Happy Birthday to my favoritist of people, my darling dearest AllyCat_13!

I hope your day is the best!

I've been spending a decent chunk of my free time lately with Crackdown, leaping tall buildings, kicking armored cars and still wondering why the game didn't come out here under its Japanese release name, Riot Act. That and wishing that the game's admittedly pretty good soundtrack was present for more of the game. Its only there when you're driving a car, and driving a car is probably one of the least gratifying things to do in the game. Good thing its an Xbox 360 game, which means that having my own music, all the time is only an ipod USB cable away.

So last night I fired up the game with the soundtrack for Jet Set Radio Future, and suddenly the game became ten times better. If you don't remember, or never experienced it, JSRF was all about using your maneuverability to get to all kinds of places you ever thought you'd be able to get to, especially while wearing a pair of rollerblades. It also had a pretty top notch soundtrack of really unique music. And since you're really doing much of the same stuff here, most of the time, it totally works and it brings it all back.

So yeah, try it. It's even better than that Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon thing, if for no other reason that Dorothy never threw a dump truck at people, but you can.

Take a long look back upon Greg Kasavin's long years here at GameSpot.

I'm usually the first to dismiss the concepts of mysterious coincidence, gremlins and the like, but this one is just a little bit too weird to ignore. Just the other night, past midnight on 11/17/06 saw me playing a spot of Gears of War. Working out what to do to solve one of the few encounters with a Berzerker, when the game just halted, saying the disc couldn't be read. My copy of the game had been doing this a bit, likely the result of a few mysterious scratches that were present when I took delivery of it. But this time, I wasn't able to boot the game back up and pick up where I left off, like I'd done before. It didn't boot at all, and for that matter, neither did any of my other games. Oh bother.

So it seems that my Xbox 360 has a bum disc drive, so off to get repaired it goes. I was really looking forward to spending the following fortnight working on my Pinata garden, but it looks like I'll otherwise be spending it finishing Okami, polishing my Guitar Hero skills, and maybe getting my hands dirty with some Bully. But that's not going to keep me from blaming the death of my 360 on the birth of the PlayStation 3.

If you're confused, look here.

In the meantime, I plan on watching this video twenty more times before heading off into my weekend, where I'll be eating all my fingernails in anticipation for Sunday's race.