I’ve gotten my Streamyx service up and running, so hopefully I can be online more now. To start with, this is what I’ve been gaming with for the past month. Since I expected to be in Malaysia on holiday for only a month, I knew it wasn’t feasible to bring back my main gaming PC all the way from the Solomon Islands. So in order not to become bored silly while on holiday, I bought a PSP. As my wife will readily attest, I’ve been making noises about buying one ever since it launched, but the higher price and the limited games library available then didn’t make it seem like a good buy until now.

The really funny thing is that while I originally intended to buy the PSP to play “deep” games that I’ve heard so much about, such as Monster Hunter and Armored Core: Formula Front, I actually ended up spending most of my time on it on more arcade-style action games like God of War, Wipeout Pulse and Tekken: Dark Ressurection. I have to admit that between the handheld format and the clunky English translations (and the severe lack of them in many places) I just couldn’t summon up enough enthusiasm to really understand how the deeper games work.

I’ve also learned over the past month that while I find arcade-style games to be a lot of fun in short doses, I no longer have the reflexes and finger dexterity to actually do well at them. I did manage to finish God of War, which as all of the reviews have pointed out is an awesome looking game with sumptuous graphics that look like they don’t belong on a handheld, but on Wipeout and Tekken, I get horribly massacred whenever I attempt to venture out of easy mode. Heck, when I waiting in a queue while at Genting earlier this month, this guy in front of me was playing a PSP and I noticed that he had his thumbs completely covering the control buttons and could accurately control things just by rolling his thumbs around. In my case, I just sort of tap on the appropriate button with the tip of my thumb like a total amateur. That said, I’m pretty satisfied with my PSP and it’s great to relax for a change with games that you won’t normally find on a PC, but the PC will always be my preferred gaming platform.

While I’ve been messing around with the PSP, here’s a picture of my current backlog of PC games:

As you can probably guess, this will likely keep me busy for a while. Note that I didn’t actually buy Dungeons & Dragons Online. It was sent to me as a free gift from PCGame.com.my since I managed to get onto their list of people who made the most valuable purchases for the month and I haven’t even opened it to see what’s inside yet. I could always try to sell it since I have zero interest in it, but I doubt that I’d be able to find anyone who’d want it either.

But before I can actually play any of them, I’d need to buy a new gaming rig, since it was way more convenient and cost effective to just sell off my old rig in the Solomon Islands to my colleagues there and buy a brand new one here rather than try to bring the whole thing back here. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time looking at hardware reviews and prices and scouring forums for suggested builds. So how beefy a gaming rig will a budget of around RM4,000 to RM5,000 buy these days? That’s going to be the subject of a future post. If anyone has suggestions, feel free to comment here or e-mail me at wankongyew at calltoreason.org.