This year has just been crazy so far, I rarely seem to get much quiet time as can be seen by my lack of posts here and my lack of lurking on iChat/MSN. True to form, Easter was very busy with relatives staying and plenty of other stuff going on and work the week before was just as hectic. The beginning of this week though has been pretty nice so far and I feel things are starting to get back to a more normal pace.

I have managed to fit in some gaming here or there around things and had been wanting to talk about Oblivion for a while. A lot has been said by others about this game and it could easily be talked about all day so I’ll just summarize some thoughts instead. The Xbox 360 version is graphically better than the PC, the people who say it isn’t are just comparing them wrong or just have a PC bias. I say to them, try playing both on the same screen with a VGA cable at the same resolution. Until ATI and NVidia release new drivers, the 360 version has more effects (i.e. HDR+AA) and the frame rate is better. The Oblivion AI doesn’t really live up to the hype. Shenmue on the Dreamcast was more convincing overall although that said, Oblivion is trying to do more and allows the player more freedom. Overall Oblivion doesn’t feel as imaginitive as Morrowind was but it is more focused and, if you play on the Xbox 360, the interface is vastly better. I’d say I’m enjoying the game a lot so far, more than I did Morrowind at the same point in the game. It’s just a shame that there’s things that could have been done much better. The levelling system is screwed up, the omnipresent guards are annoying and the scripting system seems as broken as it was in Morrowind. Someone should tell the programmers at Bethesda about a programming concept called “events” that they can use instead of polling. It would also be nice if it wasn’t so easy to break the scripts. All hell breaks loose if you don’t do things in the exact order the game expects.

Sometime I should probably talk about Galactic Civilizations 2 on the PC as well as Dead or Alive 4 and Tomb Raider Legend on the Xbox 360. This seems like it will be a big enough post as it is though. There’s also a rapidly growing list of PSP titles that look interesting. I wish they’d just ship Powerstone for PSP already. Zilch on the Nintendo DS right now, it looks like Monaco has already given up on it in the NZ market (There’s still no local Phoenix Wright or Trauma Center despite GPStore selling bucket loads of the import versions) and even overseas new DS pickings seem slim. Not that the multitude of online Nintendo apologists will admit that, they’re too busy hassling Keita Takahashi for suggesting the Revolution’s controller is not all it’s cracked up to be.

I changed my web hosting this month but I’m going to change again, hopefully nobody I’m hosting for will notice. Godaddy was heading towards Windows hosting which is entirely useless for my purposes but since moving I’ve started getting loads of spam bounces from people using the domains I host. Essentially my new hosting provider sets up new MX records for the domains even though I have no intention of actually sending email from any of them. I’m now moving somewhere else where I control the DNS records manually.