There's been lots happening around here lately.

I finished Bioshock 2 last weekend, and whilst it was a very polished and decent game, it just felt very lacking in the 'impact' department storyline-wise for me to really enjoy it. Not that I sort of blame them, but part of the premise of this game's storyline I find really hard to believe that you wouldn't have heard about it during the first game if the timeline is to be believed.

This week also saw our home NAS (a D-Link DNS-323) that I bought last year brick itself during a firmware update. I'm always appropriately careful when updating device firmware, and this is the first experience that I've had in bricking a device i didn't actually set out to purposefully do.

Luckily it is still well within the warranty period, so I returned it to Umart and they very nicely exchanged for a brand new one without me having to wait for the faulty one to be returned and analysed by D-Link.

Gaming continues with Aliens vs. Predator. So far it's been a little bit of a let down, mainly in terms of the control scheme for the marine. They've conveniently ignored the well-known convention for PC-based FPS games over the past 15 years, thinking that theirs is probably better. I'm not sure if this is a result of a half-assed console port, or insufficient user testing and QA, but it does make the game seem very amateurish. That said, I haven't yet played the Alien/Predator missions yet, so i'll reserve final judgement until then.

I've also picked up Heavy Rain today. It looks really good, I'm not sure whether to dive straight into this or to go through AvP first. Tough choices.

A Supreme Commander 2 demo was also released in the past few days. Whilst it looks great, for some reason they've drastically altered the resource handling and building actions of the game, which means that you need to have resources up-front before being able to build or queue building anything. Why on earth they've changed something as basic and fundamental as that is beyond me, and depressingly is seriously making me question whether to buy this game at all.

Work has also been frustrating this past week. We had an outbreak of the Conficker worm that has seen us spend a lot of the week fighting it. Today we're pretty sure we've totally eradicated it from the network.

Lot's of gaming to catch up on this weekend!

I flew back into Brisbane again last night after going to another office for work for a few days again. That's the last of the flying for the time-being, which i'm very glad of.

Ahead over the next couple of months is some really exciting gaming. The 'normal' gaming season of October - December at the end of last year was largely a let-down; the only noteworthy title I got during that period was Modern Warfare 2. Things are really looking up for the next month or so, as some highly anticipated titles for myself are approaching release.

To name a few, I've already bought Bioshock 2 this week (although i haven't had time to play it yet ), and Supreme Commander 2, Aliens vs. Predator, and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 are also going to be released soon.

One upcoming game that is really intriguing me at the moment is Heavy Rain, soon to be released on the PS3. The concept of an interactive 'movie' type of game looks really interesting.

So overall, it finally looks like some really good gaming ahead. It was predominantly a dryish year last year gaming-wise, and by the looks of the release schedule both soon and towards the end of the year, this one is shaping up very nicely indeed.

I got back from Sydney last night, I spent Wednesday through Friday down there for work. So that meant I spent most of the day of my birthday away from home. It's a first for me, and the day didn't turn out too well.

Other than not getting everything done for work that I wanted to, when I was walking to the train station from the office to go back to the airport it started bucketing down. Although I had an umbrella, that only kept my upper half dry. And carrying an overnight bag and a laptop bag didn't help.

Shoes and pants soggy, i eventually made it to the airport, and felt like getting a Maccas cheeseburger and an Oreo McFlurry to help dry off. That didn't turn out either, as despite people in the line before me getting ice-cream, the machine didn't want to pump out anymore for me. Downtrodden, went to the gate, and was informed there that the flight was running late. 45mins after the scheduled departure time we left.

So my birthday itself was pretty ordinary, but i'm going to make up for it this weekend.