FYI, I haven't been ignoring or forgetting about writing new entries here. I just haven't had anything I wanted to share until now. :)

First of all, it snowed in Austin late Friday/early Saturday! I mean REAL snow. Not flurries or any of that shit. I've lived in Northern Indiana where it would snow up to your elbows, so I know what I'm talking about here. But anyway, WTF? Snow in Central Texas? Yep. We had snowball fights and a bunch of people built snowmen. Fun times if you don't have to live with that shit for 3-4 months. :) Ours melted over the next 2 days. I saved a snowball in the freezer though! ;)

Tony's gonna hate this, but I won another awesome door prize! I'm not sure why, but I'm fairly lucky when it comes to winning random drawing prizes. I'm not insanely lucky, but luckier than most. So, this past weekend I attended a 3-day LAN/Tournament held here in Austin. AMD was the main sponsor and their biggest prize giveaway was an Athlon 64 FX-51 processor. Guess who won it? Right. Me!

What's weird is that I wasn't even around when I won. I didn't show up on the final day of the LAN because frankly, I was too tired to wake up early enough. Most giveaways at these events are simply of the match-the-number-on-your-ticket variety. Meaning, of course, that you must be present to win. The only drawing of the whole event that didn't require my presence, I won. :) And since I just won a Pentium 4 3.2GHz processor 2 months ago, this new CPU is going on eBay. It should net me around $600 bucks. That sure goes a long way towards... something, I'm sure.

NEWS FLASH: It's 2004, and the Sega CD still sucks! I've started to put together a 'classic gaming' room in one of my extra bedrooms. I got the new TV in place, and I had my CDX just laying there so I thought I'd give it a try. I popped in Silpheed, which I recall as being a pretty decent shooter, but it wouldn't load properly. :( Next I tried Mansion of Hidden Souls. Oh. My. God. That game SUCKS! I had forgotten how BAD games could be. I mean, the graphics were a complete mess. It looked like some kid ate an 8-pack of Crayolas (note the lack of colors) and threw up on my TV. As the vomit slowly oozed the front of my tv screen, and the resulting images, in some highly imaginitive way, resembled rooms of furnitue and a house with endless doors. The voice acting was laughable, and the control was almost non-existant. Please do not ever play this game if you can avoid it.

Moving on, I popped in Sewer Shark. Now this game... a friend and I actually finished it... about 10 years ago. Let me tell you, 10 years can do horrible, horrible things to certain games. Sewer Shark suffered BIG TIME. What I remember as being 1/2 way fun, is now totally moronic. The novelty of live actors and full motion video was pretty cool back then. No longer. The script was horrible, and the acting was terrible. Or I should say, the directing was terrible. Why is everyone so fucking mean? Are they supposed to evoke a sense of urgency? It just pissed me off.

Next we tried some Genesis games. And while I didn't have the absolute best games on hand to test, the ones I did have weren't that impressive or even fun. And let me just get this out of the way: The Sega Genesis has the worst sound ever. I'd rather listen to my Atari 2600. We tried some Street Fighter 2, and while it was mildly entertaing playing Honda and holding down punch with turob enabled, the controllers (6-button ones) weren't very good and the sound was, again, OMG BAD! It sounded like they were using tin can telephones when they talked. If it weren't for Herzog Zwei and a few Working Designs games, I wouldn't even hook up my Sega stuff.

On a collector's note, I picked up Suikoden II for about $40 the other day! Yeah, THAT was a good deal. :) Also picked up Super Mario Bros. RPG complete for $20 (although missing the UPC on the box. doh! ), SNES Breath of Fire complete $10, and a few other SNES games in box. Next up, Valkyrie Profile!