So Monday evening when I got home from the office’ late as always, my x-box 360 got powered up and the shiny new disk slotted into the drive.

First thing I have to say about this is the game was launched on Friday, I got it on Monday and the first thing I see is a message to download a patch or get booted off of live Don’t get me wrong I love the way the 360 can do that but come on, guys you sent the game to press with flaws! After almost a year of delays!!!

Still that’s not the worst thing in the world it gave me a chance to make some dinner and boy am I glad I did. Cause once I picked up that pad and started to play, I was completely absorbed, the only reason I’m not a sleep on the couch at the moment is because I had the good sense to set a “you gotta work in the morning alarm”

Been a while since a game grabbed me that way. The strange thing is, there were so many things wrong with it, but it seems there is more right with it

It’s nothing special looks wise, I have become far to used to next gen graphics far to quickly but at times it seems the flowing corners are a bit 50p like at the edge’s.

I couldn’t get online to race any real opponents due to the “TDU servers unavailable” message that kept popping up, again it’s only just been released so why can’t I get online? Thankfully that does seem to have been fixed as I was losing a small fortune by the end of Tuesday night.

After those issue’s are ignored there is so much to do, the “world” is the Island of Oahu, complete with 1000 miles of roads, I managed to cover only 100 miles of that in an evening.

The sound on this game is incredible, PGR3 is the only car game I have heard that comes close and that pales in comparison to TDU. Every car engine I’ve heard in the game sounds different and thanks to the “test drive” option in the car dealerships, I’ve heard a good few of them.

That’s the other thing I like if you want to buy a car you got to drive to the dealer for that marque, if you want to change clothes you need to buy your new threads in a store, same for performance upgrades and Motor bikes.

This is a great game it’s escapism at it’s best. You have to buy your home first then your car and all on a small budget to begin with. That’s not so bad though as your buying a house in the Hawaiian islands for less than the cost of a 3 bed semi-D in Dublin

After 2 evenings of play I have finally managed to drive around the island win a few races, buy new clothes, buy a second car, tune it and still lose about 20K in races where I should have checked what the opposition was driving before placing a bet. D’oh

I have still got to try out a bike. Check out the dinners and the club scene and that’s after clocking about 6 hours of game play. But already I can see that this game is all about building a solid community who like to use these mad machines to go really really fast and also to challenge each other with.
If like me your a fan of the racing genre, then buy this game! Hell buy an x-box 360 just to play it if you have to.

So, we are using this as an excuse to have a weekend away together in the “other Capital” I will have to remember that I’m there in a social capacity and not a business one, everybody needs a break from time to time, you know As I was looking through the list of attendee’s and speakers I noticed a few familiar names, so it will be a chance to get to know them.

My Sweetie got me interested in blogging and probobly leads the most web-centric lifestyle of any person I know. Her job is managing a web-based Doc-control system, the team of people she works with are based in numerous different timezones. She “talks” daily to her friends and mum over MSN (who my sweetie introduced to personel PC’s and the web. Her mum is now an active member in some online communities, runs her own Wiki and not so long ago installed her own broadband. She gives us both tips regularly now) also gives her mum remote assistence for troubleshooting those annoying issue’s we all have her current web project is getting our photo collection geo-tagged and online, so that we can both use it for our own blog’s and so that we can share these images with our families and friends. Almost all our shopping with the exception of food and impulse items is purchased online, every holiday we have taken together has been booked online. All our maps, newspapers and lots of our entertainment are virtual, both on and offline.
I’m blaming her for a lot in the last paragraph but in truth these are the things that we do together. I’m looking forward to this, it’s not often we get to “geek out” in public, so this should be fun and interesting for us both.