GameLog 10

World of Warcraft (15h) BundyBear, 70 Warrior. Finally made it!!!@! I was anticipating making the ding on the weekend, but some XP rich quest lines at the bottom of netherstorm had both Sandy and I popping the big seven oh in the space of 5 hours on Friday night.
Fury (12h) The first weekend of the open beta "Fury Challenge" was a pretty frustrating one. MASSIVE load times of over a minute to get into maps. Something's definitely awry as the system is reporting a footprint of 600Mb for the game when there's 1.6Gb memory allocated to something. Either there's a massive memory leak or there's some services somewhere that's not reporting ~750Mb of memory usage. Killed all services, dropped the game to the low spec renderer and lower spectral settings to help it get by, but it's still painfully slow. Once the game is loaded it stutters a little before happily running along at > 80 fps. Typical session would be sign up for queue (~3mins), tourney map loads (1min), wait for match to start (30 secs), play for ~8 mins, finish up and zone back (1min), run back to battlemaster (1min with semi zoning), join queue again. Almost 50% of the time outside the actual gameplay with no real recourse for making it faster. It's even slower if you want to go buy skillups or the like. Toward the end I'd take the queue waiting time as the skillup time, even though you couldn't apply it immediately because you're "in the queue".

2 hours in a session was enough to frustrate the hell out of me and made me put it aside to cool down. I was in a foul mood all weekend and it was largely due to the frustration over fury. A couple of hours away from it and I'd thought up some different strats and combos to try so I'd be chomping at the bit to get back into it. There's something there that grabs me, but I hope the load times are just part of the beta process. Definitely ordering more memory for the PC too, hope that will alleviate some of the grief.

Powder (5h) Just .. one .. more .. go.
Trackmania Nations (2h) Finals for TMN at St Luke's. Brendan cleaned up the finals as expected, but a pretty good showing all round saw lower than average times.
Sim City 4 (2h) The game is still buggy and has memory leaks. Can't believe that you can lose a whole session's worth of building without any ingame backup measures. Forcing myself to save before zooming in / out as that's where it seems to die the most.