I finally got in the mail Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time from Gamefly. I don't know why I had been so desperately waiting for this game. It's not like I don't have enough games to play as is. Just recently I downloaded Quantum Conundrum, adding to a sizable backlog of PSN games I've yet to finish. Now that I'm out working for most of the day six days a week, I rarely have the time to just relax behind the TV screen and game. When I do find that hour or two to play some games, I'm left figuring out what to play. The worst moments are when I know I have all these awesome games in my harddrive but instead I want to play a game I don't have yet, like Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time.

I haven't played much of A Crack in Time at this point. I was dying to play it when I was waiting for it to arrive in the mail, but now that it's in my Playstation 3's disc bay, I'm no longer feeling the powerful, addictive impulse. That's not to say I don't think the game is good. I've definitely enjoyed my time with it. The Pixar-esque cutscenes are still joyful to watch, and the colorful

universe of Ratchet & Clank - even though it isn't as graphically impressive as I had thought it's be - is still just so much to explore and blow stuff up in. I'm not quite digging the space combat and exploration aspects of it but it still is a neat new thing to have for the franchise. My only real gripe so far is that I just want Ratchet and Clank to be re-united back already.

Today instead of diving deeper into Ratchet & Clank, I instead mindlessly killed cops on the PSN downloadable title Payday: The Heist. I'm not sure if I would have ever gotten it if not for my Playstation Plus membership. By now I've been able to play so many downloadable games thanks to PS Plus. Many of the unfinished downloadable games currently in my hard drive have been granted by PS Plus, which include: Pixeljunk Shooter 2, Euphoria, Bloodrayne: Betrayal, Sideways NY, Borderlands, and LittleBigPlanet 2. LBP 2 in particular was a title I was planning to buy on my own when I had the money to buy it so I was happy when Sony released it as a part of their PS Plus Instant Game Collection during last year's E3. Overall, I still find myself amazed at the value of PS Plus. I just feel bad that I don't have enough time to catch up on all the PS Plus releases. I still haven't been able to start most of the classic Playstation one games made available to PS Plus members, which for me are Final Fantasy V and Silent Hill.

Payday: The Heist is a great stress reliever. I don't know why but it's relaxing to roam around urban landscapes in first person and shoot down waves and waves of cops. I personally can't play the for too long though. After an hour or so of playing the relentless waves of cops get a bit too tedious to put down, and the concept of shooting at cops as professional robbers gets to irk me, even though I know it's just a video game. I can only suppress my virtual moral compass for about an hour before I start to fear that I'm getting too desensitized to violence.

It's not the violence that gets me. I've played gorier games and enjoyed them fine, for long periods of time as well. I've gone on heinous rampages on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and on Saints Row: The Third and that didn't bother me all that much. Even if Indid get irked, it was never to the point that I wanted to stop playing the game for the day. Payday: The Heist hoever often irked me that much. I don't deny it's a fun concept to tackle these insane heists as a a gun-toting robber. I especially like how there are so many different heists to partake in, from the typical bank heist to a scenario in which you have to cut out an entire panic room stacked with cash and attach that to a helicopter. But to me, after a while, I get to killing just sooo many uniformed law enforcers and I start getting into way too much of a holier-than-thou attitude to play it. I like that there's a Left4Dead-esque game (albeit not as well designed) on PSN, but unlike Left4Dead, Payday is a game I can only play in short bursts.

Before I received Ratchet & Clank in the mail, I was also playing Bloodrayne: Betrayal and Pixeljunk Shooter 2. They're both pretty cool games but also they can getblretty frustrating to play. The art styles if both games keep me hooked but after a stressful work week, they're not the games I automatically gravitate to. I have to get myself in the mood to play those games, Pixeljunk Shooter 2 especially. The game has a really cool concept - exploring as a spaceship inside the body of this giant beast. I also really liked the first Pixeljunk Shooter. The sequel though has too many tedious elements, at least the first three levels. I didn't like any of the new liquid substances introduced in the game and I especially disliked the new hunger suit, which turns me into a slow-moving Pac-Man that looks like an ugly fish of some sort.

That's mostly what I've been playing on my fat 60GB PS3. These past two weeks, I've actually been trying to upgrade the internal harddrive of my now 6+ years old PS3. Through eBay I obtained the right 250GB hdd for about $30. The only problem was that I didn't have small enough screwdrivr to do the job. I solved that issue yesterday by going to a local dollar store and getting a screwdriver. I was able to get the original 60GB harddrive out of the system but now I ran into the problem of the four screws on the PS3 harddrive caddy being too deformed. It's turning out to be such a hassle for me to be able to comfortably download things onto my PS3 without having to fret about memory space. I ordered via eBay a PS3 harddrive caddy with four screws. Hopefully this is the last thing I have to obtain to upgrade my PS3's harddrive.

So that's been my gaming life recently. Leading a rather workaholic life, it's no longer easy to find the time to just game for hours, but at least I'm making a good effort towards eriting about it.