On the gaming side of things, I'm about finished playing the first Ratchet and Clank game. It's cute little platformer, and for only $10 it was an excellent buy. I can see how they were able to build such a successful franchise off of it. I think I like the Jak series better, but Ratchet and Clank is still pretty good. What I like best is the fact that all the weapons you have give you several options on how you can defeat enemies, so you can use whatever strategy you like.

Let's say you got about 10 or so small enemies (like the frogs or small robots) and three medium sized enemies that can shoot you. If you want to save ammo, and have plenty of health, you can use your morph-o-ray to turn small enemies into chickens while dodging the medium enemies attacks, then switch to your Suck-o-matic to suck up the chickens. Then use your "chicken" ammo to shoot down the medium enemies. Or you can try to turn the medium enemies into chickens too, but that takes longer and could get you killed. But if you've got the ammo, you can run around using your Blaster or flamethrower to take everyone out while equiping your drones to protect you from getting hurt. Or stand at a distance and let your Devastator's missles take them out. My personal favorite is to use the Glove of Doom to lob two or three orbs into the enemies, then the little robots that emerge will kamikaze themselves and the enemies. If you took the agonizing time it takes to earn the bolts to buy the R.Y.N.O, then just stand back and fire two shots. All the missles should take out just about everything. That's a bit too easy though.

Anyway, I also played through my very first FPS: Dark Watch. I've only beat it on easy so far, but I'm progressing through medium mode nicely. I wish they'd tightened up the story a bit more, and had some more weapons to choose from. This certainly isn't one of the best FPS's out there, but I wanted to use this one to ease myself into the genre. After enough practice, I'm sure I'll be able to tackle some of the really good FPS's, like Halo, Half-Life, Quake, Doom, Condemned, and maybe even F.E.A.R.

I pretty much finished .Hack//Quarantine, except for grabbing some of the rare items I missed. Damn that series for being a cash-cow, it's mind numbingly boring combat, and repetative dungeons. But, curse me, the premise of the game and anime series fascinates me. And the story is pretty complicated and fairly interesting. Knowing me, I'll be buying the next set of .Hack games that are coming out. I just pray they fixed the annoying features. Oh please, oh please...