Toys for big kids

I ordered my new PC today! My old one was getting up there in years, and it has become increasingly unstable over the past several months. When it started crashing regularly in Civilization 4, that was the final straw.

So now Monarch Computers is building me a nice system:
Athlon 3200+
MSI Neo4-F nForce4 motherboard
1 GB RAM
ATI Radeon X800XL
200 GB Samsung SpinPoint hard drive (fast and quiet!)
...all in a wonderfully quiet Antec Sonata II case.

Why am I having a company send me a custom system rather than building it myself? After years of upgrading a piece at a time, I decided I didn't want the headaches of configuration and hardware/software compatibility issues. This time, I'm going to front a little extra cash and get someone else to make sure my new system works before I get it (and really, not having to install/update XP Pro myself is worth the extra money).

Hillary and I went down to Coeur d'Alene to do some shopping over the weekend, and I once again spent entirely too much money on video games. Aside from the aforementioned Civ4 (which is, currently, in a not-quite-playable state), I grabbed Metroid Pinball for the Nintendo DS and SoulCalibur 3 for the PlayStation 2.

The pinball game is amazingly well-presented, and I've yet to have an opportunity to take issue with the physics. The only downside is that there are only two full-featured tables in the game, despite the packaging's claim that there are six tables in the game. Unfortunately, the other four tables can only be played as "boss battles", and there's not really any depth other than killing the boss. Still, any game that lets your pinball unroll into Samus Aran and start shooting missiles at giant metroids is pretty great.

As for SoulCalibur 3, I'll just say this... It's a great game, but only if you have people to play it with.