After returning from our "last hurrah before baby number 2 cruise", my wife and I went to see if we could get new cell phones, since our Nokia 6820's just weren't cutting it anymore. Luckily, even though we were originally AT&T Wireless customers, they were bought out by Cingular, so we were in reality Cingular customers now, and they finally had a mechanism in place to transfer customers to new phones and plans without penalty (and of course keeping the same phone number). Also, now was a good time since the company I work for, Volt, has a corporate deal with them for minor discounts.

Gabriel Knight 2"Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within" is an interesting game for many reasons. For one thing, it's one of the first games to incorporate full-motion video, and it does so effectively. Unlike Sierra's other pioneering CD-ROM project, "Phantasmogoria" or Trilobyte's "The 7th Guest," GK2 is still winning over new players today. The reasons are clear: GK2 has all the eyecandy of the other games, plus great characters, good drama, an interesting storyline, and challenging (yet not unsolvable) puzzles.

Several people are asking about the blogging features here at Armchair Arcade. Basically, the way we've been talking about this site is that most of the interaction will consist of comments on blogs and articles (once we get the issues up). Things are running a bit slowly during this beta phase, but we plan to have at least one new blog post up per day (probably two or three once things get rolling). Since we knew there would be lots of demand for a general chit-chat area, we decided to include forums on the new site. If you just want to talk informally about something unrelated to a blog post, the forums are ideal.

Playing : have got back into Mario Kart 64 - never did win all the cups - well, during the week I finally won gold in all cups at 150cc and just won gold today in Mushroom Cup Mirror/Extra mode. Holy God though : Toad's Turnpike (Flower Cup) is a nightmare in mirror mode - racing against the flow of traffic!

Developing : trying to get myself to move on my Super Robot sequel (107 downloads from www.codersworkship.com !!!) in Blitz Basic, and a new super improved version of Video Poker in Visual Basic 6) I'm coding too much in work at the moment , so I can't face it when I get home.

I see that this site was started back around the March 2006 timeframe, at least from looking at the first blogs. Where is everybody now? Not much happening at the old site. I see a couple of you are on vacation.

Also, what games are you playing and have you finished any recently? Here's my list:

Playing, heavy rotation:

DS:
Super Mario World
Metroid Prime, Hunters
Castlevania, Dawn of Sorrow

Nintendo DS: Don't buy this.I just saw something pretty funny over at Kotaku: The DS Sucks Folks, Look it up! I haven't seen this guy before, but apparently he's Jonathan Harchick, and he's been doing his Talking With Jon show since 2002. It's a pretty terrible show, yet at the same time, there's something oddly compelling about it. At any rate, it's worth a few chuckles, and will probably remind you all-too-well of some dork down the street who thinks he knows gaming.

Nancy Drew: Danger on Deception Island

I had some time tonight to update the downloads on my Xbox 360 with the latest demos and Xbox Live Arcade stuff. Three games in particular that I got to try were "Test Drive Unlimited", "Ridge Racer 6" and "Blazing Angels: Squadrons of Doom". Only one truly stood out, and from the title of this posting, I think you can figure out which one...

Since the beta test was going so well, we decided to switch everyone over to the new Website early. While we still have lots of work to do, we wanted to get everyone over and discussing things as soon as possible. While we have forums on this new platform, we really think a better way is discussing things directly with the "blog" entries, so give it a try. We'll be tweaking things as time goes on and look forward to creating new articles and print issues very soon. Welcome!