Digital distribution had begun with the launch of Steam in 2003, changed the outlook and how publishers and developers do business on the PC forever. It is now 2009 and Steam now have 15 million registered users all throughout the world, since six other websites devoted to only to sell PC games via online have started. There is no big secret to why many brick and mortar stores are stocking less and less PC retail boxes on their shelves, since digital distribution offers convenience and 24 hour avaliability.

Digital distribution have been a benefit to the PC since its release in 2003, biggest factor is the manufacturing of the boxes and disks and the warehouses to stock the thousands of boxes that are produced. A single game box could cost $2 to make and another $2 to ship with a total cost of $4 for each game box. Publishers would produce a million game boxes bring up the cost to them to $4 million. Producing a million boxes also increases risk of overstock and to continually pay for keep it stock inside warehoues which have to be maintained. It is pretty clear digital distribution cuts the cost to publishers by the millions of dollars and increases profitability each copy is sold. Increasing the profitability to the PC would help encourage publishers and developers to produce better quality games.

Three years ago, a person was looking for a game to buy via online would have only two choices, Steam and Direct2drive. There is now six sites that are devoted in digital distribution of PC games and there is sure to be more in the future. Xfire have finally started selling games, making alot of sense since they are a website based on games. Direct2drive and Xfire is owned by two heavily backed companies with huge pockets, News Corp and Viacom. Its not going to be long before these companies will start being competitive to encourage us to use their websites to buy games. The site with the easiest and most convenient to use downloader with the best download speeds, the site with the best selection of games, the site that have the best prices. or maybe the site that exclusively have Assassin's Creed III (future thought here) for the next three months. Games being made only for the console would come to an end, as Xfire and D2D will pay big bucks to the publisher to put it on the PC so they could make more money. The reason Im focusing on Xfire and D2D is because they are owned by two major companies with alot of money in their pockets, while Valve have a much limited amount of resources giving them a disadvantage to compete in the same way as Xfire or D2D would end up doing, Steam would end up being the company that sells their games and games from others that have been out for five months at a discounted price of $40.

Risen has many common traits to every other traditional RPG in the past. The player is given a hero who is set in a medieval world surrounded by men with swords or magic and cool monsters of various types. Just like any other RPG the player is the center of the storyline and only the player could solve everyones problems and save the world from impending doom. Those who have played Oblivion would know what I am talking about and would be familiar to the type of gameplay Risen have to offer.

Piranha Bytes is a German developer who is famous for their Gothic series especially Gothic III. Gothic III was a disaster of a game with unsatisfed gameplay and major performance issues giving the developer a sore spot to their name. Risen, thankfully, have redeemed the German developers name by offering a game that has competitive graphics, fun combat, and no real performance issues with consistantly high frame rates.

Unlike Oblivion, Risen does not hold your hand by giving your arrows or waypoints on the ground to guide through every single quest. Alot of quests require the player to hear what the quest giver is saying, reading the quest logs, and explore the world to be able to complete quests. The player coming into contact and fighting enemies while trying to complete a quest is inevitable.

There are many types of enemies the player will encounter throughout the game. All the enemies will have a set difficulty level and will not decrease or increase with the player. There are a few enemies, mostly at the beginning, will very challenging to nearly impossible to complete. It would be wise to advance through the game by completing quests and fighting enemies will the players character have the opporunity to get stronger. The once challenging Boar and hungry wolves, will be easily beatable by one or two hits.

Risen will offer many more advance and challenging characters to fight, such as gnomes, skeletons and other humans. These characters will have body armor, sword and shield making combat more challenging. Active use of a shield to provide a defense to enemy blows and timing just right to return a hit. This kind of interactive combat gives Risen more realistic feel and slows down the tempo of the game.

How poorly did Wolfenstein fare? According to NPD numbers obtained by GameSpot, the 360 version sold just over 59,000 units, with the PS3 edition barely clearing 30,000. Add in the PC iteration's 17,000 units, and Wolfenstein sold only around 106,000 units in the five days from its August 25 launch to August 29, when NPD's monthly reporting period ended. http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/returntocastlewolfenstein/news.html?sid=6217169

Wolfenstein is a high profile franchise name that should have gotten better sales then it did within its first week. Activision did responded in disappointment to the low outcome. The article above does list the total amount of box sales within its initital week of sale. Futher reading the article, it does not explain or make any kind of presumation to why it did so poorly.

Batman was released for the consoles on Aug 25th, about one week after Wolfenstein. According to VGchartz.com, 900,000 retail boxes were sold within its first week. Its may be possible that Batman may have contributed to the low sales of Wolfenstein, as people were to just wait one week. We are still in a recession, because of this people would decide on limiting down to one game per month instead of two or three. Adam Sessler did mention on his video blogs about how publishers are becoming more selective on which dates to release games to increase the likeihood of success.

Wolfenstein was only offered on the retail box, it was not avaliable through Steam of Direct2drive. This is a mistake that could have led to low sales for the PC. There are alot of people who will only buy PC games via digital distribution and by Activision not putting Wolfenstein on a download service, they would be ignoring alot of potential consumers. Any publisher ignoring digital distribution as a method to sell more games would be completely idiotic.

My computer is currently running Windows Vista every since I bought my machine two and half years ago. After the entire time of dealing with Vista, I had enough of its problems. My PC will take a minute and half to load up Vista and another two minutes to finish loading each time I start up. Software I have running on my PC would most of the time crash after start up, programs like Fraps, Asus hardware temperature program, Xfire, or my anti virus software. All the annoying little problems with Vista have started to get to me, enough so I have decided to upgrade to Windows 7.

Windows 7 is finally due to come out next month after two years of extensive development. PC Gamer, Gamespot and PC World editors have all gave very high remarks of Windows 7 and including a two month open beta with millions more trying it out. I could imagine Microsoft is going to make the first two months of Windows 7 to be as flawless as possible to everyone from just doing the internet, networking, gaming, and video editing. A few times I have considered on getting Windows 7 or stick with Vista for another two years. Weighing out my options, I will most definitely get Windows 7 full version with in the next six months after its release. The six month wait would be due to any kind of unseen flaw in the operating system that didnt get worked out before its final release, this would give time for any patches and bug fixes to come out before I rush out to get it. Amazon.com have the full version of Windows 7 at $200. The reason I rather get the full version so I could move the software license onto another machine in the future.

Just recently, I decided to go onto Newegg.com and do a mock selection of all hardware I would need to build my own computer. The grand total of the system I selected just over $1000, this pc was a beast. This is astonishing to me because this same PC would cost me $500-700 more then getting it through Avadirect.

Avadirect is where I bought my current PC. They are like Newegg.com that sell all parts separately, but they get to put it together for me. There have been a few past blogs where I have compared Dell and Alienware to Avadirect prices and both Dell and Alienware would fail. Howvever, comparing prices to a home built PC to a PC I could get with Avadirect, the home built PC wins.

Today, I got really serious of building my own PC way later in the future. My current PC is just fine for another year or so before I like to upgrade. Perhaps I could do a total rebuild next summer, when much better video cards come out and 4 GB dimms are more avaliable and cheaper. My current case, power supply, and dvd drive can be reused for the new system if I decide to build it myself.

The biggest concern I have about building my own PC, is not getting it to work. There is no one I know who could help me look at my PC to make sure I have all the connections right, to test to see if my motherboard is working fine, my power supply have enough power, and so on. The problems I could experience may be my fault during the building. Do I really want to gut this already working PC for another PC I built myself that may not even work? Do i really want to save $500-700 to go into a world of total hassle or spend $500-700 more to let someone build it for me so I could be hassle free?

Ill go honest with you guys and some of you I talk to on Xfire may not know. Some nine years ago I tried to build my PC, twice. Both times i thought I knew what I was doing because I asked everyone on the internet for help. When I got all my parts assembled and was ready turn it on, nothing happened. I didnt know why and nobody on the internet didnt know why either. It was way beyond frustrating, heavily disappointed and a complete waste. It is really one time of my life I really really regret and that is building a PC Do I really want to do this all over and spend $1000 and end up wasting it?

However, we now have Youtube where there are alot of videos showing how to build your own PC. It was much more helpful then nine years ago when there was no such thing as Youtube back then. My only question is about the hard drive and dvd drive hook up to the sata ports on the motherboard. Does the bios automatically know which is the hard drive and dvd drive? Someone on Gamespot Hardware forums posted a very very nice tutorial on how to build a PC and at the end he didnt mention anything about the bios.

Those who may think I may be building a PC within a few weeks, I am not. Again, I may wait until next summer or fall to decide what to do. In the meantime, I could continue learning how to build a PC, but at the end I will decide to get another pc from avadirect or build my own.

In the scene of Back to the Future II, Marty and Doc had time traveled from 1985 to the year 2015. Doc Brown flying in the sky highway through traffic, when Marty asked when are we. He replied by pronouncing the 2015 as twenty fifteen, Marty immediately replies it as two thousand fifteen. Its been eight years since the start of the new decade and most people say the year 2009 the same fashion as Marty. How long will it be before most people state the years similiar to Doc Brown?

Twenty oh nine have less then four months left. Its also that time where publishers would pack alot of their games into a 3-4 month period, great to make a top three most wanted list, due to so many games avaliable. Here are my top 3 most wanted games.

From left to right. 1. Dragon Age, 2. Risen(there is no box art avaliable for PC), 3. Saboteur.

Dawn of Discovery is an economic based strategy game. All buildings are built by you, houses, farms, mines, docks, streets, etc. The houses are required to gain population on the starting island, continue growth, and to gain more taxes. You are then have to meet the requirements to make them happy enough for them to advance a different level. To make them happy, the player have to build farms, mines, mills etc to help make finish goods like beer and leather coats. The more happier the people are the more taxes they will give you to help develop the world to keep the town happy. Supporting a town of 8,000 or more requires imperialism tactic by using other islands to produce the goods required and ship them to port to the main town, just so they could stay happy.

Sims 3 finally arrived on store shelves a month ago, and I made the decision to order it from Amazon.com a few weeks ago. The game, to my surprise, arrived on my door step less then a week later, because the box came to my house on a Friday, I was able to play it for the entire weekend. Most of my time during the next two weeks were focused on playing Sims 3, and the game can be a bit addicting.

There are some noticeable improvements and difference to Sims 3 compared to the original Sims game. The biggest improvement to Sims 3 is the ability to see more of the world past your house and the street. You can see where your Sims' go to work, other Sims houses and go visit them, see your sim walk in the park, go to the beach, go fishing, hiking, and more. Aging and death is an important part of the replayability and increases the natural realism of the game world. Death is the main reason for Sims 3 being so addictive, it prevents a sim from mastering all skills within the game.

Prototype is another game I decided to order along side with Sims 3. I just installed the game on to my computer yesterday and spent 6 hours on it so far. The immediate impression is the game speculator and its fun. There is a ton of button smashing that is required for more of the powerful moves later in the game.

The whole game is set on the island of Manhattan along with all its famous landmarks including Central Park and Empire State Building. It is entirely a sand box mode gameplay, similiar to GTA IV. You can spend hours climbing buildings, gliding, exploring, doing side quests, rampaging havoc on civilians or the military, or spend a few hours farming for exp points used for buying more abilities. The games gets alot more fun as it progress when the player is allowed more powerful abilities, fight stronger enemies.

Science have always been a strong interest of mine. Astonomy is one area of science I have particularly enjoy reading about through various of websites, books and magazines and watch tv shows like on Discovery Channel about space. Looking at just our solar system with eight planets, dwarf planets, and moons, there are alot of questions havent been answered and new places have yet to be discovered.

One such place is Saturn's moon named Enceladus. The moon is most covered in a layer of ice which have a diameter of 500km(310 miles), which is only 15% the size of our Moon. Enceladus have been a highlight for new discovery and questions since the Saturn probe, Cassini arrived that in 2004. Cassini probe have taken photos have the southern hemiphere of "tiger stripes" cracks in the ice. It have been observed that liquid water have erupted from these cracks with infrared imaging of the south region showing activity. This activity is caused by liquid water under the surface from sort of energy source that is causing the water to be come liquidified.

"It had a wide range of terrains ranging from old, heavily cratered surfaces to young, tectonically deformed terrain, with some regions with surface ages as young as 100 million years old."

Noticing the photo below of Enceladus. It shows the northern part of the moon to be heavily cratered while the southern pole is not. A high probabily that there is some sort of tectonic activity, that would "erase" any kind of impact craters that did exist. Tectonic activitiy and other information of Enceladus will be at the link below.

Why is Enceladus is such a big interest? Well because of the liquid water that is located underneath the southern pole. This water to become water would have some sort of energy to make it liquid. This energy would be heat energy. Life, such as bacteria, would have a possibility of surviving beneath the ice. If the Enceladus had a stable enough environment for a billion years or so, this bacteria could evolve into higher forms of life such as worms or fish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus_(moon)

Its already been ten years since I graduated high school. Yep, tomorrow will be my ten year anniversary since the day my high school diploma was handed to me. Time have gone by so quickly since that day, that I like to look back at my own life and the technology that was avaliable then and what it is now.

In June 1999, there was no myspace, facebook, youtube, wikipedia, ipod, iphone, core 2 duo, etc... Virtually all the major websites including community based websites isuch as Xfire did not exist, it wasnt even in concept at that time. Yahoo was king and leader of all the search engines and really for me it was the place for me to be. Google had just been founded and it was only a simple website with no gmail, google earth or anything else that fantasy. Penitum II and K6-2 was the main stream technology at the time, while the Pentium III had just came out one month prior. I was still using 56k dial up and heard of cable internet but it was very very expensive and there was no reason to get anything faster because of nothing large to download. Playstation, Nintendo 64 and Saga Saturn were the consoles to get, while Xbox was a complete unknown and it was unthinkable that Microsoft would get into the console business since they were into the PC. Cell phones were just simple phones and not mp3 players, camera, with nice flashy color screens and no text messaging. DVD players had just came on the scene, while VHS still had a large audience. Its pretty easy to see that alot of the new technology was barely or did not exist at all at the time I graduated. So many things to the internet as well have been added to make this place more entertaining.

Looking back at my own life, which isnt all that exciting other then things around me have happened. I am not a very socially active person, so much of my time is at home watching tv, websites like gamespot and playing games. Went through two other jobs before settling down on being a janitor for the past seven years with the same employer. There are alot of people I have met and talk to through my ten years, either at work and the internet, that I have had the pleasure of talking to. My sister have gotten married to a fantastic brother in law and soon I will be an uncle. The car I was driving during the time I graduated was a 86 Mazda 626 that I bought for $2200, now I drive a fairly brand new Honda Accord coupe. My life isnt all that fruitful as to someone who would say they had climbed a mountain and swam the english channel. Its all really simple.

This blog is ment to reflect back in the past ten years of my life after high school. It have been a fun, enjoyable adventure and I hope it would continue another ten years.

http://e3.gamespot.com/story/6210583/crysis-2-ps3-360-pc-bound

LOS ANGELES--After years of hints and tech-demo teases, the Crysis series is finally headed to consoles. This morning, Electronic Arts and German developer Crytek announced the development of Crysis 2 for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. The game will be the first console title that the notoriously PC-centric studio will develop directly for consoles, having let Ubisoft develop the console spin-offs for its groundbreaking 2004 first-person shooter Far Cry. Ubisoft bought the Far Cry IP outright in 2006. No release date was given.

"The development of Crysis 2 marks a major stepping stone for our studio," said Crytek CEO and President Cevat Yerli in a statement. "This is not only the next game in the Crysis franchise, it's the first title we are developing for consoles and the first title being built on CryEngine 3." In March, the CryEngine3 was shown off on the 360 and PS3 to Game Developers Conference attendees.

As part of today's announcement, EA and Crytek also announced that they were extending their strategic partnership forged in 2004. The deal came shortly after Far Cry became both a critical and commercial hit on the PC for Ubisoft, which EA still owns one fifth of. The deal is part of the EA Partners program, which lets developers pick and choose marketing, sales, and development-support services from the megapublisher. Current EA Partners and games include Harmonix (Rock Band), Valve (The Orange Box and Left 4 Dead), Grasshopper Manufacture (Unnamed PC/PS3/360/Wii project), and Epic Games (Untitled People Can Fly Project).

For more on Crysis 2, check out GameSpot's video stream and live blog of EA's E3 2009 Press Conference at 2 p.m. PDT/10 p.m. BST this afternoon, straight from the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.http://e3.gamespot.com/story/6210583/crysis-2-ps3-360-pc-bound. (end of article)

It is true the next game developed by Crytek will be a multiplatform release on the X360, PS3 and PC. That game would be Crysis 2, sequel of Crysis. Crysis was a PC exclusive game that came out in fall of 07. Now Crytek have decided for Crysis 2 they will have it put on both consoles and the PC on the pursuit for more money.

This isnt a surprise at all. Trying to make more money from their products would be the kind of move any business would make. Halo 3 made $170 million on its first day, two months prior of Crysis release and GTA IV made $500 million on its first week. This kind of success happans to many consoles games in large amount of revenue is what Crytek wants. Crytek president Cevat Yerli, discussed piracy of Crysis in an issue of PC Gamer. He mentioned that because Crysis was so heavily pirated it influenced the decision of having Crysis 2 be multiform. For Crytek to say piracy had anything to do with Crysis 2 being developed for consoles and PC, is a complete lie with no inclusive proof. They simply want to sell games on consoles because of major success of Halo 3 and GTA IV had on its first week of release.

EA have reported Crysis had sold 1.5 million worldwide last year. By now it would have sold around 2 million worldwide. There is no way to know if someone who pirated a copy was a lost sale to begin with. Crysis required at a very beefy system to run the game on medium graphic quality at its time of its release. People who would have pirated wouldnt have a system to run the game at all or alot of them are kids on PCs playing WoW. The reason Crysis didnt sell as well as they hoped on its first month, was majority of people didnt have systems capable of running the game at all. Over time, within a year or so, people either upgraded or bought better computers end up buying Crysis.

It was just reported PC gaming is worth $12.7 billion worldwide. In the United States console software sales reported by NPD were at $11 billion in 2008 (1). The days of third party publishers making games exclusively on one system is coming to an end. Making a game just on Xbox 360, for example, a publisher would be missing out sales that could be made on playstation 3 and PC. The only publisher that is continuing to support exclusives are Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo on their own console systems. For Crytek, they are also following the same trend as any other third party developer.

Source:
1. http://www.gamespot.com/news/6203257.html?tag=result;title;2

For a couple of months now I have considered on getting a bigger external hard drive to replace my current one. My western digital external hard drive is only 160 gigs. At the time when I bought it, it was fairly large and I didnt have any need of anything bigger. My needs have grown and so does the files I like to store. While my internal hard drive is quickly running out of space as well, it gives me all the reason to get a larger external hard drive.

Why do I want to get an external hard drive instead of getting a second internal hard drive? Well I have considered on getting a second internal hard drive. However, the advantage of an external hard drive portability what atracts me. I like to have hardware that is portable to move files easily. Two years in the future, I will be using another computer to replace the current one I have. To prepare for that future PC, I like to have a way to store files I want to keep to take with me for the next one.

Today, I decided to order a Cavarly Caum external HDD. This time I order an enormous 1 terabyte or 1000 gigabyte hard drive to hopefully meet my needs for a few years to come.

Ordered two games from Amazon.com yesterday. Lord of the Rings Conquest I've been waiting for a price drop from $50 since this game have gotten fairly poor reviews for that kind of money. It is now $30 on Amazon.com so I decided to order it. I also decided to ordered Chronciles of Riddick: Dark Athena, a first person shooter game that recently came out. It was hard to pick with so many games out. I almost bought Zeno Clash for $20 on Digital2drive, but decided to wait next month or something. Another game I need to get is FEAR 2, which Ive been wanting for a while now, but because there is so many games out there right now, its hard to chose.

So far I have purchased four games from Direct2drive. Direct2drive and Steam does offer alot of games that are also avaliable on the retail box. Ive decided to go back to primarily buying the retail box of the games I want. Noticing that prices on Amazon.com drop quicker then on Direct2drive, giving the game a better value for me. Plus I miss the pretty box art I get to hold in my hand. Indie games like Zeno Clash that isnt avaliable on a retail box I would have to buy it through digital download.

Demigod was reviewed and rated by Gamespot's editors last week. It got a poor score of 6.5 rating while IGN gave it a 7.5, 1up C, AtomicGamer 89/100 and player rating average is 7.8. On Sunday, I decided to run to the score and pick up Demigod despite the low score Gamespot have given it.

Not to my surprise the game is alot better then it appeared to be. After spending 30 seconds opening the game manual to figure out what I need to do, the game's fun level just took off. The game is really a RPG with one RTS quality. The only RTS quality is resource gaining and there is only one resource you need to get and that is gold. There are flag points in the game that are fought over to get the opporuntity to get gold and defeating an enemy demigod gives you gold as well. The RPG part is its just you and your demigod. You level up your demigod and you get to increase its abilities with a skill tree and enough gold is collected, you could buy potions, spells, and armor.

There are eight demigods total each of them require different strategy in playing it. There are eight maps with four different objectives to each map. For single player play, there is four difficulty settings, easy, normal, hard and nightmare, even harder play online.

Right now I like to play the unclean beast as seen in the screenshots below.

Barack Obama adminstation is a sham. With the recession going on and how the government in doing is effecting the future of the well being of this country. Nothing is going right and the boneheads in office is just throwing money into the wind and see if it helps.

Obama lied during his campaign and he is not doing what he promised. He blasted the republicans and promised fiscalr esponsibility during the time he was running for president six months ago. $2 trillion will be added to the United States already $10 trillion debt with no end in sight in stopping and deceasing the debt. Obama wants congress to pass a $3.6 trillion budget for next year, Bush's last budget was $3 trillion so we will get a $600 billion increase in spending. I dont know where this money is going to come from, except by raising taxes not just on the wealthy but on the middle class as well, which he also promised the middle class will not get a tax increase. The American middle class have lost spending power do to stagflation, increasing taxes on the middle class would only increase the problem of getting out of the recession and improve the economy.

Obama was asked about the national debt during the last press conference some time last week. As like any other politician before him, he is blowing it off to the next president. McCain also promised to have a balanced budget by 2013 during his campaign. When you have that kind of length of time either 5 or 10 years, people will forget about having a $12 trillion debt and add more money to that debt. The national debt need to be talked about alot more now since it is so large. It will be a matter of time for the United States tax payers will have to pay 50% to just pay for the interest required by the Federal Reserve.

Obama administration wants more control with business who are considered a finanical risk to the well being of the country's economy. They want to go into the business and look to see what they are doing and take control if there was a problem. This is a form of a state run business if the government have control of a business operations. Besides the deal is completely unconstitutional, a business is a private place just like someones home. The government isnt allowed to go into people's homes to see what they are doing. A better idea is to add more laws like restricting banking companies, in buying out insurance companies, and decrease the market share of a bank from 20% to 15% to encourage more competition. More banks and insurance companies in competition and make them smaller, it would have a less of an impact when the economy takes a turn for the worse.

Bailing out AIG was huge fiasco and it should have never happened. The executives of AIG made bad decisions that effect themselves and caused the problems of that company. They had $400 billion in Goldman Sach mortgage assets in an insurance program that if AIG were to win they would make money, but if the economy were to turn, AIG would be hurting. What would have been a better idea is to let AIG go chapter 7 bankrupcy and the government were to buy all of the assets of AIG and auction it off at cost price. This would help start up companies, small, medium companies looking to grow their business. The problem of AIG absents would not be missed with many other companies taking its place and by increasing competition.

Everyone seem to have forgotten about the $350 billion bailout to the banks. While peoples attention is on AIG, nobody is questioning what the banks are doing with that money. It is known the banks pocketed the bailout money for themselves and didnt use it for credit like they should have. Car companies were having problems with people getting loans due to the banks not giving out loans before the bailout. The bailout was suppose to fix that problem and bring back the flow of credit.

The better idea for the bailout, is if a bank is asking the government $20 billion in aid. The government would buy the banks good assets for $20 billion at equal value of $20 billion. People homes and cars who are loan contract, that contract would move to the government. The government would then sell that contract to another bank for at cost price. Banks are left with their bad assets and a position for them to go into chapter 7 bankrupcy. Small, medium and start up banking companies will grow with the absence of the larger banks. With many small, medium and other investment companies who have bought the loan contracts would have an increase revenue base to grow their company and offer more loans to people. More competition would be a result and the economy would get back to normal without giving money away.

Today I bought a new car.

Yesterday I test drove three cars, the Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, and Nissan Altima, all of them were 2009 models. Ended up liking the Honda Accord the best. Then I narrowed it down to the Honda coupe instead of the sedan I orignally would like to get. Today I test drove the Honda Accord coupe EX-L ended buying the same car I was test driving. The car's color is a silver with black leather interior.

Now the worst part of it is, I have to make payments and I have to sell off my old car. Anyone looking for a used car?

Just to make something clear about what is and isnt a nonhuman creature. A human creature would be any character within a game that is human, elves, or klingon, any thing that have a simliar looking faces or behaviors to a human. Nonhuman creatures are characters such as wolves, minotaurs, dragons, lizardmen, or any other creature that doesnt have any human characteristics. Other words I would refer to a nonhuman creature would be monsters, beasts or creature.

One of my most favorite aspects to gaming is the monsters within the game world. I have a big habit of getting a game simply because of the monsters within a game. Rise of the Argonauts is one game I got simply because it had monsters in the game world. Its hard to choose from what exactly my favorite game monsters. Every year new games come out with new character designs and better graphics.

Located below are screenshots of the monsters I like from various of games. This wasnt easy to decide which monsters are my favorite because there are so many I like.

Minotaur from Everquest 2

Brumak from Gears of War(PC)

Deathclaw from Fallout 3

Character on the left of the screen is named Pan, he is a satyr. From Rise of the Argonauts

Nessus in battle armor in Rise of the Argonauts

Two issues in recent months have been edging me. First is the the seemingly never ending whining about any game that is not meeting someones expectations. The other issue is the logic of some people who think a $600 pc will save them money while a someone who built or bought a $2000 pc is a waste of money.

1. Gamespot community is amazing and lively I should first say. There are people here who are smart and enjoyable to discuss intelligently with topics related to PC and console gaming. However, what Ive grown tired in the last few months is the consent complaining folks are doing on the forums.

Games like Assassins Creed, Farcry 2, and Spore is causing people to do nothing but whine and cry about the game that they had waited for the past two years, read the previews and bought the hype from the publishers. Then when the game comes out they say the game is full s***. Some of these people will do nothing but point out all the flaws of any game that does not fit what they think is a perfect game. Another thing they will do is blame the publisher for hyping the game, then brand them as being a bad publisher.

There is no way that any game is absolutely perfect by any means by anyone. GTA IV got a 10 from Gamespot.com for the consoles, that doesnt mean its really a perfect game, it just means to their opinion the game should get a 10. I be pretty sure someone came on the forums and complained that GTA IV did not meet what they expected then blamed Gamespot and the publisher. There are plenty of people who have ceilings that are so high that no one could ever reach it. Believe me I spoken to these people in real life with real life issues. If these people dont do it themselves, then its always wrong.

2. Some of you might have seen my posts in various of threads. Within those threads is my computer specs I have listed down below in my sig. The video card you see is a replacement, the orignal I got when I bought the PC was a BFG Tech 8800 GTX OC2. Ill be honest that system wasnt cheap at the time when I bought it. It cost about $2600 from Avadirect The video card alone cost $600.

When I get a PC, I dont like to bother with upgrading it. So I will get some of the highest end parts so it could last at least three years or longer. By the time three years come around, the hardware in my PC would be so obsolete I just upgrade by getting an all new PC with the latest hardware.

There are people on Gamespot who think it would be more logical to spend $600-$1000 on a PC to play the latest games. While this is fine, these same people will find they would need to spend an additional $1500 with in the next three years to be able to keep up with the recommended system requirements. These same people who would praise themselves for their $600-$1000 PC would soon match someone who got a $1900-$2500 PC.

Since Last October there have been stagging layoffs in every business sector. State governments here in the US is experience a decrease in tax revenue because people are losing their jobs.

$350 billion have been handed out to major US banks. This was done to help keep the line of credit so business and people could take out loans. Without loans nobody could buy a new car. Since Last October when US congress past a $350 billion bail out to US banks, nothing have improve.

Why are we in a recession? The United States government have created $5 trillion in new money out into the world. This would cause the dollar to drop in value which would cause gasoline prices to go up. People who barely making their mortgage payments would have to deal with increase gas and food prices. One million people had to foreclose their homes. Now we are in a recession and people are being layed off, those who arent layed off will be tighting their belts. Alot of people might be thinking twice in buying that $20,000 new car right now with the risk of them losing their job in six months. In short to all this production is down.

Here is my plan to all this. Department of Defense has a $600 billion budget, wars in Iraq and Afghanstan $500 billion a year, Homeland Security $700 billion, and national defense another $700 billion, making it $2.5 trillion in spending just for united states defense per year. Cut DoD budget down to pre 9/11 level to $230 billion, end the war in Iraq, cut homeland security and cut national defense. Nobody is talking about this not even Obama, but the $10 trillion national debt is killing this country.

Without borrowing more money, set up a $700 billion construction plan on roads, bridges, power lines, water and sewer lines. US government could build and own 3 skyscapers in every major city. Skyscapers cost around $200-300 million to build if there was three at one time that would be a billion injected into local economies. Instead of handing money to US banks, the construction plan would turn that money into pay checks. Those pay checks would go to spending on houses, cars, tvs, etc. People indirectly would be employed because of more cars, tvs and other high priced goods are building built, those people would have to spend their money on stuff too. Instead of handing money to US banks, the vast majority of money use for production would go into the banks as savings account, checking and other investments. Those savings accounts would turn into loans for people looking for a house, car, etc. Instead of having a whirlpool of a declining economy, it would cause an increase.

This is my first blog post of the new year. With my computer troubles I didnt have alot of time to make a blog. Now I am back I got alot of things on my mind I would like to say.

1. My previous blogs I mentioned there were problems with my computer. The video card went kaput on me while in a Fallout 3 gaming session. My last card was a BFG Tech 8800 GTX OC2. Its been almost a month since I shipped the dead card back to Avadirect.

I did call Avadirect last week to ask what is happening with the replacement. They told me they have sent the dead card to the manufacturer. When they get a replacement card from BFG Tech they would send me that one. So oblviously manufactures dont handle with consumers, only the resellers do.

Getting really frustrating in waiting, I decided to buy a new card. My new card is a Sapphire Radeon 4870 1 GB. It arrived right on New Years Eve just in time for some gaming for New Years Day and the weekend following.

2. There are two new games to my collection of games. I decided to buy Grand Theft Auto 4 and Tomb Raider: Underworld. They both arrived on New Years Eve.

I am currently playing GTA IV and excited in finishing it. There is so much to do and the game itself causes distractions. Like Brucie, Kate, Little Jacob, or Roman would call me up while I am on my way to a mission or trying to jump a ramp.

3. Grand Theft Auto 4 is very hardware demanding. I am only getting 10-20 fps at medium graphic quality with the shadows on low quality. The game auto set to high graphic quality and was only getting 5 fps making it unplayable.

I noticed on the forums about people complaining about how the highest end hardware is still having problems achieving high frames. Some of these people seem to have no clue what is going on with GTA IV on why its so demanding. Rockstar did discuss about what was coming when GTA 4 was heading to the PC. They said the resolutions will be higher, graphic quality would be better, and the population density will be alot more then the console version. The population density is the big reason the frames are so low. With so many moving NPCs moving around on the map plus the player character moving, the CPU have to calculate everyone of them. The video card have to wait for the CPU to say ok this guy is here and here and here for it to render the NPC for us to even see it and interact with it.

4. Doing a little research about Directx 11. I read Directx 11 video cards will be coming out late this year a few months before Windows 7. This will be a deju vu all over again with Directx 10. Directx 11 games wont be out until the summer or early fall.