to difficulty, there's hard and then there's downright degrading. NGS is the latter. With no selectable difficulty setting and only a God of War style "If you die too many times in a row, we'll offer to put the training wheels back on" option, this game is still so difficult as to be not very fun at all.

So, now I'm working my way through the first in the .hack//G.U. series. It took me a while to get into the story and the "game-within-a-game" mechanics, but now I'm starting to really enjoy the immersiveness of the game. About the only thing I really don't like is that it takes the introductory exposition that the more recent entries in the Final Fantasy series is famous for and turns it up to 11. For somewhere around the first 8 hours of play, there's almost zero decision making. It's brief spurts of interactivity followed up with LOTS of cut scenes and dialogue. Now that I'm at around hour 12-15, things have gotten much better and there's a lot more freedom. But damn, it sure took 'em long enough to get me there.

I also recently played Shadow of Rome, which was a fairly shallow narrative, an occasionally frustrating stealth game with awesomely gruesome, completely over-the-top gladitorial combat game along for the ride. They could have easily discarded the story and the stealth game, focused on expanding on the gladitorial combat, with it's plethora of methods for mutilating and dispatching your opponents, and they'd have had a much better game when it came time to ship it out the door. Discovering all of the named combos was half the fun. Rewarding the player with things like the Juicy Tomato when you finish someone off with a mace, or the crowd going wild when you perform trigger the Meat Sculptor by lopping of both of your opponent's limbs. This was just some great and bloody fun.

Finally, I'm really happy with the PS3 and the PSN. Sony has been dropping some really fun games nearly every week on the PSN. If the upcoming releases list is any indication, we're now getting into the months I've been waiting for. There's a ton of stuff coming in October and November that I believe will be the beginning of Sony returning to the top of the console pile.

Even more finally, some mad props to all of the PS3s participating in Folding@Home. The PS3s broke the PetaFLOP barrier earlier this week, and they continue to contribute the most computing power to the project. That's simply awesome and is contributing to a really great cause. It just shows that the PS3 is more than just a gaming console.