Been saving up some money lately and I’ve finally decided that it’s time to spend it. Only thing is that I can’t choose what to purchase. My initial choice was a PS3 (gotta catch ‘em all), but then my roommate decided he wanted to get one so I can put that on the back burner until the summer. Another thought was to get a new monitor cause I thought my current one was flaking out which I’ll elaborate on later. But since it isn’t, don’t really need a new one. Third thought was to upgrade my PC which is something I really want to do, but honestly I just upgraded it a little under a year ago and I should regulate myself to at least a years if not more time. Plus this time I think I’d want to build an entirely new one which’ll be a big investment. Another pipe dream thought was to get an electric piano but I don’t think it’d be a great investment.

So in the end I’m just gonna save it for the clusterfuck of video games coming out in the next few months. Freakin’ peeves me off that pretty much nothing for three/four months then suddenly a deluge of triple A titles. Ah well. Totally excited about the three F’s. Fable II, Fallout 3, and Far Cry 2 which are all coming out within a WEEK of each other. Gah. All look freakin’ great. Might end up just downloading Far Cry 2 just to save my wallet a little cash. Then a week later Gears of fucking War 2. Praying that one of my roommates will get that one since it’ll become a dorm room staple immediately when it comes out. Then a few days after freakin’ Mirrors Edge comes out. Five must have games in the span of a month. Whoopie. And that still doesn’t include the lesser known titles I’ll also want to pick up: Left 4 Dead, Red Alert 3, The Last Remnant, Tales of Symphonia 2, and then Prince of Persia after the turn of the year. So more or less I’ll probably die trying to juggle these games, school work, and life in general. I’ll gladly welcome them though cause I’m bored over here with no games to play. I try to start playing an old game again but I just get too tired of it too fast and it goes no where.

Anyway as I was talking about earlier, been having some monitor troubles. For reasons unbeknownst to me my monitor will decide to randomly shut off like when rebooting the computer it’d flash for a second like its turning on but then go dark or sometimes when I start a game it just turns off. And it won’t turn back on for some reason. It’s not like the computer turns off. No I can hear everything normal going on like the Windows login tune or the menu screen music in the game. So first thing I thought was it’s probably something wrong with the video card. Take it out gave it a good once over and didn’t find anything bad. Switched some slots around so it’d be in a different spot. Worked fine for a while and thought I fixed it but it just comes back after a week of working normally. Then I think deeper and figure out that the monitor only dies when I reboot the computer (works fine from a cold start) or when I got into a graphics intensive game. Works fine for relatively old games such as HL2, TF2, etc. But for games like Devil May Cry 4, Mercenaries 2, and for some reason Lego Star Wars it shuts off. So I starting thinking it was a cooling issue. But checked the temps and everything was running fairly cool. Then thought it might be the power supply but I’ve got way more than enough power for my rig.

So finally came to the conclusion that it may be the monitor. So this weekend I’m gonna have to get a DVItoVGA adaptor and test out my roommates monitor on my PC. If it works just fine then that means it’s either my monitor or the DVI cable. Seriously hoping its the cable. If not I’m screwed and will have to drop a few hundies on a new good monitor. But if it’s neither than I’m also screwed cause Ive got no idea what else it’d be.

In other gaming news, I was extremely excited about the release of Portal: Prelude, a mod about the pre-Glados era of Portal. Had a really interesting concept and looked pretty neat. Only problem was the puzzles sucked. Sure they only spent less than a year making them but still they were pretty awful. Instead of being “I’ve got to think about this for ten minutes before I get the ah!” puzzles, they were the “wow thats really easy to figure out but hellishly difficult to execute” type puzzles especially the last level. Besides that though the story was pretty interesting despite the horrid voice-acting or lack thereof since its just a text to speech program. So yeah overall I was majorly disappointed.

In possibly my last thought of the day, I really really freakin’ want to go to a Video Games Live concert. I just think that’d be a pretty epic experience and hell it’d be pure awesome. Go get their CD if you want a sample, it’s pretty sweet. Makes me remember how epic Kingdom Hearts and Halo sound orchestrally.

Pretty sure I’ve got other stuff to say but it just turned 2 am here and I’m woefully overtired. So goodnight and good luck.