New Additions (Recent Losses)

Well Hey everybody,

Now's the time I talk to you about my week in review.

Well, I knew I was going to get a bonus come today (yes!) of somewhere around $500 (yessir!), and I also discovered that because of some wonderful sales by a team completely unrealated to me, at all, I got another $75 dollar bonus on top of that.

It's fantastic!

So I decided I could pay off some of my bills and maybe, just maybe pickup an Xbox 360.
Especially since this week they had their prices drop down to $300 and there's a sale that you get a $25 dollar giftcard with the purchase of a new system.

Well, I thought about it long and hard, and discovered that my credit limit had been increased by over $1,500! so I decided 'you know what, screw it!' and I bought myself an Xbox 360 (going to pay off my credit card later today). It's fantastic!
I absoltuely love it. Streaming content from my PC to my Xbox is great (although I have so much content it sometimes takes a while to load..). I have three actual games for it;
Crackdown - a GTA style shooter where you're a cop trying to clean up the streets
Gears of War - a thirdperson shooter, fighting demons or aliens, or something I don't really know, I can't get past the fact that this game is so FREAKING HARD. I play most games on the normal, or medium settings, for my first go through, and this game is insanely hard. I can play other games just fine on the medium setting, but this game, is nuts!
Halo 3 - Originally, I wasn't going to get this game, I was just going to get Crackdown and Gears of War. I played Halo 3 before, and it didn't really seem like anything special to me. But my room mate said I should probably get it, and I do like Halo 1 (I never got to finish Halo 2, thanks to original xbox drive failure), so I figured since it has achievements, it's probably the better one to get. I don't know why, but achievements drive me nuts. it just makes a game more fun. Look at Geometry Wars, great game, right? well on PC there are no achievements. I find myself getting bored competing with my own scores and not having any kind of goals to make it's just unchallenging. But so far, I've actually been enjoying it. I'm coming up to the part now where you go inside a Flood ship, and there's a part like this in every game, a part where my instincts clash with what you have to do in the game. It wants you to enter the ship, and I don't want to go in there, it's probably filled with the flood, I freaking hate the flood. don't go in there, stay the hell away from the goddamn flood. I had issues like this with Half-life 2, entering Ravenholm, I guess it's just a part of the experience, I mean, what fun would the game be if you played it safe the whole way through? It'd be boring. I don't know, maybe I'm just looking for some kind of monster that isn't going to completely freak me out. I like opponents that aren't zombies; aliens, fine, humans, fine, whatever, but zombies.. let's get the hell outta there.

anyway, I am really enjoying all three games, Crackdown is just.. it's like a toy, it's so much fun, you can play with it for hours. I never get bored of jumping around the city, shooting up gang members, and increasing my stats. And Gears of War is hard, but something about it is still fun.. I don't know what it is.

I also picked up some arcade titles,
Geometry Wars - I loved this for PC, with achievements and leaderboards, I have a whole new reason to play.
Poker Smash - It's tetris attack on drugs, what can I say? I still enjoy it. I enjoy every Tetris Attack (panel de pon). I have it on Gameboy Advanced, Nintendo DS, Pokemon Puzzle League on Wii, and now I have Poker Smash on 360.. It's fantastic.
Doom - Oh my god, I knew this was on here, but I didn't know how great it was. I played Doom before on PC and most of the time I was just lost and confused. Something about this version of it, makes it so much more coherent. Perhaps it's the higher resolution, but to me this is the most approachable version of the game. It reminds me sort of, of Marathon on PC (the only version I've played).
Undertow - I kind of don't like this game so much. it was free to me (yeah, i had an xbox live acct back when they were giving it out, and i downloaded it on a friends 360) and I haven't played it much. It's a neat premise and the graphics are great I'm just kind of.. meh.. not so interested.

And then I have the usual free games that every one has access to,
yaris, hexic, and aegis wing.

I think there are more free games, but I forget. I'm at work now so I can't say what.
I also purchased an Episode of South Park "Over Logging On." it is one of my favorite South Park Episodes, probably because I work in Tech Support, and can actually make this happen.

Anyway, all in all, my Xbox 360 experience has been absolutely Fantastic! sure, I had to wait a few years so I could have other people wade through the absolute shit for me, but once again, the conservative, sandwich-heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor.

Well, this blog was titled New Additions (Recent Losses) for a reason, so let me tell you about the other portion.

Tuesday evening, I came home, in hopes to play perhaps some Garrys Mod and Poker Smash with my Buddy Adam.
I played some Poker Smash with him, while waiting for my computer to compress some files so I could send them to Adam so he could have those files. After Compressing them, I went to send them to him in an Email.
And then my computer crashed.
It did the little window saying "this computer will shut down in 00:05:00" bit, and for fun, I pulled the clock back to 2k5 and the number exploded. Anyway, I went ahead and shut the computer down, and then when I went to turn it back on, I was asked if I wanted to put it in safe mode. I chose to use my most recent settings that worked, and... it shut down.
I went to turn it on again, and it got to the Windows loading screen before shutting down.
I turned it on again, and it didn't POST.
For those of you who don't know, POST stands for Power On Self Test. If it passes this test, your computer will normally beep. There have been some computers out there that have been released without this beep, so don't worry if yours doesn't have one and still works, it's probably fine. My computer is supposed to beep though, and it wasn't beeping. It wasn't passing the Power On Self Test.

So I freaked out, I stopped playing Poker Smash, threw my computer on the chop block and started taking parts out. First I started with the Video card.. no difference, I put it back in.
then I tried each stick of ram individually.

One of my 1 gig corsair pieces of ram was dead.

it even had the heatsinks!

So I decided there and then, to buy a new computer.
Earlier in the day I had been browsing the Dell Website, I discovered they had an awesome deal, a Quadcore, 3gig ram, 500gig hdd, monster of a machine for only $499.
Now, with my employee discount, I was able to get it for ten dollars less than the sticker price. However with my additions and extras, it cost all together over $800 after shipping and taxes.

But I'm really looking forward to getting it. I'm going to slap my Radeon 2600 HD in there and go to town.

Anyway, I have done a lot of shopping this week and I plan on not doing a lot of shopping for a while.