I started playing EO again to take a break from Final Fantasy CC My Life as a King because that was taking up way too much of my time. Unfortunately, EO is just as addictive and I can't stop playing it once I start. Hopefully I can finish the first one before the 2nd game comes out later in June.

The first time I played the game, I noticed that I was always in need of money, but now I have a great strategy for earning money. I already had one Survivalist in my main exploring party, but I created three more. I then take those four Survivalists and a medic to the first floor of the dungeon and I max out the newly created Survivalists' chop stats so they can chop loot in the two chopping spots in that dungeon. I can easily get 1000 in one day just doing that.

Now I'm laughing at the monsters I'm slapping around left and right with my moneyhats.

After hearing the announcement of a PSP slim as well as reading some reviews of Jeanne D'Arc, I thought, "There! There's my reason to finally own a PSP."

So yesterday, I went over to Best Buy, a Target print-out in hand and got a Daxter PSP bundle + Jeanne of Arc for the low low price of $217. Thank goodness for price-matching and the nice cashier who didn't blink an eye at my print out.

At home, I charged up the PSP, stuck in Jeanne D'Arc, started to play, and FRAAAACK. Dead pixels?! Wait, no, they came off after I blew at the screen. Probably just lint. But wait, what's this? There's a piece of black lint about two pixels big on the underside of the clear plastic cover over the LCD. Nooooooes. I tried to blow it out with canned air directed into the UMD slot. No luck. *shake shake shake* No luck.

Looks like I'm going to have to stop by Best Buy today and exchange it. I hope the next unit I get doesn't have this problem and also has NO DEAD/STUCK pixels. I'm wondering if it's worth it to just live with the piece of lint under the screen instead of trading it in for a unit that might have dead pixels.

I left work early, carrying my collector's edition Bioshock case with me out to my bike. My boss remarked, "I didn't know you were THAT much of a geek. Collector's edition. Pah!" I wasn't embarassed though. The Mr. Bubbles figurine is SWEET. It's amazingly heavy and has a lot of detail, including little blood splatters on the drill and some drops on his shoe.

I would call this the best collectors edition I ever bought but the EP is a bit disappointed. I like the old-timey songs in the Bioshock game. Why did someone feel the need to bastardize them into some remix dance music? Ugh.

As for the game? Incredible. So far it's a tie between that and Persona 3 for my favorite single-player game of the year. I can't believe how rich the environment is in Bioshock. Every room tells a story. Even hallways! I usually like getting from point A to point B as quickly as I can, but in Bioshock, I'm actually enjoying exploring every corner of the room. Well, mostly because I like finding items, especially the diary items that add on to the story.

Unfortunately, I could only play for a few hours. I got up to the point where you enter the bathysphere a second time. The game is so intense, I had to take a break from it. Yes, I was a little scared of playing in the dark.

I heard a lot of people talking about how hard it was to choose between saving the Little Sisters or harvesting them. Maybe I have no conscience or something. I didn't think the choice was so hard. I chose to save them, not because I felt sorry for them, but because I wanted to get a good ending. It's as easy as that. If I hadn't known about how to get the good ending, you bet your soul I would have harvested every drop of ADAM from those little girls. Maybe I'll do that on my second playthrough.

After however many hours it took to download the Bioshock demo, I finally got some time to sit down and play it. Holy crap, graphics have come a long way! What a brilliant idea, starting the game off with the player in the water so they can drool at how the waves are rendered, the reflection of the flames on the surface of the water, the sound of the water lapping up against the shore.

I was mildly interested in the game, but after the demo, I'm hyped up for it! The musical score is Hollywood blockbuster material. The opening scene where the player is brought into Rapture was phenomenal. I felt like I was watching the start of a big-budget sci-fi movie.

As for the gameplay? Pretty damn good. I still haven't finished the demo. I admit, I got freaked out playing it at midnight in the dark and decided to put it away until it was daytime again. But knocking corpses around with a wrench felt GREAT. I usually don't like playing with the controller's vibration on, but I might make an exception for this.

I was playing Shadowrun last night and got put onto a team with some chatty-cathy. I can't emphasize this enough: Xbox Live is NOT IRC. If you want to talk about yourself, go take it elsewhere. I just want to hear things about the artifact and the enemy, not your 3 stalkers. The first map was a total flop because no one was really playing on my team and chatty-cathy thought it was funny to drop nades in our own spawn as soon as we started. Most of the guys on my team were just, "Aw shucks, you naughty girl."

On the next map, I got put on the opposite team as chatty-cathy & her fan club and they finally started to play the game. Unfortunately, chatty-cathy had some sort of vendetta against me and kept singling me out, trying to knife me and what not. (Note to people: If you're a slow troll, swinging a sword from 20 feet away isn't going to hurt ayone.)

It was almost as if some queen bee was mad that I was encroaching upon her territory. Even my own teammates remarked how chatty-cathy seemed to have a strong dislike for me. Seriously girls, do we need to be this catty online? Why can't we all just get along?

Sometimes, I wonder who's worse on Xbox Live: the 11 year old boys who are being OVERLY nice to you, or the crankypants girls who feel threatened by an extra vagina in the room.

One of my pet peeves is people talking to me while I'm playing any type of twitch-reaction game like an FPS. I don't mind people saying things over Xbox Live that are useful like, "Hey, I'm coming up behind you" or "The artifact is near the troll", but I hate it when people who are watching me play can't shut up.

They think that just because I'm sitting still, looking at the screen, they can just start blabbing on and on and ask stupid questions every five minutes like, "What's that?", "How come you're going that way?", "Why did you die?", "Are you winning yet?" I'd like to think I'm good natured, but everytime someone tries to have a conversation with me while I'm playing games, I want to kick them out of the window.