[nir] why can't all adventure games be this delightful... ? i want more!

[nir] pretty much nothing has as much impact on a desktop as a good solid state drive, and intel's X25-M G2 (second generation) is probably the most reliable and affordable solid state drive solution out there. i have one of these in roz's four year old desktop and one in my fairly recently put together higher-end PC. whether you get the very cheap 40GB X25V or the roughly doubly-expensive 80GB X25M you probably won't be able to do much more with it than put your OS and most of your applications on it, but that is enough to transport your desktop's performance to wonderland territory. you're still better off keeping all your large files such as music collections, videos or downloads on a run of the mill secondary drive. roz's pc went from adequately responsive doing most things to something you'd expect out of a brand new purchase. mine generally now finishes doing things before i'm done clicking the mouse. i even have enough room to put a few steam games on the ssd which doesn't really affect how they play, but eliminates loading times altogether.

[nir] up until dark crusade, dawn of war's second expansion, the single player aspect of the previous game and expansion has been interesting, if exceedingly frustrating (in the latter) and limited (in both the former and latter). multi-players have been enjoying the full dawn of war experience since the beginning, but single-players like myself have pretty much only experienced two of the factions properly, and one or two more only briefly. come dark crusade, and relic has packaged absolutely everything it's done and much more, and opened it all up. instead of a storied campaign, which up until now has felt like a weak excuse to present new missions anyway, dark crusade turned it all into a sort of elaborate board game. choose to play one of seven factions, and get to battle all other six over a plethora of territories, each its own map. go to full-scale war when you attack a territory, go to full-scale war when you defend a territory. the location and race combinations are near limitless. attacking the home base of an enemy or trying to win one of several special-ability artifacts also results in extremely specialized missions which have you do much more than just wipe out the enemy. once you've won the game, which should take you a good twenty to thirty hours, feel free to do it all over again with a different faction. of the seven factions some are a little samey (specificially the standard military factions), but many play vastly differently such as the eldar (warhammer's version of space elves?) or the robotic and ghoulish necrons which seek to wipe out all life. dark crusade scratches the deep itch induced by the installments before it, and implausibly makes all the preceding frustration totally worth it.

[nir] console gaming? what's that? telltale adventures and dragon age being the only games i've played on the PC in the last few years, valve's steam, which last time i looked at it just about let me register my retail copy of half-life 2, has since become an unbelievably great way to catch up with years of missed PC gaming since I took to the wiis and xboxes of the world. and boy, has it been a homecoming. a $50 deal on the complete THQ pack including nineteen games from the last few years ignited weeks of adrenaline-fueled real time strategy, as only a PC is capable of, in the form of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and its three expansions. I haven't even gotten to the Company of Heroes series, a world war II themed RTS, all of the installments of which were added to my steam library as part of the package. and Red Faction: Guerrilla was fun on the XBox 360, but it's a much snappier and more responsive experience on the PC. a few more strategic bargain purchases later i've ended up with over 30 games i have every intention (but perhaps not enough time in this life) to try. it wasn't at all expensive either, and this is really the great thing about steam. as long as you're willing to hold off on the absolute latest, you can enjoy the kind of gaming experience one would likely fall short of being able to dream of with what feels like an amorally inexpensive and broad selection on the most hard core of platforms. sure, you can't easily share your games with someone else, but as long as you have your steam log in you're guaranteed to be able to download and re-download everything you've ever purchased till kingdom come. and if you don't feel like updating your gaming rig, or even have a "gaming rig", then the past is your friend, my friend.