The GameTap runner up prize was a little key chain thing, it looks kind of weird, but it has a fairly powerful bluish/purplish LED light on it that's really cool. Definitely not bad considering it was free. Some -- bad and good -- pics of it are attached below.

American McGee's Grimm: Ep 03: The Fisherman and His Wife and Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones have both been released on GameTap. Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones is the only Prince of Persia in the Sands of Time trilogy that I've yet to play, so that's cool.

So, something good about the new USB microphone, it installs itself as a recording device on your PC. You can't record from 2 inputs on the same device, but you can record from 2 devices at the same time, so you can record with FRAPS and Audacity at the same time and have separate audio for the game and your voice, so you can fix volume issues in post production. The only problems with that are that it adds a good bit of time to post production, and the USB microphone picks up me pressing keys on the keyboard really well :(.

Anyway, stuff to do, so goodbye.

The top left part of my thumb is partially numb for some reason, has been for a while, hope it's nothing bad :-<. At least I know the blood is still circulating, that's something.

The new Samsung Hard-Drive came with about 50%-75% of the bubble wrap popped, so I was worried it wouldn't work, but it formatted fine and I've already moved all of my data over to it, the only possible problem is that NVIDIA Monitor reports "Read Hard Disk Error!". The new Hard-Drive isn't even noticeable over the sound of my fans and the 320 GB Seagate that's just for the OS and installed software now.

In case you're interested, here's the results of Windows' built-in Read Speed Test for both Hard-Drives:

750 GB Samsung:

• Theoretical limit: 300.0 MB
• Burst speed: 164.8 MB

I ordered some more stuff from Newegg a little while ago.

But first, I haven't been able to finish loading a Newegg page for hours (it took a while to work out what length cables I needed), so far it's gotten stuck on one of these 3 sites (in order): cm.newegg.com, ad.doubleclick.net, c1.neweggimages.com.

And here's the new parts :D.

1. • Hard-Drive:
   • Price: $99.99, Quantity: 1.
   • SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD753LJ 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

I forgot to mention that I received my new DVD Burner 2 days ago, it's a SAMSUNG SH-S223F, it's replacing a -- seemingly dying -- almost 2 year old LG GCE-8527BB, which means I finally have an all SATA PC.

Edit: Apparently the new drive is only SATA 1.50Gb/s, but that's ~192 MiB/s I believe, so it doesn't matter.

It was a bitch to install since I didn't want to take out my Video Card, which makes removing my SATA cables damn near impossible.

I completed the F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate Demo just now.

I was running FRAPS, Xfire, and Steam with it's overlay disabled, and I didn't have any problems.

Some of the textures are noticeably low-res even at max settings, and there's no comparing the fire to Alone in the Dark's, but it still looked pretty good, especially during slo-mo firefights.

Apparently the demo ends about 5 seconds after the place that it crashed on me last time, so nothing new.

I'll be getting F.E.A.R. Platinum soon and it comes with the original F.E.A.R. plus both expansion packs.

Later.

Like the title says, "American McGee's Grimm: Ep 01: A Boy Learns What Fear Is" was released on GameTap yesterday.

I've already downloaded it, but I'm avoiding it for now, trying to wait on something, I'll play it soon though.

osu! (free game):

osu! is a really fun and addictive rhythm game that you play with the mouse or keyboard, it's best explained by just watching the game play footage on it's website.

To play osu!, you download usermade "beatmaps" (songs) from the site after you've registered on the forums, and registration doesn't even require an activation email, so give it a shot, it's really good, just watch out for overlapping notes and the spinners that don't like to spin :(.

The osu! website redesign went live today, and apparently it's caused a few problems with downloading beatmaps, namely, some won't download, but this will probably be fixed soon.

I found Hulu.com just a little while ago, it's description pretty much boils down to this: A YouTube that users can't upload to, that contains a lot of full length movies, TV show episodes, and TV show excerpts that you can watch for free and without even registering, but you have to deal with ads just like on real TV.

According to Wikipedia, "Hulu is a joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp, with funding by Providence Equity Partners..."

I assume this was yet another result of the ever present "We want our own YouTube that we can do whatever we want with, and will probably completely screw up and lose lots of money on" syndrome, but to be fair, Hulu is pretty freaking sweet, I don't know if it's making any money though, so it may be around for a while and it may not. I also don't know how long any piece of content will be available on the site, just that different content can of course be shown longer than others depending on what the content provider wants, but that's pretty standard for everything, and Hulu is free, not even requiring registration, so at least it won't hurt so much if a favorite gets taken down.