an icepick through the keyhole

Am slowly going over the core rules for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons.

Preliminary thoughts: lots of changes, but a lot simpler to grasp, and combat just got a lot more tactical. Basically, they're aiming this for the MMORPG crowd — you can almost immediately translate the mechanics into things that WoW players understand and vice versa. That's not necessarily a bad thing, by the way.

Whether I'll actually play it, well... that depends. The people I'd like to play it with happen, unfortunately, to be over in Georgia and Indiana...

After an incredibly painful installation and activation procedure, I finally managed to load up BioShock and played it until 4 a.m.

As a result, odd dreams. Most of it was relatively random, but I remember the last bit.

I was Thunderbolt Ross, battling a robotic dragon, trying to fire a rocket-propelled grenade up through a gap in the force field in its belly. Finally managed to do it, but the grenade fell back towards me, and the explosion hurled me off a cliff, along with the dragon. So we're both tumbling down, in a slow motion Jerry Bruckheimer moment, I grab a frag grenade, and am about to literally ram it down the dragon's throat as we both tumble to our deaths — well, mine a certainty anyway... when I wake up.

BioShock has a great story, as is to expected from the guys who did System Shock 2, but I'm not too crazy about some aspects of the control scheme and the way they deal with "hacking" into various pieces of equipment you find in the environment, which essentially amounts to you playing Pipe Dream.

Still enjoying it nonetheless, which explains the 4 a.m. sleep time and my current semi-somnabulistic state.

If this were true, it'd be worth it buying both the PS2 and Kingdom Hearts 2 just to see it happen.