Last week, my brother and I moved into a new house - 2 bed, 1.5 bath with a den, laundry room, carport. You're probably saying "why you and your brother"? The answer is because "it's dirt fucking cheap and I don't need all the space, so why not split all the bills?" The place is $500 a month, water and gas is covered (as the landlord works for the gas company and her sister works for the water company), and we just pay electric and other stuff like internet or whatever. Needless to say, it's a STEAL in this economy!

Now that we've moved in, we started building some PC rigs for ourselves. We were given eight or nine towers worth of PC parts, equaling out to about 16GB of RAM, eight high-end processors, at least five high-end video cards, around 1TB worth of hard drives, and even a couple of 3.5" floppy drives. We finally got one of the builds done:

• Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53Ghz processor
• 500W Antec power supply
• 4GB DDR2 800 RAM
• 130GB WD Caviar SATA HDD
• 1GB NVIDIA GT 220 video card
• Fatal1ty FP-IN9 motherboard (which was a bitch to work with)
• Soundblaster Audigy 2 sound card

It's not a ZOMGFUCKINGPOWER system, but it will run all the shit we need without a problem...

...which leads to the purpose of this blog: I finally got to play The Witcher! FINALLY! After all this time of listening to Vinny talk about it on the Bombcast and hearing my friend Pip tell me that I need to play it, it was time that I got it downloaded from GOG and started that fucker up. I'm not very far into it (basically just started Chapter 1), so here are my knee-jerk reactions:

• What the fuck is with the camera? It's kind of disorienting, as it feels a lot like that camera view you would have when you see a long hallway and then it keeps extending even further. Actually, Dragon Age kind of had the same thing at one point in the game (on Xbox 360, that is). It's just really awkward to use. I need to look at other possible camera options...if there are any.
• Right now, I haven't seen any of this crazy "in-depth" combat that people have gone on about. All I've been doing is clicking my left mouse button on time to keep my combos going and not really paying attention to anything else that has been hitting me. I am playing it on the Normal difficulty, in case anyone is wondering. Moreover, I don't know if there are ways to quickly switch between weapons, but if there isn't, they should've considered having that in there. I prefer axes. Just saying. I know I could hit pause and then switch over to the axe, but that just seems a little wonky.
• That game is still pretty. I'm not dropping down and kissing the ground it walks on, but it still holds up relatively well to this day on its highest settings. A lot of that is probably due to the attention they gave each character's faces, as their bodies are kind of...eh.
• I slept with Triss in the beginning. Is that bad? I have a thing for redheads. I just can't help it.
• Why did I not get to fight the Frightener? Did I pick the wrong path or something? I wanted to kill the thing from Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones' arena fight sequence!
• There is a specific level of brutality that this game brings which I like. I just don't necessarily feel like it achieves the level of gore that I'd want to see. I mean, when I cleave a guy in the face with the hilt of my sword like that (which is so fucking badass that I can do that while holding the blade!), I would hope there would be some Apocalypto-styled "I hit you in the side of the head and now blood will just continually spurt from that spot in a slightly dark yet funny way" type of thing.

Overall, I'm enjoying myself with the game so far. I'm looking forward to the continuing adventures of Geralt, and hopefully, I can get this done within a decent amount of time to pick up Witcher 2 and get that out of the way. In all honesty, I picked up The Witcher JUST BECAUSE I wanted to be able to import my game save into Witcher 2.

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In other news, I've pretty much completely quit Diablo 3 at this point. The few times that it has been fired up were to farm some gear to throw on the RMAH in order to buy Diablo II and the expansion. It feels like I'm having to fight more systems in that game than creatures, demons, and monsters. That's not what Diablo should be in my eyes. You got my $60, Blizzard...but you just can't keep me around. Maybe I'll launch it back up in a few months.

I made more progression in Legend of Grimrock. Goddamn, that game is good. Easily one of my Top 10 for the year. I'm hoping to finish that up sometime in the next week. I'm on level 9 right now (1st temple, room with the three fire mages....III, II, I, III), so it shouldn't be much longer. I've been told there are only 13 floors.

Because I started playing that...and we now have a gaming PC for once in our lives, I also ended up digging into some Fallout and Icewind Dale Complete. That's right. We've got this excellent rig...and I'm playing 10+ year old games! It's been a good ten years since I last played Icewind Dale, and given that I died to the first mob in the game because I forgot how to fucking play beyond "click to kill", it shows. They both remain great, though.

Anyways, it's time to open the store up.

Until next time, piece.

P.S. - I STILL need to get Amnesia: Dark Descent. Now that everyone is talking about it, that hankering is getting uncontrollable!