I recently finished the main storyline in Fallout 3, spending about 40 hours with the game in the process. One of the things that I really enjoyed about the game was that there were so many paths I never took, places I never discovered, capabilities my character never had, people I never met and information about the world that I will never know that it seemed like a real world. Julian Murdoch made a similar comment on the Gamers with Jobs podcast recently.

The great thing about the large world was not that it allows me to explore it for hundreds of hours (who has time or that?), but rather that its vastness makes it impossible to explore completely and therefore more realistic.

The service contract for our three-year-old Dell PowerEdge SC430 server was to expire at the beginning of December. Ordinarily on a piece of hardware this old I would take the chance of a hardware failure, figuring that the PC wasn't worth enough to service. This machine, however, runs our home installation of Small Business Server 2003, making a failure a bigger pain to deal with-- and the promised next-day service of significant value. That was why I had extended the original one-year service agreement for an additional two years and why it would have been worth another $200 or so to extend the agreement for another year.

So when I received a solicitation in the mail to call to extend our service agreement that is just what I did. And was quoted a price of $400 for a one year extension.

My incredulity resulted in an offer to reduce that price to $360, which I indicated still wasn't worth my while. I ended the call and started considering other options.

Later in the day I received another call from Dell offering me a two-year extension for $270. However, I only needed a one-year extension and $270 was still too much, so I declined. The sales rep then asked me how much I was willing to pay. "$150" I answered thinking if the countered with a higher price I still might accept a price under $200. She put me on hold for a few minutes and came back on offering me a price of $140 for a one-year extension. I accepted.

A little negotiation had resulted in a 70% price reduction. Of course I hadn't realized when I first called that this was the beginning of a negotiation-- but others reading this who find themselves in a similar situation can now recognize the process for what it is.

Overall, I am quite please with Vista Media Center and my system with dual CableCard tuners, but one of the annoyances that plagues my installation is that once every few weeks one of the tuners will stop working in such a way as to require a reboot to get it running again, or a tuner will take too long to get a signal and fail to record a show. Ordinarily this is not a problem, because with two tuners, the shows I care about end up getting recorded on the other tuner and some Simpsons rerun fails to record. However, this past week I failed to notice for six days that both tuners had failed, resulting in a week of lost shows. Hopefully this sort of reliability issue will be addressed in Windows 7.

I can go back to reading Andrew Sullivan again.

In this post, he quotes Barack Obama's prior statement that "...the entire auto industry should follow GM's lead and put a yellow gas cap on all flexible fuel vehicles, and notify consumers in writing as well" accurate observes that." Andrew than accurately observes:

But owning the companies or telling them how to run their businesses is not the way to do it. This is a real test for Obama: is he a market-friendly pragmatist or a knee-jerk socialist?

I had spent about 15 hours playing Fable 2 and was about 75% through the game when I fell victim to a game-ending-glitch. In the final part of the Tattered Spire quest, the final confrontation never materialized leaving my character trapped on the Spire with no way to leave. With only one saved game allowed there were no prior save to start from and with no desire to start over this effectively ended the game for me. I am returning the game to Amazon for a full refund.

I certainly wish I had been able to complete the game and get the attendant Xbox Achievements and experience the conclusion of the story, on the other hand I enjoyed the time I spent with the game, I got a pretty good sense of the the world of Fable 2 and will be getting my money back (which I will be using to purchase Fallout 3), have avoided any possible frustration with trying to beat end-of-game bosses. I have also avoided any guilt at for buying a game I failed to finish (I'm looking at you Gears of War). The 15 hours I had spent with the game since release was also about the limit of my wife's tolerance for such an endeavor. In sum, I am only slightly annoyed at this turn of events.

As evidenced by the preceding paragraph, I have also found the experience to be food for thought about what I like and dislike about games. As married 41-year-old with three still-attention-craving kids my conclusions are at least partly a function of my life circumstances, but what here's what I like in games I play:

• An entertaining story. Halo 3 and Bioshock had this. Games like GTA 4 and Fable 2, less so.
• A difficulty level that provides a slight challenge, but doesn't prevent me from completing the story in some mode (even if that mode is "easy"). Halo 3 did an excellent job of this, as did the combat system in Fable 2. Oblivion was excellent in that it let you adjust the difficulty level with a slider. GTA 4 eventually got too hard for me to want to bother with.
• Not be too reliant on hand-eye coordination. I like games that let me overcome my lack of skill with preparation. Bioshock's system of plasmids allowed this. No such system was present in GTA4 and it eventually led me to abandon the game about 80% of the way through.
• Multiplayer that matches me with similarly incompetent players. Xbox live's trueskill does a pretty good job of this, except when the universe of other players consists of devotees of a franchise. This made me one of the relatively few people (evidently) who enjoyed Shadowrun.
• Graphics that transport me into some type of alternate world, or the equivalent of a good boardgame. Almost all triple-A games these days meet the first standard and well designed Xbox Live Arcade games like Carcasonne can easily meet the second.