I have installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my desktop PC. So far, the usual: it is prettier but it feels noticeably slower and more unstable. The OS keeps asking for permission to do anything, but I know where that comes from and I don’t mind.

I just finished watching the 3rd season’s finale, and despite having found most of this season fairly uninteresting, I think the finale is among the best endings of a TV series I have ever seen. The finales of Battlestar Galactica’s 2nd season and Invasion’s first and only were very good as well, whereas this years’s Heroes has been a bit meh, 24 was "more of the same" and BSG was downright terrible.

Still, nothing beats Babylon 5’s 2nd and 3rd seasons. 🙂

I’ll keep it short: the actual game is not so terrible, and all in all it seems a nice update of true Total Annihilation gameplay. I played the first few campaign missions and I found them fairly uninspired: complete some early objectives before the map expands and then decimate a large enemy base. Fun but a bit monotonous.

The only problem that remains is that the game freezes my PC after about 10-20 minutes of playing. Hard reboot. I’m using the latest NVidia drivers so there’s not much else I can do. It doesn’t crash when watching a replay, so I don’t have much faith in new drivers. Ah well, at least I got to see some of the cool stuff the game can offer.

Edit: Good news! I downloaded the WHQL version of the NVidia drivers I was using (158.22, should be no difference), and the game apparently stopped crashing.

Unless you are hiding under a rock, you will know by now that Blizzard has officially announced Starcraft 2. Juciy cinematic and gameplay videos are cluttering the Internet, fanboys and detractors heated in dialectic debates about the apparent lack of a difference between this game and the original. Me? I loved the original and I don’t mind Starcraft 1.5 with a visual upgrade. I don’t mind that at all. It looks exactly how I hoped it would, nothing more and nothing less.

Until Starcraft 2 arrives, many of us have Supreme Commander, the spiritual successor of Total Annihilation. Now, few games have captured me like the original TA did. The sheer scope of the battles, the technical features, the mods, and especially the community-created movie recording and playback tools all sucked a lot of time from me.

The bad news is, Supreme Commander is a massive resource hog. However, I have a new beefy machine to play game on. I didn’t bring my old desktop to Vancouver, and the good old laptop was showing its age. Mirek of Kube Computers has built an excellent (and QUIET!) machine, so if you are in Vancouver and buying a PC, I recommend them.

The worse news is, Supreme Commander is annoying in many ways. I’ll give it a bit more time before I write a long tirade about the game and the severe lack of polish, but my disappointment is dangerously close to what I felt when the horrible TA: Kingdoms was released.

I wish they were all as honest as this. But what would have David Jaffe done if that was about his game?

Nah, I bet he would have loved it.

David Jaffe (THE God of War creator) just finished a completely different kind of project: casual, downloadable, $10 PS3 game "Calling All Cars". Then, Gamespot gave it a 6.7. David didn’t like it, but apparently something in the reviews (he says the IGN one) made them decide to spend a bit more time fixing some problems. Joystiq made fun of him, and he got really mad.

I like to see game developers voicing opinions, and I have my share of secretly (or not so secretly) hated gaming sites and reviewers… but when one of our industry’s best tells a gaming site to just "Fuck you, guys. Go fuck yourselves. […] I hope Kotaku fucking puts your ass out of business, wanna be fucktards", then things have got out of hand.