Summer time?

July and August have been quite busy months this year. Managed to squeeze a couple of weeks off work, which is always good. During my time off we managed to pack up a couple of bags (and the dog) and headed off to sunny Dorset for a weekend at Grizzly's manor. Lots of walking, drinking, eating and rocking out was had and a fun time was had by all, as usual :)

Sadly I came back to work to the usual summer time supplier troubles... I'm pretty sure I've had a rant about it before but I'll at least mention it again... where is the customer services?! Cable engineers that think it's ok to leave your buildings looking like an abattoir floor (oh, and a word of advice for any potential cable teams out there... if your door frame is 4cm wide, cutting a rough 3.5cm diameter hole in it and then cramming more cables through it than it's obviously going to take will not work... and the fire officer gets particularly upset when you do it to fire doors!), CCTV engineers that don't actually know how to wire the equipment they are putting in OR install/configure the software (so I end up doing it for them), security 'experts' not bothering to do ANY of the things they had promised a month ago... and then going on holiday, and then two month lead-times on essential equipment! Still... I think I've kicked enough ass to get most of it fixed before time runs out.
*deep breath*

Anyway... other than that I've managed to get a reasonable amount of gaming in. Certainly clocked up a few hours (and achievements) on Oblivion on the Xbox. It also seems to have been a quiet time for the MMO makers as I've had free time thrown at me by Everquest II, Warhammer Online and Lord of the Rings Online which meant I could play for a month without paying anything... always a good thing!

Strangely, one game that has come back into the picture and I've been spending a lot of time playing is Far Cry 2! I've owned it for quite some time but never really got into it when it first arrived. Whether it was because I was playing something else, or just not in the right mood, I don't know but I'm absolutely loving it now. The graphics and physics are pretty amazing and there are a lot of quite clever touches... I particularly like the 'buddy rescue' when you lose almost all of your health. Just a little more convincing than having lots of lives and yet the game can still afford to be a little brutal sometimes. The only real pain I've found at the moment is that, even after three patches, the game frequently crashes in DirectX 10 mode. It appears to be quite a substantial memory leak (if the forums are to be believed) and can be quite frustrating. No error messages and no warning, it just drops to desktop and if you don't reboot before attempting to play again, it'll happen again even sooner! Strangely I've been unable to find any comments from Ubisoft despite quite a lot of people apparently suffering from it. The easiest solution is just to run in DirectX 9 mode... but that's hardly a proper solution. At least it's still fun to play...