• Got back to work after a two week stint of annual leave making me feel more miserable than ever. The news of redundancy back in November wasn’t a huge deal at first – although naturally I was still pissed – but now the reality of it all has set in. My current job ends on the 31st March 2011.

• Blue Monday was last week, y’know, the most depressing day of the year. It’s an equation that takes into account debt, weather (it’s been shitty), the time since Christmas, time since failing New Year Resolutions, low motivational levels and feeling of need to take action. I like to call mine a Blue Month, January has been bloody awful as a whole.

• I developed a Minecraft addiction, at one point I clocked up around ten hours in a single day. I’ve since sickened myself of this game after digging a 3 mile long tunnel in a few hours.

• Through the said addiction I failed my 70-272 MCDST exam. I didn’t put as much effort into study as I probably should have and I also attribute a fair amount of my failure to Microsoft’s crappy essay-length questions.

• I’ve managed to pre-order the Nintendo 3DS for £199.85 instead of the RRP of £230, which everywhere else is selling the unit for. Other shops are starting to drop their prices, I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that GAME will follow suit, as I have £20 worth of points that would knock the price down to £180 for me.

• I’m now studying for the 70-272, properly this time. I’ve kicked my Minecraft addiction and gaming is taking a back seat. I get to play Dead Space et al when I’ve been good.

• I’m losing chubb again, I’ve walked home from work three times in the last week.

I’m sure February will be a better month as a whole, it can’t get much worse than this so I shall try to be positive.

I spent quite a bit of my Christmas Day tidying up my PC. Two of the five partitions over three drives fell into the red over the last week and needed to be freed up. My gaming drive dropped to 910mb free thanks to the recent Steam sale and my primary partition was in its final gigabyte. In all honesty that drive was getting that way for quite a while due to the large number of FRAPS videos that were stored under the program folder.

To balance things out I moved some of the FRAPS videos to my files partition and deleted the rest, I then proceeded to make a backup of all my Steam games and place them on my backup partition. I then uninstalled all games that I haven’t played in the last few months, it’s not too much of a pain because they can easily be restored from the backup. As you can see from the screenshot at the top of this entry, the clean up went pretty well!

Aside from dicking around with my PC, eating Christmas dinner, lots of sweets and drinking a bit, I also watched my shiny new copy of The Expendables. Around about half an hour into the movie I thought to myself that the picture wasn’t very clear. It wasn’t until I looked at the discs in the case that I realised I was watching the DVD instead of the Blu Ray. It’s pretty stupid to put the DVD at the top of what is sold and marketed as a Blu Ray release. Regardless, the movie was as awesome as I remembered it at the cinema and the big fight at the end made me grin like a Cheshire Cat.

I also played Donkey Kong Country Returns and Mass Effect for the first time, both are pretty damned good games so far. Especially Donkey Kong Country Returns, it’s like the original game but with a lot of nice extra touches. I will write a few impressions about these later (if I remember).

My wallet sighed with relief today as the Steam sale didn’t throw up any games that I wanted. Even though I already own the game I don’t really class £19.99 to be a good sale price for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. You can buy the game a lot cheaper than that if you know where to go, and besides, it’s a year old game now. It should be closer to the tenner mark when included in sales!

I rounded off the day laying in bed with my laptop watching the ultimate Christmas movie: Die Hard. Yup, it’s been a good day!

Yesterday I received the following email about my Donkey Kong Return pre-orders. Basically they’ve dispatched it but it was temporarily reduced for £5 and to save delaying my order they’ve taken full payment but have given me a £5 voucher to use online or in their stores.

Dear GAME Customer,

Get £5 off a minimum spend of £5.01 in one transaction. Closing Date: 14th December 2010. Excludes Preorders, Gift Vouchers, Gift Cards, Hardware & Software Bundles, Solus Consoles, GAME Digital: On Demand services, GAME Rentals or Mobile Games. No alternative will be offered. Only valid with purchases made online at GAME.co.uk and not in any GAME Stores. GAME.co.uk reserves the right to withdraw from this promotion at any time.

In all honesty I would’ve preferred that the £5 be refunded to my credit card. What they’re saying here is they have £5 of my money, I can have it back as long as I agree to buy something else in their store. Oh… and it has an expiry, if it’s not used by the 14th December it goes into the kitty for the company Christmas Party. Thanks GAME! *thumbs up*

On the plus side, YAY DONKEY KONG!!!

FML.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 was released on Friday 11th June, and while many kiddies and adults are enjoying the fat little plumber’s latest adventure I’m still going without. Yup, despite the game being dispatched LAST TUESDAY, I’m still Super Mario Galaxy 2-less. Bunch of bastards, I expect my copy to be here on launch day dammit!

PS: This carrot cake is all kinds of awesome.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 is easily one of my most anticipated titles of the year, and to ensure I get a better experience I have finally bought a component cable for the Wii. I got my HDTV around the same time as New Super Mario Bros Wii and the picture was a little bit on the blurry side. The cable won’t make the game HD, but it’ll help make the new galaxies look lurvely.

I did a test just now with New Super Mario Bros Wii and it is looking much better. The image is not quite so blurred but it helped bring out the jaggies. Not a good thing but then again, I probably shouldn’t be sitting as close to the screen as I do!

All in all it seems to be a worthwhile purchase, and with Mario’s latest adventure releasing in a week’s time I’m definitely ready. Thank god the cable only cost me six quid instead of Nintendo’s asking price of £17.99.

… now I’ve said that, the cable will probably randomly catch on fire.

For the last month or so I have been considering getting hold of a DSi XL when it launches on the 5th March. Like with any purchase I have to consider whether I actually need one, I’m looking for some opinions on this!

Here is my small list of pros and cons for purchasing this device.

Pros
• The larger screen is a huge plus.
• Larger stylus could be handy.
• WPA support. Sadly my DS Lite doesn’t support this (I swear a firmware update could’ve sorted this) and I haven’t been on WEP since 2006, and I’m not likely to take that down just for a few games online.
• Access to the DSi shop.

Cons
• I already own a DS Phat and a DS Lite.
• Is it really worth buying another generation of DS when its successor is possibly a minimum of a year away?
• Not 100% sure if I’ll make adequate use of the DSi shop.
• Not 100% sure if I’ll make adequate use of online. Snaking players in Mario Kart DS will probably drive me nuts and I’ll almost certainly get my ass beat in Pokémon. As for other games, I’m not entirely sure until I play them.

So there we are. Even though my cons list is a little longer than my pros (I probably forgot to list a few), I still cannot decide.

Please post your opinions in the comments below. If you haven’t used my comments section before it will require validation, so fill in your info before posting. Email addresses are not displayed or used for anything else and you can also link to your website!

It’s official, at the time of writing this entry I have spent more time asleep than awake this decade! I watched a bit of The Speedgamers New Year playthrough of New Super Mario Bros Wii until 1:30 then I went for a lie down, I didn’t wake up until 5am. I sat at the PC for a while until 5:30/5:45 and then went back to bed again, not rising until midday. w00t!

Anyway, what did I do for New Years Eve? Not a lot really. I installed my Bluray drive (breaking one of the cold cathodes in the process) and hooked it up to the TV using a HDMI cable. So far the results have been pretty damn amazing, I used Rambo as my test disk.

Sarah came down just before 9 and we watched a bit of TV. The IT Crowd was on along with The 100 Most Annoying People of 2009 (AGAIN! – it’s been shown nightly on BBC3 for some time now) then I hooked up the Wii to the TV and we played New Super Mario Bros Wii for the first time. It’s a pretty good game, it’s taken all of the really good parts of Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 3, Super Mario World and the original Yoshi’s Island and mashed them together to make something that is truly brillaint. A good game to end the decade playing and to start the new one with!

PS: It snowed overnight again, awesome!

Thanks to the the recent Speed Gamers Pokémon Marathon I have been in the mood to play Pokémon, the last time I played the series properly was Pokémon Sapphire in 2003, in which I managed to get a free legit copy before release. This year is also the 10th Anniversary of my absolute addiction to Pokémon Blue. Playing Pokémon against the guys in Sixth Form, now those were the days!

Anyway my copy of Pokémon Platinum came today and its brought back all of those good memories! It’s an excellent little game so far and the DS seems more suited for it than the original Gameboy did. Managing your inventory on the touchscreen makes life so much easier. I’ve been playing for an hour and a half now and I haven’t seen a single Pokémon from the original yet… then again their numbers have risen to 490-odd from the 151 in the originals.

I’ve got to catch me a Pikachu! Team Rocket 4 Life, yo!