My poor Xbox 360, all but kicked to the curb. The only thing gathering playtime in the past few weeks is GTA IV, and even then, it’s not exactly very enthusiastic gaming. I really should beat Mass Effect, Crackdown, and Burnout Paradise — considering how close I am — but how can I play those when I have years of PC gaming to catch up on? Company of Heroes, Civilization 4, Painkiller, Sins of a Solar Empire, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., World in Conflict, The Witcher, Command and Conquer 3, HL2: Ep.1+2…

You may notice those last two are also on the 360, but I can’t play an RTS with anything but a mouse and keyboard, and I’m too accustomed to playing Source engine games with them as well.

Team Fortress 2 has taken Call of Duty 4‘s spot in my gaming rotation as FPS of choice, I’m scrounging my way through the CoH single-player campaign, and I just went animal today and bought Sins of a Solar Empire and the “Every Single Damn Command and Conquer Game” pack.

Totally awesome. I’ve been playing Sins for the past 2 hours — it is a ridiculously epic and addicting game. A SMALL map is made up of 14 planets. I didn’t even finish the match yet. A large map with a bunch of people has to be easily more time-consuming than a game of Risk. Basically, it’s not a game that would ever make it to consoles. And with Red Alert 3 and Starcraft II coming out at the tail end of this year, I am set for a long while.

As for my 360…well, I need to beat GTA IV soon, so I can get a decent amount of money selling it. I need to fund all this PC gaming (and Ninja Gaiden II).

- Bought GTA IV. Oh wait, that wasn’t that awesome. How did this game get 10s across the board? How did Zelda: OOT get dethroned by this sluggish, buggy game? Ok, the scope and detail of the world is nothing less than impressive, but the framerate is pretty awful and the game almost seems to have a blurry filter. The 20fps only serve to excerbate the already sluggish controls. Everything just moves so damn slowly. I’m not even going to rip on the driving like I’ve seen a lot of people do. I guess Rockstar just wanted to go a more realistic route this time around. They didn’t want to try to compete with Crackdown, which I’m tempted to say is the king of the sandbox genre at this point. I was just playing that game endlessly a few weeks back, so the transition to the gameplay of GTA IV is jarring. The online makes the game worth a purchase, though. The first day I played mostly multi, since I kept getting invited to games. It’s funny how the gameplay is the worst part of the videogame, yet it still is universally praised. It’s not a surprise I haven’t played the game at all this weekend. But that may have to do with the next thing…

- Got a new laptop. A huge 17″ Dell Inspiron 1720 with a 1920×1200 LCD screen. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. I had both the Google Sidebar and Vista Sidebar going at one time, and it was totally unnecessary and awesome. Unfortunately, that wasn’t supposed to happen, so I’ve never managed to recreate the gloriousness. I’ve played Team Fortress 2, Company of Heroes, and Trackmania Nations Forever, leaving my GTA IV to rot in my 360 disk tray. Birthday + Graduation gifts FTW.

- Speaking of Company of Heroes, I’ve missed the RTS genre so much. I’m truly not sure of the last RTS I bought. If SimCity 4 doesn’t count, I think it’s Warcraft III. So my re-entrance into one of my favorite genres of gaming has made this a good week. The physics in CoH are incredible — watching an entire city get destroyed over the course of a mission is one the most awe-inspiring things I’ve seen in a game. Watching artillery strikes rain down on enemy units reminds me of watching siege tanks destroy hydra rushes in Starcraft. Oh God, Starcraft 2.

- Got a new job — one that will hopefully turn into a career. (Not that half of you would even know what an actuary is. And if you do, it’s probably from that god-forsaken Ben Stiller movie that I’ve heard people bring up a bunch of times.) A family friend connection basically got me the job. Yeah, that’s right. Not that I was under-qualified or anything, but I never would’ve known about the place otherwise. It definitely changed my plans for at least the next year, and probably many more. Now I will be able to buy an HDTV!

- And that brings me back to my orgasmic laptop. FULL HD with BLU-RAY. When I first got it, I didn’t think I would want to bother watching movies on it, since it’s still only 17″, but the latest Dark Knight trailer changed that. So I bought Terminator 2, Blade Runner, and 2001: A Space Odyssey on BD. I love me some sci-fi. Why is it abbreviated BD anyway? It should be BRD. Whatever, everyone says “Blu-Ray” anyway.

- I also had no exams and next to no work this week. I had to read Issac Asimov’s I, Robot and one of his short stories — but those were totally awesome. Which was a nice change of pace between the two exams and paper of two weeks ago, and upcoming finals and actuarial exam. Fun stuff.