So! Holidays are over, PC’s fixed, it’s back to work, gaming and blogging. ALL AT THE SAME TIME!!1! Or possibly not.

Actually, it looks like work might be going a bit crazy for a while, which might well cut back on time for the other two, but we’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, gaming-wise, I’ve been playing rather a lot of Bioshock the past couple of days. I’d actually got it before heading off on the most recent holiday, but rather irritatingly it totally failed to start with a good old “Windows has encountered a problem…” type message before anything had even loaded. A quick poke around the tech support forums, installation of the latest beta nVidia drivers, installation of some drivers for the new dual-core processor… still nothing. Then another thread suggested there might be a conflict with GOM Player, so I uninstalled that, and away it went, Bioshocktastic!

It’s an amazing game, structurally very similar to the System Shock games (unsurprisingly), with you as the protagonist dropped into a utopia-turned-nightmare, guided by audio transmissions, fighting twisted medical experiments. The atmosphere is incredible, particularly the sound, haunting period music echoing around the corridors, splicer’s deranged mutterings… just incredible.