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Boredom. It strikes with no remorse, and it lasts for hours. They say the idle mind is the devil’s playground [Idiots], but being the politically-correct individual that I am I’ve decided to churn out some idea’s of how you may overcome this problem.It’s simple, Games, Games Games. No you idiot, I’m not talking about Badminton over the court, Video Games of course. The age old battle is, ‘Which system is best?’

It is my humble opinion that it doesn’t matter, every console shines well on it’s own level. You will, in your lifetime meet preposterously opinionated people who asphyxiate you, with their unreasonable … reasoning you wish you could just extirpate them, whenever this debate comes up, which usually ends up inconclusive due to the lack of proper judges or the headstrong opponent who refuses to realize loss, or you yourself, who is so well drenched by your own pomposity that you refuse to consider an alternative to what you’ve already predetermined. The reason for this post is not to discuss the superiority of one gaming platform over the other, but merely a list of PC games you could preoccupy yourself with, when swarmed by boredom…

Naturally, to make things interesting, I shall force my whims and fancies unto you, and as such, I shall rate the games in increasing order of ‘kick-ass’-ness, that shall be measured with the following Criteria :

1 Level of ‘kick-ass’-ness : This game sucks monkey balls, you’re better of just being bored.

2 Level of ‘kick-ass’-ness : This game is alright, if you’re wedged in a tight spot of boredom and need some gaming action.

3 Level of ‘kick-ass’-ness : This game is mediocre by all standards but will do to cure the average bored individual.

4 Level of ‘kick-ass’-ness : This game is awesome, and is highly recommended for combating boredom.

5 Level of ‘kick-ass’-ness : The awesomeness of this game is indescribable. One should purposely become bored to play this game.

That being clarified, lets begin.

Dreamfall :- The Longest Journey : Level of ‘kick-ass’-ness : 1

Now, I didn’t get much in this game. Many people tell me this game is pretty good, but, I personally don’t see it. There is no need for me to shoot a review, for one should be easily available from http://pc.ign.com should you need it. My beef with this game is that I found the voice acting atrocious. It was …abhorring to endure it. Imagine a gas of black cloud seeks to suck you into it’s ether-bound prison. The voice goes, ‘No, No..Noooo!’… but what indeed you get is some European dude reading the script out loud at a slow pace with no emotions. Not to be undone, I gave the game another chance and let it load to the part where I could use my main character. I got excited they showed the main character in her knickers. I started controlling her and realized this game was stupid to the core. I hated the controls, the interfaces, everything screamed sin! I immediately uninstalled the game. I’d suggest you’d do the same.

Time taken to Beat : Uninstalled in 2 minutes

Replay Value : None

Spellforce 2 : Level of ‘kick-ass’-ness : 3

Now this game, was rather interesting. The game combines the elements of RTS (Real time Strategy) and RPG (Role Playing) into one power packed package. The game starts with you being one of the few of the Shaikan race. Simply put, Shaikan’s are of a mystical race, which have the blood of the dragon [Patriarch, Ur] flowing deep within their veins. This allows them to be resurrected in battle by a fellow Shaikan provided the fatal blow was laid not too long ago. Everyone with the blood of the dragon is referred to as ‘The Brother of my Blood’ and naturally in this game, your entire party will be blessed with the dragon blood. However, Only the original 3 characters are true Shaikan’s and the remaining shall receive the dragon blood to be revived in an awful situation that may befall them.

The story basically takes you to discovering the recent attacks by the ‘Shadow’s’ unto the world of Dwarves, Men and Elves. You will quickly notice treacherous terrains, grotesque monsters and mighty titans assisting you in your battles. The game is rather short, of perhaps, 20 hours at most, to complete all side-quests, infact, it’s possible to do it in less than that amount of time if you’re familiar with what you’re doing. There is a nice skill tree that allows you to either become a Mage/Cleric/Warrior/Necromancer/Archer or a Hybrid. You may however not be able to learn everything. The voice acting for your avatars and heroes are pretty good but for the NPC’s tend to be rather annoying. After about an hour of gameplay, I turned off the volume, and loaded windows media player for music.

The game, however, does not have a proper ending. I was rather disappointed with this but took consolation with the fact that the expansion pack was to be released in March, 2007. It is to be called SpellForce 2: Dragon Storm. My beef with the game was rather slight, and I do hope the expansion pack of the game leaves the game with a proper ending. Another minor problem was that most of the equipment in game was aimed towards the melee class. This makes sense to an extent because once I got a nice quarterstaff early on, I never bothered changing equipment for my sorceress. My robe remained the same for a long time as well since equipment for sorceress’ are far and few in between. But since their casting power is so amazing, the trade off seems fair.

Time Taken to beat : 15 hours with all sidequests

Replay Value : Nothing that alters the direction the game heads on, just of a different class for the main character.

Rogue Trooper : Level of ‘kick-ass’-ness : 3

This is another awesome FPS game, based on the comic strip of the same name. It basically depicts the story of genetically engineered soldiers who are used for warfare in the planet only known as Nu Earth. The game depicts advanced technological cloning and computing techniques that a clone may save it’s comrade by removing his ‘chip’ and implementing it unto his backpack/helmet or even gun. I was really impressed at the way the AI interacts with you. I especially loved it how Rogue reloaded his weapon. A slot opens on the side of your backpack, from which emerges a metallic arm with a clip of ammunition. It brings this ammunition to Rogue to his right side, and yells, ‘Here Rogue’ upon which Rogue takes it and reloads his weapon.

Call me a sucker for fireworks, but that was pretty amazing. The game in itself is pretty short, and can be beaten by 2 hours of continues gameplay. But if you’re looking for some quick fragging fun, this game is just the thing for you. The voice overs may be childish at times, but this does not bother me one bit. The game starts with a betrayal of a high ranking officer which leads to the massacre of the majority of the genetically engineered G.I.’s. You’re among the few survivors, and you’re to find who the backstabbing officer is. You do not find conveniently positioned crates of ammunition, but instead you ‘Salvage’ items off of corpses and salvage piles found around various parts of the game. This salvaged parts allows the chip in your backpack to forge weapons, grenades, ammunition and upgrades for your arsenal. It was a fresh take on FPS’ everywhere.

Time Taken to Beat : 1 hour 30 minutes.

Replay Value : There are some interesting unlockables, that would keep you coming to replay, but beyond that, there isn’t much.

Stay Tuned for Part 2 of Frittering away time…

Naturally, My birthday is around the corner, and the only right thing to do is the conjure up a wish list. As many Thaumaturge’s of the past have shown, planning to be disappointed is better to have not planned and…fuck it, nobody said anything.

Anyways, lethargy kicks in, as this body hits 2 decades, and a swash buckle. This year is rather special cause I’ve more body hair than ever. Naturally, the greatest gift is to be able to wake up in the morning and scratch one’s butt, however, materialistic things are always great.

Without being far too verbose, here’s a bunch of things I’d love to get, in descending order of importance.

1) Sony Playstation 3

Rather glorious isn’t she? Yes, all good things in life is female, because eventually they get outdated and a better one comes along. Sexist? Nah, not quite, merely an observation of how things around me work. If only human firmware was upgradeable. Anyhow, back to this beauty, it’s workmanship is awesome. The reflective metal black casing nothing much to ogle at, but, there’s just something about it that screams Manly. The ultimate definition of high definition gaming. There is no need to go through the specifications of this machine, and what you need to know is that this is the ultimate gaming rig for the this year.

I’m a Playstation aficionado . I have previously owned A Sony PSX, PSONE, PS2, PSP, and would, soon, love to be the proud owner of a PS3. So HypoG, what the hell is stopping you? Hrm, Nothing much, just $500 in spare change.

2) BFG Tech® NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800 GTX OC 768MB

This, my friend is what is known as a graphic card. For the uninitiated, what they do is basically everything you see on your monitor. Naturally, BFG [the company which produces this NVIDIA Based card] pride themselves by calling their products ‘Gamers Choice’ and entice you further with ‘Lifetime Guarantee’. The beauty of BFG cards is that they come ‘Overclocked out of the box’. Overclocking is the act of increasing the core clock speed of the processing unit, [in this case the GPU] to squeeze out some extra juice. Naturally, doing so voids your warranty, as overclocking without knowing what you’re doing can result in your graphic card getting fried. Then, what it leaves you with is a nice paper weight. This card, comes in 2 versions, the water cooled version and the fan version as poised above.

The fundamental difference between both those versions is that the water cooled version, has a clock speed of 650 mhz, as opposed to the 600 mhz of the heat-sink-dual-fan version and the normal 8800’s clock speed of 575 mhz. All these numbers may mean nothing to you, but, for overclockers and ‘professional gamers [whatever those are]’ alike, this means the world. But it doesn’t stop there, since this is SLI-enabled (Scalable Link Interface). What this basically means is, you can synchronize two of these identical cards to process games for you, which would lead to an increase in performance (Roughly 10%). This means, playing with maxed out settings, anti aliasing, Anisotropic filtering, and of course high definition mode is possible. And since graphics are one of the major factor in games selling, this is very important. So much for not being verbose..

If I was to summarize this card in one word; ludicrous. Why? Hrm It has 768 MB of memory. Who needs that much memory? Infact, 512 mb of memory on a graphics card is considered overkill, let alone 700+? 650/600 Mhz Core speed? Yum! Overkill for this point of time, but since hardware is in need of constant upgrading, I’d say this will keep you going for a while. A year and a half, maybe.

But HypoG, if you say it’s overkill, why’d you want one?

-Because I’m a Man.

But HypoG, be practical.

-I’m a Man.

Sex or the card?

-Sex, unless if you’re talking about the water cooled edition.

BFG…while it’s not officially stated, it’s well known as Big Fuckin’ Gun. Big indeed.

So what’s stopping you from getting one? : $599

3) BFGR1000WPSU

Say what? Basically it stands for BFG’s latest 1 Kw [!] power supply unit.

I was unable to secure a better image, so newegg it is. A little about the PSU’s in general. PSU, or power supply units basically convert power from your socket to power your motherboard and other hardware, like your hard disks, optical drives, etc. PSU’s come ranging from 200 w to, well now 1000w. The average PC is powered by a 250W PSU… imagine, 250W is able to power a low-end computer flawlessly. Albeit nowadays, most of these 250W are called ‘Cap-ayam’ Made in china purchased for maybe RM 20-40! The standard, is 500W and there are alot of PSU’s in the market to choose from at this range. Then SLI came along and now you have SLI-minded PSU’s out there, with Nvidia listing out ‘SLI-Certified PSU’s’

Again, this is overkill, and the only reason I want it is because I’m a man and men like big powerful guns. My current Foltron Epsilon 700W works fine, but an upgrade, is always welcome.

The price? : $290 only. You can’t put a price on quality.

Why don’t you get it? : To get this, I’d first need to SLI a pair of 8800 GTX OC’s, and naturally since they’re too expensive for me, I don’t need this yet.

4) Hard Disk’s

Today, my stupid hard disk crashed. What this meant was I lost all my data saved on my WD 250 GB Sata II hard disk. This ranged from files I used for school, and leisure. I lost video’s of my anatomy classes, recording of lectures, cadaver photo’s, you name it. It took me a few hours to get everything back running, but the original hard disk went obsolete. I have a hard disk recovery device that I’ve always wanted to use. I messed with it a bit [and as such voided the warranty in which my hard disk is still under], and got the hard disk running, however, I could not recover any of the data. The hard disk which crashed was the one on which my Operating System was running on.

So I’d now love to replace this hard disk with something new, something juicy, and something reliable.

How’s about the worlds fastest SATA hard disk? The WD Raptor of course, at 10,000 RPM, and 160 GB of space. But wait, that’s not all, lets RAID 0 it!

Now with RAID technology, you’ll be able to combine 2-3 hard disks together to make them work as one. What this does is faster access to memory, and more stability. However, if one of the hard disk crashes, they all crash*. The most obvious reason to RAID would be to show off, and naturally that’s what being a Man is all about. It’s pointless to RAID unless if you are running a server. But of course RAID for disks with your operating system shows significant increase in load times.

*There are many RAID methods, and on certain RAID’s, the data may still be sustained even if 1 of the disk’s may fail.

The cost of one of these babies? : $250, x 2 $500. Ouch.

And this leads me to the final item on my wish list. And no, it’ s not another computer related device.

5) Littmann® Master Cardiology

This, for all those time I wanted to play doctor. There’s no need to go into the details of this stethoscope and let me just leave it as, this device costs a grand total of : $ 180.

With that, I reckon it concludes my wishlist. I still remember back in the days I would beg my parents for RM 40 a set, train set. The battery operated one with fake smoke. I would buy a few of these and build it into one large track. I’d do all sorts of experiments with landmarks, collision tests, reverse engineering and what not. Today, it seems RM 40 is no longer enough. To do the math, this year’s wish list, if I was to get the following :

– 1x PS3 [No accessories, No extra games, nothing] $500

– 2x BFG Tech® NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800 GTX OC 768MB [Water Cooled] $600 X 2

– 1x BFGR1000WPSU $290

-2x WD RAPTORS 160 GB’s @ 10,000 RPM $ 250 x 2

-The Ultimate Stethoscope $ 180.

All these bring a grand total of $ 2670.

Ironically, that is about half of what I am paying as tuition fee right now. God save us all.

P.S. From the date of entry, you’ve about 2 months and a half to save up enough money to get me stuff so that I’d not obliterate you in sight with my Arch-lich like powers.

The Thaumaturge,

HypoGXII