CNN do a quick 3-minute review of Microsoft’s Zune, and they didn’t like it at all. I love the bit where the female presenter says “May I show you my new Shuffle?” toward the end, and pulls one of the gorgeous new iPod shuffles. The design contrast between the two devices is night and day. I think that review will probably sell more Shuffles than Zunes.

You know, I really do wish the iPod had a kick-ass competitor. While there are plenty of geeks who’ll say “Well I have an iRiver and it’s much better than an iPod!”; I mean I’d like to see another device that has 30-40% of the MP3 music player market instead of Apple owning such a massive chunk of it. A single company holding such a large percentage of a market just isn’t good for consumers in the long run. Creative, Samsung, Microsoft, and every single other large electronics company have had how long now and how much resources to put out their so-called iPod killers? Get with the program!

Zing, can you tell I’ve been procrastinating lately? The last three blog entries are all about boring site news. Woah, like, totally meta dude.

• Comments have been turned back on, so now you can have your say on my views and boring-ass blog entries if you’re really keen!
• I’ve ripped out a couple of old blog entries and made a formal About Me section on this site, that talks about me in all my massive glory and stuff. There’s also a whole new shebang on stuff that I like. It’s always so weird writing about yourself.
• Lots of little tidy-ups and small things.

I’ve added a games section to the site. There’s some small cheat… uhh, tricks, that you may find handy, some information on crafting items, and also a small patch to remove the XP penalty for multiclassing if you think it’s stupid (which I do). Have fun!

Ooo, my main website just got a bit shinier. Yeah for awesome free RapidWeaver themes!

Whoops, those of you who had problems downloading Vimacs will find that the download links work properly now. (What the hell, people besides me actually use Vimacs?)

Those of you who like stalking me will be glad to know that the gallery is back online.

Well, it seems that Neverwinter Nights 2, Obsidian¹’s next kick-ass roll-playing game, is out in the USA. Unfortunately, it’s been delayed in Australia until November the 16th. Whaaaa? That’s… like… next year! Muaahaha, thankfully I’ve managed to wrangle some contacts and download the thing from Direct2Drive, so I’ve been gleefully playing it for the past few nights. Well, OK, make that the past few days, nights, and early mornings…

First impressions are good, although the game engine isn’t particularly medal-worthy: Obsidian could use some better game engines programmers, that’s for sure. It’s not in the same league as Oblivion, for instance. The user interface also isn’t quite up to NWN1 standards. However, the spell effects do look very pretty, and more importantly, the story looks quite promising, and possesses the same moral and ethical ambiguity that is the hallmark of Obsidian games. None of this bozo so-obvious black-and-white good-vs-evil crap. (Mind you, I’m playing a slightly evil character at the moment — slaughtering the Neverwinter City Watch might be somewhat evil… but it is so much fun. Besides, the Watch is weak and not doing its job, so I don’t see anything wrong with the Thieves’ Guild controlling the city streets since they actually have the resources to maintain peace and order better than the Watch. Just ensure the local shop keepers pay their taxes to the Guild and everyone’s happy… )

It also looks like an even more hackable game than the original NWN, although I’m unhappy with the toolset using the same dock-o-rama type of user interface that Visual Studio is famous for. Dockable windows are OK, but I still think it’s far inferior to using multiple windows and a decent window management tool such as Exposé. Still, it took me about 30 minutes to write some small chea… uhh, scripts, to help with some in-game things.

So far I’ve probably pumped about 20 to 30 hours into the game, and I think I’m about 3/4 of the way through Chapter One, with there being three chapters in total. If I don’t reply to any emails for the week or two, uhhh, I guess you know what I’ll be doing!

¹ Obsidian are makers of the best computer role-playing games in existence, end of story. (None of this World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy VII crap, thank you very much.) If you disagree with me on this, that’s OK, I’m not really into Pokemon anyway.