I can't believe it's been THIS long since I've posted on my site. More than 7 months of outdated web material! Unbelievable!

Well, since the last post, I've done a lot more to my car. Too much to list here. I just took it to Auto Club Speedway (formerly known as California Speedway) this last Saturday for an open track day on the infield. It was the hardest I've ever pushed my car. It was kind of embarrasing being literally the slowest car out there. But hey, at least I now know where the limits are in my vehicle. I had a ton of understeer slides, a couple oversteer slides, and lots of other cars passing me. But it was fun! For some reason though, my brakes have become very mushy afterwards. I think it may be the brake lines and/or the fluid. But yea, I knew real life racing is much different than video game racing (obviously), but I can say that without a doubt, the various racing games that I've played at the very least prepared me for all the theories and physics involved in high-speed driving. The thing that I was most unaccustomed to was the g-forces. Having a regular car seat was really problematic since I had to deal with holding myself up in every corner.

Regardless though, it was TONS of fun. I really ate up a lot of tread on my tires but still, TONS of fun!

SO SORE!@#$ After 20 hours of working on the car, the sway bars and intake is finally installed! It would've been much easier with better/correct tools. Big UPs go to Tom for helping through the whole process and providing some of the better/correct tools! Also, big UPs go Rip for enduring a day worth of pains and for coming up with the life-saving "PULL THE OTHER SIDE" solution! And one more big UPs for Thy too for being the morale officer/book reader for the whole ordeal.

Before anyone forgets, here's some memorable moments!

- Ooo ooo Ooo Ooo! Ahh ahh ahh Ahh! (Tom's reverse mallet hammering!)

- "hey hey hey hey Hey Hey HEY HEY HEY" (Tom's excitement building!)

- When both me and Rip were working under the car and Rip's head kept tapping the release lever for one of the jack stands. DANGEROUS!@#$

- Every painful counter-turn bracing against Tom's turn in removing the rear engine mount bolt.

- Trying to remove the stock rear sway bar without removing the brace. "I ALMOST pulled it out! It's SO close!"

- All the failed attempts at re-aligning the bottom sub-frame with the chassis studs. Tie-down belt ratchet. 2x4 reverse pry. Jacking the suspension in different combinations.

- Trying to create my own 3.5 mm Allen wrench. First, out of a pencil eraser. When that broke immediately, second, the other side of the wooden unsharpened pencil. Then using a razor to accidently make a very painful blood-gushing cut straight into my thumb.

End result? Sways have made those hard turns very stable. No dramatic tire squeal and no more extreme chassis lean. The intake produces some nice growling sounds above 3000 RPM. Also, the rev climb between 1500 and 5000 RPM is now much smoother. It feels like the power is delivered much more linearly.

Infrequent update is here! And even MORE infrequent is my MySpace! I finally put down some information there. It is kind of fun to fill out those profile forms. It's like answering those mass ultimate survey emails that you got in high school and forwarded to everybody you know. And now, a game summary of stuff I've played this fall so far!

BioShock
I found this kind of short but very well put together. The production values are really high. The atmosphere of the levels are the shining point of this game. It's quite eerie and macabre. For me, the game was 40% shooting, 20% navigating, 30% puzzling, and 10% exploring. That 20% of navigating might turn some people off since there's backtracking and quest reading involved. The story is pretty interesting. I was trying to play it over again for another ending, but tedium set in and I lost interest. Overall though, good game! Oh yea, best water effects ever seen in any game!

Medal of Honor Airborne
Freakin' awesome! The action is over-the-top and the graphics have a lot of whizz-bang. Some people don't like the leaning system because you can't lean and move at the same time, like previous MoH's. I say screw that, leaning is so much more useful with this system...and leaning and running looks pretty stupid. I have only two complaints about this game. #1 - Too short. Only 6 levels. They may be huge levels, but total time to completion of the entire game was less than 6 hours. I don't think that's acceptable for a $50 title. #2 - multiplayer has consolitis. It's online only (a horrible trend I've been seeing in the past couple of releases) and the player limit is 12. With maps this big, it just doesn't make any sense.

Sega Rally
A DIVERSION! Said Legolas! It's a fun arcadey racer. Graphics aren't great, but they work for the game. The deformable terrain is actually a gameplay mechanic also. If you ride the vehicle in the grooves formed by someone in front of you, you can whip around turns quicker. Ultimate downfall? No LAN support. Only only, just like above.

Team Fortress 2 (BETA)
Now this is fun stuff. It's a little bit dumbed down from TFC but that might not be a bad thing. It feels pretty balanced for this type of game (9 player classes) and the pixar-like graphic style is really appealing. I think Valve really nailed this one. There are a lot of little details like the voices and animations that make the game extra special. Teamwork is absolutely required which makes this a really good...team game. Plus, the new Steam Communities feature is awesome! It's like Xbox LIVE for PC. Or what LIVE for PC should've been...free!

MotoGP 2007
PS3 description said "photorealistic graphics" but when it comes to PC, it looks kind of "meh". It took me a while to get used to how a bike handles, probably because I've never rode a bike before. The game is just racing, nothing extreme like knocking other people off or doing wheelies. Although you can do wheelies, I don't think they help you go faster. On the upside, there's LAN play!

Stranglehold
I started playing this thinking that it was going to be a "me too" version of Max Payne. Nothing great, just another [Legolas]DIVERSION[/Legolas]. But I ended up being pretty impressed and very entertained! Just like Max Payne, you HAVE to use Tequila Time and the Tequila Bombs. Especially in the later levels, you WILL die in 2 or 3 shots. But where it differs from Max Payne is the cool moves you can do with the environment. You can slide on carts, across tables, wall jump, swing from a chandelier, grind on a rail, all sorts of crazy shit. You can also stay down after a dive and keep shooting while on the ground. I found that very useful. The Unreal Engine 3 looks really good here, much better than Rainbow Six Vegas but on-par with MoHA. Chow-Yun Fat's likeness is really accurate, even when he bares his teeth and pulls off dual-pistol spin moves. There's a lot of variety in the gameplay too, there's a scripted mini-shoot-game that happens at least once a level that's pretty awesome. The last one of these was especially cool. Again, only two complaints. Your character doesn't animate smoothly when you go from moving forward to another direction (strafing, backpedal, etc...) and the multiplayer is...online only.

Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare (BETA)
It just ended on Xbox LIVE but the last two days of it was VERY cool. They upped the level cap to 25 (from 16) which let people play with a lot more of the perks. I can safely say that it's going to be the next major tourney game. It's just a question of whether the PC or 360 version will be the ones that have major cash prizes.

Crysis MP Beta
I'm not sure if I can actually say anything about this right now due to the NDA. I can say what I've seen on another review site though...it laaaaags. I don't think it's network-related either. It's graphic lag. Which, in turn, may cause server lag. Basically, it's all laaaag. It's still very playable, but I would've thought my system could put out higher framerates...in DX9! The graphics look nice though. The engine seems solid, but the motion blur is a little distracting. Especially since if you laaag, it'll motion blur the skipped frames so if you're in the middle of a IO stutter, everything just looks like a mosaic. But it's still beta. And I have a feeling it's running in debug mode. So much improvement is to be expected. Other reviewers have said that single player performance isn't like this. Maybe it IS the network code?

OH god, it's starting...the yearly influx of new "next" gen games. I'm already in the middle of Tomb Raider Anniversary, Bioshock, Forza 2, and Rayman Raving Rabbids. Tomorrow I'll have to add Medal of Honor : Airborne to that list, along with (very shortly), Stranglehold, The Orange Box, Call of Duty 4, Crysis, Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts. And possibly with sprinklings of ET:Quake Wars, SEGA Rally Revo, Clive Barker's Jericho, Gears of War, Hellgate:London, and World in Conflict. It's gonna be hectic, yo!

OMG OLIVIA MUNN from Attack of the Show on G4
My NEW FAVORITE HOTTIE!

This was from when she first came onto the show.

I just saw a pre-screening of Transformers last night!

I thought it was pretty good, but the last half seemed really...sub-par. The graphics were awesome and there's a lot of the Transformer "lore" in the movie, but the plot and dialogue got a little cheesy near the end. It's like they realized that the movie was running too long and rushed the last half. The camera movement was REALLY shaky too. I'm not sure if it's because I sat too close the the screen, but it was kind of hard to tell what was going on in the robot fights. Maybe they did it to cover up some CGI imperfections?

On the Reepal.com scale, I give it an 8.6!

Time to make use of that hosting bandwidth!

Yagh! My forearms are sore! I'm in my new place now!

I just clocked my download speed....1.18 MB/sec WOOHOO!!!

NoOOoOoooOOoOOoOooo! I just turned 27! Too fast!!

Ridiculous! Was 24 always this ridiculous?!? This is the first season that I've watched this show and it's like one emergency after another! Jack needs to take the advice of that guy Rip played Hold'em against...TAKE IT EEEEASY YOUNG MAN!

THIS is worth an update! So, I went to the Buy.com LAN in Anaheim this weekend with Rip and Omar. Originally Sung too, but he got turned down at the door. Anyways, team ƒyre racked up some huge win profit by pwning helpless mediocre players! Wins include :

Quake 3 Contest : TalonFyre 1st, "Cruisin' Rip" 2nd, MagusFyre 3rd
Quake 4 Instagib Contest : MagusFyre 1st, TalonFyre 2nd
PNY Sponsored Quake 4 Tournament : TalonFyre 1st, MagusFyre 3rd
Call of Duty 2 Contest : TalonFyre 3rd

Total accumulated prizes were worth $1800! Winnars!

OMG Exciting!! I can't say much more about it right now, but in a couple months, we're going to have a new LAN place!!!

NEW YEAR! SAME SHIT! I really need to revamp this site...

After 10 days without Internet access, it's finally fixed! Turns out some jabroni from Time Warner accidently disconnected us in the junction box out on the street. It took 5 minutes to fix the problem. SO STUPID.

Sapphire ATI X1900 XT 512 MB RMA sent!

It's just too loud and too incompatible.

100 MB extra page file usage for Catalyst Control Center, wtf?

Fog of War in Company of Heroes = stair-step blocks, wtf?

Can't enable FSAA in City of Heroes/Villains without disabling all SM 3.0 features, WTF?

Sounds like a leaf-blower when running any 3D app, WTF??

Ordered a eVGA 7900 GTO to replace it! Saved $50 FTW! Lost $44 for restocking fee FTL =(

Core 2 Duo system complete! The rest of my components are :

Sapphire ATI X1900 XT 512 MB

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.16 Ghz 2 MB Shared L2 Cache

TWO Updates in ONE Day! WTF is going on?!? I just wanted to post what I've ordered for my new Core 2 Duo system so far. The past Saturday, I got in on the best DDR2 memory deal I've ever seen. This had a $100 rebate with FREE shipping! Unbelievable...and now out-of-stock! And now, I just ordered this motherboard, the Abit AW9D-MAX (Intel 975X Chipset). Reports on XtremeSystems.org and Anandtech.com forums have said that it can do 8x440FSB without mods. Since I'm only going for 8x400FSB, this should work very nicely. The only concern I have is the lack of regular PCI slots. This motherboard only has ONE. Yep, one PCI slot regardless of whether or not you have dual video cards. In my current system, I'm using 3 PCI cards! But in order to rationalize this dilemma away, I will say : I don't use 2 of those cards, namely the HDTV card and the wireless G card. Maybe this is a good time to convert my A64 into an HTPC!

Finished Company of Heroes! The campaign was cool, but not really compelling story-wise. The good stuff is in the gameplay, which shows in MP as well as SP. But yea, I think this is the greatest RTS since Warcraft III. Everything about it is just done so well. Most importantly, for MP, the balance is top-notch. I can't think of any situation where one single strategy is not counter-able. The only thing left now...arranged teams for online play!

I just slept for 15 hours straight! How?!? Why?!?

I've beaten Titan Quest! On normal difficulty. I think it's quite possibly the funnest game of it's kind since Diablo 2! Then again, not many games like that (Action Hack 'N Slash RPG) have come out for a while. This should be a cool title for LAN. This next LAN HAS to include Sung though. Whenever I play a hack 'n slash game like this, all I remember is Sung and those endless days of leveling up his Barbarian in Diablo 2. Whirlwind 24/7!

About 20 more days until...Palm Springs??

Super Strong Car Wash! There's a new touch-free car wash machine that opened up on the Valley View/Cerritos Ave. Chevron. I just tried it this morning and OMG! It's so much stronger than the one near Long Beach Town Center (76). The sprays are even and soaps come out consistently. But then the final blow-dry cycle comes out and it sounds like a tornado! It blew so hard that my antenna bent over backwards and started slapping my rear window! WHAP-WHAP-WHAP-WHAP-WHAP! The machine is brand new and I don't think many people know about it - there was no one in line when I went.

According to ReleaseLog, FlatOut 2 is out but it uses StarForce 4. It really puzzles me why a small developer like BugBear would go with a copy protection with such a bad rep and also one that could hurt sales. Bad Business Decision, HOOOOOOOOO!

Also according to ReleaseLog, there's a CloneDVD of Prey floating around out there. However, it has the sorriest NFO I've ever seen. Check it out for yourself at Binsearch.

What's that NOISE?!? It's new on TalonFyre.com! Integrated MP3 player! Take that MySpace! I'm now one step closer to TalonSpace.

Talon and Net Fusion, HOOOOOO!

By the way, this is music from Silent Hill 3...Pyramid Head's theme.

IMO, Best E3 2006 Model!

Beeeeauutiful!

Worse...cold...ever! Well, it's the worst cold I've had in a while. My sinuses are clogged, my head feels like it's in a vice clamp, and half my hearing is gone. I can't even tell which direction enemies are coming in Quake! My doctor friend (actually a Surgeon) says that 3 full days of 10-hour bedrest will knock this out. It's day #3 now and I'm feeling much much...the same as 3 days ago! Lies! Medical Lies!

So...my computer crapped out yesterday. That wasn't good. But this is! If you've got an extra hour to kill, sit back and watch this episode from BBC's Top Gear.

It's the Bugatti Veyron!

OMG! I borrowed this from work!

It's the Dell 3007WFP 30-inch widescreen LCD! It's huuuuuuge! I actually have to move my head to see all of it. It looks really awesome in FPS games, really makes it very immersive. But competitively, it's not really a good thing. It makes it harder to aim quickly because I have to constantly move my head and eyes to catch everything that's going on. Funny how that works, eh?