random notes

I finally finished Oblivion, thank god. I'm really tired of the game now. I guess I say 'finished' but really it just means that I hung in there and got the achievement points. I would imagine that I really only finished 50% of the game. Last check I played the fucking game damn near 70 hours. Too long really. I know a lot of people are hung up on games being longer than 10 hours but anything over 30 is too long. Perhaps it's just that Oblivion became such a chore to play. The load times got really annoying and because the game world is so huge you regularly end up spending several minutes trying to figure out what to do next rather than actually playing. I think I'm going to trade it in Forza 2. Normally I really hate the idea of trading games in (since the developers don't make any more money on the sale of used games) but in the case of Oblivion there is very little point for me to keep it since I know I'll never want to play it again, and because it's so big it's unlikely I'll brake it out for friends to play when they're over for drinks.

I finally got my 360 racing wheel that I won on Ebay. It was in decent shape, some scuffs and really fucking dirty but some windex shined it up nicely. It seems to work great and I managed to play some Forza2 demo and TD:U demo which worked well. I still want to find some way to attach the wheel to a tv tray table or something similar as it does feel better when attached to something (as opposed to sitting on your lap).

I got into the Halo3 beta last night. Live seemed REALLY sluggish, probably due to so many people trying to play the game. I never played Halo2 online so I don't know how to compare it but overall I was really impressed. Possibly because the match I played I spent the first half in the bottom 2 (of 8 players) and by the end I was fighting for the top spot (came in second). The game feels really balanced and not as twitchy as I expected. I sucked at CoD3 online and worried that Halo3 would be similar but the pace in H3 is much slower which works for me. Overall I was really impressed though I want to spend time playing some of the other game modes.