My So Called Life…

After visiting friends for the weekend the lady in my life persuaded me to buy Singstar for her. We ordered it Saturday evening and all week she’s been like a giddy schoolgirl waiting for it to arrive. That happened today.

First the game itself arrived, but no sign of the microphones, which made me giggle and made her to grow increasingly impatient. Fortunately for her the mics arrived not too long after in the back of a van, so tonight has been filled with the sound of Take That.

I can only hope that tomorrow the other disk arrives so there’ll at least be some other artists available. Either that or it was all a big con to get me to order some tune off the SingStore. Hmm.

I shall now spend Friday humming God-awful Take That tunes to myself and anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity. What has become of me.

At least I got a high score on Eye of the tiger. Wait, what am I saying…

Well, Toni has actually spoken to the letting agency about the flat now, they were supposed to be letting us know the state of play lest Friday, considering they initially said we’d be back in by the weekend just gone…

They still don’t know when we’ll be back in the flat again, when I stuck my head in the door on Saturday the carpet was still up and we were missing a wall, so I doubt we’ll be back in any time soon.

To top it all off, the new Burnout DLC is out on Thursday and the PS3 is back at the flat still. Nooooo!

I’ve been a fan of the Unreal Tournament series since it first came out (bring back the razor-jacks!!) and have played each incarnation with renewed joy and enthusiasm, but when the UT3 was released I felt it was somewhat lacking… Don’t get me wrong, I thought it looked amazing, but having played the rest of the series it seemed to add a little too much. It all seemed very busy and cluttered and far removed form the clean crisp lines of UT 2003/4. One way to look at it is that more clutter is more realistic, cracked and collapsing cement has a much more visceral look to it and it works.

Anyway, last weekend Steam had a free weekend to help announce the new titan patch and update to version 2.0. So I set steam to download the game and enjoy my weekend, waiting for the download to finish.

Around about 6pm on Sunday the download completed, and after letting it install and getting all the settings as I wanted them I played about 3 matches before the free weekend ended (at 8pm!) and I was turfed out of the game. Grrr. It’s only 8 quid now though, and as I already have it pre-loaded it might be worth a punt…

**Update**

Looks like Valve/Epic realised the problem and if you’ve still got your pre-loaded data this weekend coming will be free play as well!

For the last few days I’ve not been able to get steam running, it just sits at “Steam – Updating – 0%” and does nothing. It was allowing safe mode but after trying to reinstall it from the download it lost that too. One fix on the forums says to delete StreamUI.dll and try again, but that didn’t work.

In the end it turns out that Steam doesn’t like network bridges. Deleted the bridge and deleted my second network port and it went straight in. Finally!

This is the exact reason I will never get an X-Box. Microsoft have massively failed their customers who have paid for their consoles, paid for their games and then paid AGAIN for a non-existent on-line service.

With a PC you buy your kit from whoever makes the best equipment, but the game and play on-line on whatever servers you want. Sony managed a perfectly decent on-line presence, why are MS so piss poor at doing the same when most of their business is based on-line.

Muppets.

25 minutes until Half-life 2 goodness…

The Ultimate Game Quiz – 86%, but think I should have done better. Dropped a few easy ones.

Cheers to Ben for this little gem. Starts easy, then not so much… Got to level 5 before I started having too many difficulties though.

It’s time. They better have mine ready.

It’s been more off-again on-again than a wedding day in Albert Square, but it looks like the Stargate game is back, hopefully to stay this time. Stargate Worlds will use Unreal Engine 3 so it should look pretty spectacular, especially after seeing the UT2007 preview… WOW!