I’m almost as bad as RPG and Bal ¬_¬. Anyhoo, what has been the cause of the lack of blog chatter? Well, three things: Xbox, Work and Xbox.

Work has been been a bit of pain of late, not because of it being work, but because I’ve been fixing, installing and tinkering with various bits of software and hardware instead of programming. As I mentioned previously I was at work a week ago last Saturday rebuilding a replacement server for the one that had lost its marbles.

Well yesterday, whilst I was working at home waiting for a new shed to arrive (the old one was another victim of the bad weather. The new one is a shiny metal one, or it will be when Kate and I put it together. I don’t possess Vonduresque building skills, so it may take a while), I was rebuilding the injured party since new parts for it arrived in the post on Tuesday. One SATA RAID controller and one 160GB SATA HDD. The controller, scarily, costs more than twice what the HDD does and is also more expensive than a Geforce 7950GT. Why, I don’t know, give it’s just a PCI card with fancy sockets.

But it’s not just been the hardware that’s been an arse, it’s the software too. Microsoft Exchange and Veritas BackupExec in particular. Words cannot accurately describe the utter contempt I hold for them. There are times when software seems to be designed to be needless hard to use or completely dumb in telling you what problems it’s having. I could rant for hours on the subject, but for the sake of my sanity, won’t.

But enough of work, outside of it because of the above fun, I’ve not much felt like sitting in front of my laptop writing updates. Instead I’ve been giving the 360 a kicking. However single player Gears of War has been pounded into a bloody pulp, Project Gotham has been aced, Burnout Revenge the same and Test Drive Unlimited has lost it’s shine a bit for the time being. So I got Oblivion and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 Super Mega Squirrel Edition last week to keep me busy.

Oblivion is an odd one. It’s a proper RPG like days of old. Lots of text to read, a proper story to follow and gazillions of attributes to tweak. Gom appears to be loving it going by his achievement record, but 6 hours play was enough. I think though that I’ve been spoilt by playing Blizzard games, like Diablo and WoW. They’re more arcady RPG’s with the emphasis on action.

Actually, I totally forgot that Oblivion was unlike WoW. I went thundering into a bunch of enemies and obviously got decked. There I was expecting to be revived in some local graveyard but was instead prompted to pick which save game I’d like to load up. Feck and biscuits. An hours gameplay lost.

The main thing with Oblivion is that it’s slow going in parts. Kinda like eating a steak but getting stuck on some gristle and you just end up chewing. You know there’s more good stuff to come, but you’d rather have a Big Mac instead. Hence the Tiger Woods purchase.

Now I’d played the demo and was totally addicted. A chap at work loves Links on the PC (I used to play it for hours back in the DOS days) and it got me interested again. There’s plenty of courses (like St. Andrews, Firestone CC, Spyglass Hill) and it looks pretty damn good. One thing I really like is the way the golf swing is done. You move the left thumbstick back to start the back swing that mash it forwards to finish it off. If you don’t do it in a straight line it’ll go off sideways. It’s clever stuff.

Thing is, it’s a total time sink. I ended up playing til 3 in the morning last Saturday. 9 holes takes 20 to 30 minutes whilst 18 is double that. You really have to practice to get the hang of the controls. I’m getting there but I still suck at getting out of bunkers.

I’ve also yet to play online because I know I’ll get my arse kicked by some 12 year old who has the kind of thumb dexterity I can only dream of. I think finishing the PGA Tour and Tiger Challenge cup would be a good idea first.