Auto Assault simply sucked. The only surprise here is that it took this long to die. (And, honestly, I don't think all that much more of Tabula Rasa. Both games convey a strong sense of 'generic' gaming. That is, the games themselves convey no feeling of their being the distillations of passion, no vibe that the developers or artists felt this was something new or cool or different. Rather, they both convey a heavy vibe of generic monsters, generic action, generic gaming created by punch-clock drones who wrote or drew what the schedule said they needed to this week.)

Creston - No, there is a windows dialog that says "bioshock.exe has stopped working" "A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available." No notification yet, though. It isn't Steam. It's definitely Bioshock that's crashing. Steam merely blew away an extra day of non-connect then downloading at a snail's pace. But I even did a steam->properties->local files->verify integrity of game cache. As far as steam is concerned, I got what I paid for.

How about some Bioshock/Steam bashing instead? It is now a day and a half since Bioshock went 'live' on Steam, and I still haven't got it to run.

First was about an hour and a half when my Steam client couldn't even connect, then (at long last) the decryption, followed by (ugh) more downloading. The download was crawling, so I went to bed, leaving it going. When I got up, 8 hours later, it still hadn't finished downloading, and was coming in at a whopping 2.3 kbps. Okay, I leave it going and head off to work. This evening, Steam finally says it is ready to go. I launch. I eagerly watch as the Bioshock logo comes up. I expectantly wait as the screen changes to black. I keep waiting. Nothing. I call up task manager, and see a dialog saying bioshock.exe has stopped working. I reboot. Same deal. I reboot and kill off all the miscellaneous gewgaws in my system tray. Same-o.

Bottom line - Valve's claim that I could pre-load and play Bioshock the *instant* it is released is just plain flat-out false advertising. They had to know it'd take hours to ship out the 500 MB additional download to everyone. And, in my case at least, the program supplied does not run on my system. I think I can properly state, with the authority of experience, that Steam and Bioshock suck. Completely.

I had plunked down $5 to reserve a boxed copy from my local GameStop, but then I saw it could be pre-loaded on Steam and figured that would be faster, so I got my $5 back and pre-purchased on Steam. I envisioned being able to simply come home from work and click Launch and be able to dive right in. No side-trip to GameStop, no tedious installation from disc. Boy was I wrong. My first clue should have been when the pre-load averaged around 15kbps. Okay, we still had days to go, and I wasn't worried about it finishing in time. But now I come home and try to fire up steam. The Steam servers are so slagged that I can't even get the support webpage to come up, let alone have my client successfully log in. This sucks. Totally. What is the value proposition of Steam again? If I thought I could get a refund from Valve, I'd happily go drive to GameStop and pick up a boxed version, just so I could actually play the dammned thing.

I've never felt more ripped-off by any other author than I did when, after having read and enjoyed Ender's Game, I came across Lost Boys and foolishly assumed it ought to be about as good, or in the ballpark, anyway. Lost Boys was one of the most worthless pieces of crap I've ever read. (And, given my promiscuous reading habits, that's saying something). I can't believe these two books came from the same person. I mean, they are so vastly different in quality that I seriously wonder if Card didn't pay someone else to ghost-write Ender's Game. (Or, conversely, maybe he's coasting on Ender's Game by offshoring his later writing?)

I haven't seen the new area, but this update also came with a little more eye-candy in the form of spiffed up effects and a little more glitz on the GUI.

The update also brought a problem, at least on my system, in that the names over people are only visible when they are just to the right of center. It's as if there's some sort of clipping box that blocks the lettering outside of this range.

It's a fun game, though. I'm still trying to figure out what keeps me playing. I think WoW is better in many ways, but LotRO has some mysterious attraction for me.

This trailer, for all it's hi-rez glory, just sucks. It spends almost no time at all revealing what the game is like and invests extra time pointing out irrelevant stuff like how the producer also invested money in Gears of War, as if that's somehow related. I was disappointed. I wanted to look at the game, not at how fabulous Epic thinks they are or see vidscreens on the wall showing flashbacks of previous UT incarnations.

These guys should post en entry on prosper.com, just like bunches of other buisnesses that want loans from random individuals.

At least, that's what Froogle seems to think:
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=iPhone

Glass might last longer than polycarbonate, but that stuff about it sounding better because plastic loses data is BS. CDs use Reed-Solomon error-correction to replace missing or damaged data. (And, if plastic CDs really did lose data, they wouldn't be much use for software).

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, "Sport" definition #3: "An active pastime; recreation." (So there!)