Morning all,

What an emotional rollercoaster! Bubble's off in XinJiang on Holiday (surprise!) so I have a free pass to play as much PS2 as humany possible for the next 10 days. This doesn't happen often and personal time with the PS2 is something I place a probably unhealthy value on. And this time I've got the projector, so the whole living room becomes the racetrack. Imagine, then, my child like confusion and the buds of tears when the the thing upped and stopped working on Saturday morning, during my traditional pre-work race session. No smoke or fire, just froze than refused to re-boot.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Off down my local games shop (a small hole in the wall for chipping PS2s and the like), the fella had my black box of joy on it's back, feet in the air and its knickers off with a practiced smoothness while I looked on like a worried parent. 5 minutes, some testing gear and a phone call later, my final hope declared the joy box dead with no hope of recovery. Seems the graphics chip had expired and a new mother board wasn't available for my model of unit (never knew there were differnet models, but it seems there are.) So, how much for a new one, then? More than I had in my bank account apparantly. It's the end of the month you see and Bubble left with the balace of the cash (fair dos; I told her to, figuring I wouldn't need money to sit in the living room in my boxers pretending I can drive).

A trip to the cash point revealed that I was 300 HKD (20 of your new English pounds) short so, rather than face the prospect of a week sans-PS2, I broke my own rules and took the cash out on the credit card.

Now I have no money for food but who cares, I have a new chipped "slimline" edition PS2 and there's plenty of tinned tuna in the house. the slimline PS2 really tiny and I will have to exercise some self restraint not to take it with me on business trips (it's smaller and lighter than my thinkpad X!!). Anyhoo, it works and that's the point. Got a steering wheel "included in the price" so eagerly stuck that to the dining room table and fired up the GT4 to find that ... it's completely uncontrollable. Bugger. I think it's cause it's a cheap wheel but tried it on Burnout 3 just to see. Works on that game just fine. And what a game it is. Stopping every half hour to clean the blood out of my eyes, I wondered at this street racing game that gives rewards for dangerous driving and pushing others off the road. A case in point is the "crash" mini-game, which gives you a junction full of traffic to barrel into and then pays you the equivalent of the value of damage you manage to do. Bloody brilliant!

Breakfast time for bomber so I'll be off, then perhaps a race or 2 before work...

Bomber out