I've just finished the monthly network maintenance for work. Took me a little longer than expected, but it's over now.

Today was largely uneventful, except for my indoor game. We've had a couple of good results lately, last week we won 4-0, but that game will be remembered by me as a game where I had about 15 solid goal-scoring chances but somehow I failed to score.

Today I was out to put that behind me, and I think I managed that. Early in the game i got a bouncing ball on the right of the goal, chipped it around the defender and hammered it home for a good goal. Later in the game i also got another sweet goal, half-volleying a rocket into the goal from a fair bit out. We ended up winning the game a whopping 15-0, once again keeping a clean-sheet and picking up more than a few bonus points.

Onto a different subject: now that i have a decent gaming computer, i've had my eye on buying a few more games than i've previously been used to.

The problem is the price: games in Australia are horrendously expensive: most PC games retail at $100, which is just highway robbery, as the exact same game in the US goes for USD$50. For games to be AUD$100 five years ago was fine when the Aussie dollar only bought 50 US cents. Now that it buys around 83 US cents, it's criminal for games to stay at a 100 bucks.

So i've had enough, i'm going to be parallel importing my PC games from overseas to save myself some money: the only difference in terms of the game itself may be the box-art and the contact numbers in the manual.

I think the store that i'll be ordering from the most will be yesasia.com out of Hong Kong, as they have legitimate (not pirated) English versions of games for US retail prices and don't charge for shipping to Australia for orders over USD$15.

The first thing i've ordered is Command and Conquer 3 for USD$40 with an online coupon. That equates to AUD$49 including the credit card foreign currency transaction fee, which makes it less than half the price at EB Games, and still $20-30 less than I can get it elsewhere in Australia.

We'll see how long the delivery takes, but i think i'll be getting most of my PC games like this in the future (Wii games are region-based (PAL and NTSC), so this isn't an option for that :().