Now there is a damn sexy piece of apparel. Look at that Afro! Click on the picture to see other WHUBBLE T-shirts.

As gamers it’s inherent in us to turn our back on reality at every given opportunity. Sure, the notion of being able to switch off from depressing daily drudgeries might sound romantic to people unable to liberate themselves from life’s grim burdens, but the fact of the matter is that being on a permanent vacation in the Costa del Virtual comes with its own metaphorical ball and chain.

The longer we’re away, the worse things are when we return for the unavoidable stint that must be suffered back in the Real World. The bills have piled up. The dirty dishes are a breeding ground of filth. The kids are malnourished. The dog’s pissed on the carpet. The global economy’s a wreck.

And we address the fallout of our prolonged neglect in the only way we can. By playing some more games and ignoring it all. It’s not a choice. It’s every dedicated gamers hard-coded prime directive. How can we escape escapism? It’s the impossible conundrum that torments our existence.

Preach my brother, preach!

So,

Its been about a week since I’ve been in hell at A4e because of feeling like hammered shit and I think they have kicked me off, yet again. They usually kick your arse off when you have to many days off without giving them a reason, but I phoned up at the start of the week declaring I was taking some time off because of not being well. But since my A4e ‘adviser’ just shunned & laughed at my deteriorating health since I started back there, I’m not surprised he kicked me off for being ill. Idiot So, its most likely I’m gonna be without money a couple of weeks if the Job Centre let me sign back on again. If they don’t I’m fucked.

Also, I finally scraped together enough money to get a new graphics card, a nice shiny XFX 9800 GT XXX edition (£125). And as usual nothing goes to plan. When I first installed the card Vista freaked the fuck of for a while giving me memory management BSOD’s, my first BSOD’s with Vista. So like any other knowledgeable person, I googled the problem, most people who got the problem said it was a Memory or Driver problem, fine fine. I re-installed the latest NVIDIA drivers and it seemed to sort out the problem. Playing games in maxed out settings is such nice feeling. I tested out a few games they all seemed to run fine, sept Age Of Conan which crashed every time I tried to change the graphics settings.

I came off the games for a while, opened up Firefox and loaded all the 22 bookmarks on my Toolbar and my damn PC curdled over. I then noticed every time I had anything other then a game open for longer then a few minutes it would freeze my PC. So I thought “Fuck it! I’m in need of a format anyway.” This is where the fun began.

I stuck my Vista DVD in, clicked away until I needed to restart for the wizard to format my C drive. I go for a piss, about a minute later I come back to see my computer has booted back into windows. Slightly confused, out of Tea & goosed up on painkillers, (that hardly work any more), to get rid of my migraines, I just go through the process again and wait to see what it does when it restarts. First time not really paying attention it boots back into windows, again, next time I select the windows vista setup from the boot list & I’m staring at a blank screen. “Great!”

So after ages of going in and out of windows trying the setup through Safe mode, I’m still getting nowhere very damn slowly. I whip out the XP CD gets all the way to the end of the install & freezes on the saving settings bit, 3 fucking times. Okay, whip out the Ubuntu CD, loads up, yay! Start the install, blank screen, FUCK YOU! (I said it rather loudly).

Right, adding serious frustration to the fact I feel pretty shitty already, I go to bed.

A day and a half later, I get out of bed.

Right, lets give this another go, still no luck, I try with taking out a stick of RAM, still no luck. So I slap in my old 7600GT and and install Vista first try, one is not amused! After installing a copious amounts of updates and then SP1 Vista 32-bit is finally seeing all 4GB of my RAM, yay! No its time to try the 9800GT again, it doesn’t even get to the boot screen. Something’s fishy here! I check the Bios, I see my RAM is underclocked, I set it back to normal and try again. Nope. Now its back and forth to Jamie’s house and borrowing his brother Alex’s 8800 to test and it works perfectly!

So I stick my 9800 back in and still nothing. I remove one stick of RAM, nothing, I remove one more stick of RAM, Success! Sadly I’m down to 2GB of RAM something I’ve not had for years. So I install drivers and Assassin’s Creed, (it came with the card), and play for about 20 minutes, it runs perfectly at maximum settings. Huzah! Sorted. I install steam start TF2 downloading and head off to my good friend Jamie’s house, along with Alex’s 8800.

After spending a large amount of hanging out and chatting of manly things like complaining about having no money and our hatred for spiders, I’m home again playing a little more Assassins Creed. 40 minutes later my PC freezes, ayup! shrugging it off as a random game crash I start playing again, another 30-40 minutes passes, fucking blank screen again, but this time I notice that the game is still making noises.

Its now officially ‘on’!

I install Age Of Conan, which takes a fucking age, damn 30gb install & 1.3GB updates going at about 200kbs. I usually get 700-800kbs damn it! Its always something. Anyway, I’m in game in High settings, I just hit the predefined High button, restarted the game and got about 5-10 minutes of game time before it crashed. Right. I load up Team Fortress 2, max out the settings, it runs perfectly, I get into setting people on fire, joining the game with 25 minutes remaining I get to 20 minutes and I get the blank screen again.

Well, it looks like it wasn’t my RAM, it looks like the new 700W PSU I have cant handle the XFX 9800GT XXX Edition & possibly the two 160GB and one 500GB hard drives I have in. Now there is a 900W £100 PSU in my bookmarks and £10 in my bank account.

Now are you happy ebuyer! You’ve taken all of my money and you’re gonna get more. Damn you! Damn you to hell!

PS. Hellgate: London looks damn sexy in DX10 at maximum settings, shame it only fucking runs once.

END!