Bought the game last week (used, Craigslist), and couldn’t stop playing since then. Made by Rockstar games, same company that did Grand Theft Auto. I really like the detail the designers put into the game - the realistic weather changes and sound effects (love the thunderstorms), the extremely detailed and realistic formations like the canyons, valleys, rivers…all that good stuff. Riding the horse in the game I really feel like I have gone back in time when I visited Utah - in fact I think a lot of the sceneries are made based on the earth formations found in Utah and Arizona. The canyons remind me of Canyonlands National Park, and the arches of course, remind me of the Arches National Park. I can spend an entire night just to ride the horse and wander around the vast plains and the narrow canyons! The missions are fun, interactions are pretty cool, in-game physics work well, I don’t really have too much of a complaint. Maybe it’s a little over-realistic but I guess most modern games tend to do it that way.

It fried today. My screen was showing these crazy “colorful” random patterns and I knew something was wrong. It was scary as you never know whether it’s the display card, the motherboard, software drivers, or something else. I rushed to Futureshop to get a GeForce 210 ($59, cheapest shit), plugged it in, and my PC revived. Now it’s the hard decision whether I should keep the display card and keep using my PC, or completely get rid of the PC since I have this really cool laptop now that is a few times faster than my PC. It’s a tough call since I have 5 internal harddrive right now and huge amount of data, if I get rid of the PC I’ll somehow have to be able to access data from these harddrives via some sort of adapter. I came across the “Vantec Nexstar Universal Storage Adapter” which claims to be able to connect to all kinds of storage devices externally via USB - HDD, DVDRom, memory cards, everything. It only costs $23 I think I’ll pick up two of them and see how cool it really is..