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First off, apologies for the badly written entry a previous to this one. I was barely conscious at the time, just eager to get it written so i could play some more. I figured it was necessary in case my observations had merit. Apparently this time i was wrong.

Ah well.

Yesterday i completed Bioshock - so my blog goes back to regularly scheduled programming. I’m not sure what game i’ll play next, but i doubt it’ll captivate me as much. We’ll get back to that in a while.

You’re wondering why i’ve referred to the ending of Bioshock as “sick”, well i’m not referring to the games ending.. i’m referring to the pathetic state i’ve been in for the last couple of days. I took a one way train to Phlegmsville, and they made me the mayor.

The nice thing about taking some sick time was that i got some stuff done. I built a new bed (which will hopefully help with my aching back), completed Bioshock, tidied up, cooked, and watched some movies/tv shows i had been saving.

The bad thing about taking sick time is that it’s even more quiet boring moments to sit around feeling sorry for yourself. I think the worst part of having a cold is tearing your nose to pieces with all the tissues you go through. That, and everything seems to aggravate you more than usual.

There was a period of time not too long ago where my health was constantly on the rocks. Every time someone i knew caught something i was guaranteed to get it. I ended up taking loads of time off work because of it, and just generally felt like crap. So i did some research into immune system problems. As well as switching my diet around (which i’ve been doing quite a lot of this year) i decided to cut out caffeine and cut out sugar. I also decided to drink a cup of Rooibos tea with lemon every morning. The difference was quite evident, i didn’t get sick at all.

But, there was a problem. See.. i love coffee, and i need caffeine. Sure i could handle not having it, but it didn’t mean i wasn’t depressed when i thought about my plight. To make it harder, people at work started drinking more and more. I didn’t mind so much when they would nip down to McDonalds and buy a cup of their coffee imitation drinks, but after a while they came back to the cafetiere and better than usual coffee. It didn’t take long before i broke. Ordered some fresh grounds from my favourite supplier. Ordered a bag for home too.. It wasn’t long till i was buying myself a can of Red Bull on Monday mornings.. It wasn’t long till i was giving up on my morning tea. Of course, the first illness i encountered hit home, and now i’m lying in bed blogging about it because i feel hellish - as well as stupid.

Ah well, onto happier things. A couple of days ago i was forced to buy something i’ve wanted to buy for a while, but never really needed to. A couple of 500gig hard drives. The 500gig Seagate Freeagent external drive that i’ve been using as an archive is full now, and it’s about time i got a real media server running in here. So i have my old Windows machine sitting gutted on the floor. I think it’s a 2.4Ghz AMD processor with 768MB of RAM and a couple of 80gig Western Digital drives. The plan is to take everything important off one of the 80gigs, and install Ubuntu on it. Then stick the two 500gigs in there, followed by a third next month. That’ll hold me over for a while.

As i mentioned before, now that i’ve finished bioshock i have nothing else to play. Out of the 13 xbox 360 games i own, there are only 3 i haven’t finished.

• Kameo - The underwater control mechanic really annoyed me, so i gave up.
• Test Drive Unlimited - The only way to “finish” it is to achieve everything, and i’m not that much of a driving game fan.
• Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter - I liked it at first, but the missions became frustrating because of the complex controls and the game failed to capture me. Playing Rainbow Six Vegas really put me off continuing GRAW because it’s nowhere near as enjoyable.

Blue Dragon is out now. I downloaded the demo hoping for an exciting new RPG. I was immediately put off by the graphics, and put off even further by the strange dragon combat mechanic. But boredom brought me back to it, and i was a little more patient with it. I guess i could probably enjoy it if i play it from the beginning. I’ll buy it, but i don’t think i’ll buy it for it’s current £39.99 price.

John Woos Stranglehold is out soon. The demo is exciting. It’s like a next gen Max Payne in Japan, which is such a good thing. I can’t imagine it’ll be very captivating (though even if it was, i doubt it could’ve been close to Bioshock of Marvel Ultimate Alliance, so does it really matter?). But it might be fun for a while.

Two Worlds is out now, and i don’t know much about it other than it looks like a cheesy Oblivion clone that belongs on a PC.

It’s tempting to just buy C&C3.

Oh, but i get my CoD4 beta invite on Friday…

So you’ve probably heard of the game Bioshock. If you know me in person you probably also know that i’m incredibly excited about it. I’m not going to blog about the game right now, i’ll save that for later. But i will tell you a bit about the last couple of hours.

Today the Bioshock pc demo was released, and i urged a colleague of mine here to download and play it. Sadly the PC’s here are your typical dell business machines, nothing fantastic. The end result being that the Bioshock demo ran like hell. You could see that it was supposed to be pretty, you could appreciate the shiny water and the crackling flames. But you couldn’t really move, and that’s kind of important.

If only i had bothered to install bootcamp on my macbook pro..

Yeah, you’ve already guessed what happened next. I backed up my macbook pro, cleared out some space, and started installing bootcamp. Just to install a demo that i’ve completed 4 or 5 times on the xbox360. Not to mention the fact that the game is due out here on Friday, and i’ve preordered the collectors edition!

I started up the bootcamp installer, opted to make a 10GB partition for XP (i was using 6 or 7 gig for my parallels XP install, and that was going fine) and clicked continue.

Bootcamp Partition Error: “Files cannot be moved”

Bugger, wasn’t expecting that.

The installer explained that i needed to “repair” my drive. I’m in the habit of repairing my permissions almost every day, so i instinctively did that… only to get a new error message telling me that there were files bootcamp couldn’t move. The installers suggestion was to back up my entire drive, format, and then pull my backups back over before trying to install bootcamp. No chance!

I thought for a while, what kind of file would cause the problem… My first thought was parallels, perhaps it’s having difficulty with the protected files it uses. So i deleted parallels - to no avail. I got rid of incomplete Bittorrent downloads, and large video files. I got rid of temporary Final Cut files. Nothing.

Then it clicked.

I wasn’t repairing my disc, i was repairing the permissions. So i tried to verify the disk.

Of course, luckily for me you can’t repair the disc you’re currently booted from.. and i didn’t have my OS discs with me to boot from. Woo.

Just as i was about to give up i remembered that booting into safe mode runs fsck.. or something like it anyway. So i did just that (if you ended up here looking for a solution to the problem, you can enter safe mode by pressing shift as soon as you hear the boot chime, and holding it till the rotating “wheel” appears under the apple icon.. it’ll take a while to book into OSX, but one it does you can just restart to get back into OSX normally.). After i was back in the OS i ran Disk Utility again.

Woo!

Woo!

Apparently there are 31 minutes remaining on my XP install.. hopefully things will remain this smooth.

Edit: It went fine. XP is installed.. though i can’t seem to connect to our wireless access point here..