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Guitar Hero III (10h) - Mat & nat came up for the baptism on Friday night, so we got stuck into GH. Scott and Greig joined in on Saturday to give it a good thrashing. Finally got past "Welcome to the jungle" and ploughed through a couple more sets to be only 1 song shy of "cliffs" on medium.

Spore Creature Creator (6h) - Took an eternity to get, and the full version only offered a couple more options to peak my interest. Cameron enjoyed it sso I'll probably be fiddling with it every now & then.

FM08 (2h) - Gateshead, Season 3, 8th BSP

FuryBand (2h) - VRBones LXXI, Level 18 Mutant Beorning Jedi

Metal Gear Solid 4 (1h) - Hard to find time when Sandy and Cameron aren't using the TV and I'm not interested in something else.

Battle of Tiles (1h) - Demo'd it a bit to others

Visit Spore.com

It's time for some critters!

Even tohugh I picked up the pre-order, the 17th rolls on and there's nothing released. Eventually the trial version is out, but still nothing on the full version.

Mucked around in the trial version last night for about 4 hours creating 4 totally different creatures. I showed Cameron tonight and he liked it enough to keep him occupied, but "TrackMania" was the real reason we went to the PC and eventually it won out.

Seeing no way to update the trial into the full fersion I uninstalled the trial to see if there was anything the EA downloader would do. Now instead of saying 'Play' it says "releasing in 3 hours". Looks like EA are heading the same way as steam with their downloader and are being tarred by the same ineptitude.

GameLog 44

Chaos League (9h) - Picked up a copy for $10 on the Monday to tie me over unitl Metal Gear Solid came out. Takes forever to play using action pauses, but it still has that Bloodbowl feel. Played through a couple of games. Slaughtered some dwarves 13-0.

Metal Gear Solid 4 (8h) - Finished the first act. Might redo to see if I can do it without killing anyone, possibly after going through once though. Tried the multiplayer and I couldn't believe how much stuff I had to go through to get into a game. It took about 1 & 1/2 hours to download patches, create accounts (with one of the most inane requirements on game name I've seen) and then find a server. Others playing must have had a keyboard as they were chatting quite regularly during the game, and there's no way known I'd suffer typing out a message using the controller. Quite frankly it was a really bad experience, much worse than I've seen on PC. If that is supposed to be the friendly console way then let me outta here. The game itself feels epic, and it's been a pretty interesting storyline so far.

Football Manager (6h) - Gateshead, Season 3, 8th BSP - We played poorly to get dumped out of the FA Trophy, but we're up to the 1/4 finals of the Setanta Shield. Playing much better in the league now and sitting in a firm mid-table position with only 8 points shy of playoffs. I had ruled out a serious challenge for the title once I saw how poorly we were going in the first couple of rounds, but we might just jag a couple more and be in with a shot. Cook finally broke an 18 hour goal drought so we now have 3 strikers I'm confident with. Clarke really doesn't have the stats to be playing as well as he does, but he's the crowd favourite and keeps banging them in. Once he gets a goal drought I'll probably permenantly bench him.

Guitar Hero III (4h) - Still can't get past "welcome to the Jungle" on medium. It's still fun playing through the easy tracks though. Only a few left that aren't 5 stars.

Battle of Tiles (3h) - Trying on "very hard" but I keep losing men to the group attacks. Got one save past the first boss, but lost my main lightning mage.

Spore creature creator

Spore is slowly getting closer, and GameSetwatch has a good article about the Maxis crowd and the imminent release of the creature creator next Tuesday. I like the sound of immediately embedding animation into blogs and YouTube vids. Sounds like a perfect launchpad for viral marketing.

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FM08 (4h) - Gateshead, season 3, 15th - Still in the FA trophy and Setanta Shield, but not travelling too well in the league. Uni assignments and the arrival of Rachael made the week fly by!

Battle of Tiles (5h) - Saw this indie game on GameSetWatch. Liked it enough to pick it up for a fiver.

Guitar Hero III (3h) - Andrew's nearly completed medium level. I'd rather rock out on easy ones.

GameLog 42

FM08 (8h) - Gateshead, season 3, 12th - A dozen games in and it's a so-so result so far. Even though the team is ranked well individually the bookies still have us behind most matches, and there are some teams who pay pro's over 2000 pounds a week. Seems like some of the difficulty further up the league is flowing down this way.

Guitar Hero III (5h) - Good for vegging out once home from work.

FuryBand (3h) - VRBones LXII, Level 21 Beorning Jedi Mutant - Talking to Ben made me pull this one out of the closet again. I've been trying to get enough into gauntlet mode to get full identify working. Still haven't made it to lvl 24. Keep dying to silly pack situations.

Cannot remove Mac created directory ending with space

Had a curly one at work today. A Mac user had created a directory stored onto the Windows 2003 fileserver with a space on the END. It first started appearing in the backup error reports stating the file didn't exist. When I finally got round to looking into it I found it was virtually impossible to remove from the server because the API must truncate the name. Couldn't delete through windows explorer, through DOS, through DOS as an 8.3 file, or brute forcing a delete on the whole directory.

Finally hopped onto a linux box and removed it with a simple "rm ._*" over a cifs share ...