Out with the Old...

Yes I've played Halo 3, yes the graphics are really that good, no it's nothing ground breaking - it's just a really good first person shooter. I'm not going to go on and on about it. I played Halo 3 co-op for an hour or two with my brother when I went over to visit yesterday. The cinema mode is more than I hoped it would be and the game itself is very smooth. You still can't fly Pelicans (as far as I know) but that's about the only limitation they give you, I don't know about Phantoms either.

For me it's not just the continuation of a solid game series that makes a game exciting. It's innovation. That's why I think Assassin's Creed and Splinter Cell: Conviction should have more attention than Halo 3. I'm not saying Halo 3 isn't as good as those games, but it doesn't really bring anything new to the party does it?

I found out that Hitman: Blood Money runs on my computer just fine despite it only being marginally better than the minimum specifications for it (mainly, my processor is the oldest component in my PC, the graphics card could do with a replacement too but it's good for maybe a month).

I've been thinking of just splashing out on a new motherboard and an AMD AM2 6000+ 64bit processor this week. I was previously considering saving up for a completely new computer but with the price of motorbike riding lessons (so I can stop riding on L plates) and other things looming around the corner, perhaps it would be better to just buy components in smaller steps. I'll have to check if the motherboard will take an AGP card and the RAM I've got but otherwise I think I should be fine shopping at Overclockers, eBay, KC Computers (local), or CrysTech for the components. I'm also thinking a new hard drive wouldn't go amiss (especially since the house will be connected to the Internet in a week or so), and I should replace my two 512mb memory DIMMs with a single 1GB DIMM in preperation for 2gb of RAM, but I'm also thinking about replacing the graphics card, although I don't think I'll spend enough to get a card bigger than my motherboard.

I'm still reading The Book of Vile Darkness. There's a lot of interesting material for creating dark artefacts and villains that might be the focal point of a campaign. I've also gone back to studying Races of Stone and Races of the Wild, there are things I missed in there like guidelines to settlements for said races and guidelines on writing adventures in settings relative to the races of stone/the wild.

As a side note there was enough warmish weather to clean my bike in. It's much better with the rust on the suspension forks but I should have done more polishing on it while I had the chance. Today looks too dismal to add a finishing coat of protection.