Grip that doomed shift, Homeboy!

We have a home!!

Well Natz and I finally found our ‘home’ on Friday. Ok, so it’s a rented place, but with the uncertainty over her community service placement next year, and the generally effed up high cost of housing lately in South Africa, it just doesn’t make sense for us to buy right now. It’s actually a nice big place, a duplex with three bedrooms and two full bathrooms upstairs, and a full kitchen, guest toilet and dining/living area downstairs. We have a nice little garden (ok, so it’s huge by today’s townhouse standards..), a courtyard and a lock up garage and carport! Compared to the rabbit hutches we’ve been looking at buying, this is a mansion! We’ll have place for a spare bedroom and a study for the two of us. It’s in Monument Park in Pretoria, which is a bit further from work than I am now, but it’s really close for Natz, which is awesome, and it’s a nice area-quiet, but close to the highway which’ll make getting to work a cinch. And it’s way, WAY better than living in Pretoria North, which we might have had to do if Natz’ internship had ended up being at Garankua. That place is too damned hot for words, and miles from any decent entertainment-not to mention getting to work from there would have been hell!



Of course, I won’t be able to move in just yet, Natz will move in next month, and I’ll move in after the wedding (and honeymoon) so it’ll be well over two months before I start living there-but I can hardly wait! Of course furnishing the place will be quite an ordeal, her folks have been really generous with some of their older furniture, as has my dad, but we’ll still need to invest in some stuff (not that I mind, it’ll be nice to have some new furniture of our own J). I wish I could go large and buy everything new, but I’m not made of money yet.. That’ll just have to wait until I win the Lottery..



And more new games!

Last week I finally got hold of Doom 3 for the Xbox (I was going to buy it from cdwow, but I found someone here selling a copy secondhand). I’ve seen it before briefly on a friend’s Xbox, but it’s only in playing it for a while that you really appreciate what id achieved with it. Now I’m by no means an id fan boy-far from it, I generally don’t enjoy their games. They tend to make great engines, and forget all about the game play ;)

Anyway, in this case they actually did quite a good job on the game play side. I wouldn’t say it feels like the old Doom games, not by a long shot (the closest modern games to that feeling IMHO is actually the Serious Sam ones), but it really has great atmosphere, and it’s obvious a lot of work went into slowing down and fine tuning the gameplay to take full advantage of that atmosphere. I’ll post my full impressions on DESCONOCIDO when I’ve played further-preferably when I’ve finished it.



Another new one (which I picked up yesterday) is GripShift for the PSP. I’ve been eyeing this for a while, partially because of all the critical praise it received and partially because of the relatively low price tag :P

GripShift is, well it’s difficult to describe. It’s a driving game, in which you have a number of play modes, and a number of objectives to achieve per track in each mode. Most are pretty standard stuff-collect x stars, complete the track in a set time, find a hidden marker, etc. What makes this different is the nature of the tracks and cars, and the psycho physics they employ. A puzzle element is introduced by adding everything from moving platforms to really powerful fans to the tracks. The result is a great (and bloody difficult) puzzle-driving game. Again, final verdict on DESCONOCIDO.