Yup - Sunday was my birthday and I'm only blogging about it now. It probably proves that I am getting way to old to really "celebrate" my birthday and that I am way too busy to be blogging these days

Wow - what a great time I had this past weekend!

I eventually got a few hours to play my new copy of World in Conflict, which I actually bought on the 28th of September but have been too busy at work to even open the box. The downside is that I am actually still pondering if I like the game or not. Perhaps if I play a few more rounds - I don't know.

As far as the real world in conflict is concerned, the weekend also saw England upstage our old rivals Australia in the IRB Rugby World Cup 2007, not to mention France that probably caused the biggest upset in rugby world cup history by sending the top tournament and #1 ranked team in the world- New Zealand - packing as well! That will be the first time in history they didn't make it to the semi-finals!

So, from a South African perspective we are more than happy, since being the #3 ranked team in the world at the moment (just behind New Zealand and France), we actually spent the entire Saturday afternoon and evening shouting for England and France - good stuff and well done to all the English and French supporters out there. It shows that both these teams deserve to be in the final 4 and represent Northern hemisphere rugby.

As far as the rest of the week is concerned, it's going to be pretty hectic on the work front, so I probably won't get much time to do any gaming until this coming weekend.

It's been 8 very interesting days for me - to say the least!

At last, we started with the implementation of a fairly large network I designed for a corporate customer approximately 6 months ago, on the 27th of September and completed the project this afternoon.

That means that we have been working non-stop, from 06:00 until at least 22:00 every day since the 27th of September. The only time I took off was to watch the IRB World Cup rugby match between South Africa and the USA last Sunday. To make it even more interesting is that fact that the customer operates in five cities, which means that there was also quite a bit of travelling and flying around over these past 8 days. Hence why I haven't blogged or commented on anyone else's blog since the 26th - appologies to all.

The good thing is that I love my job so much, that I don't mind working these hours to see a plan come together - on time and within budget.

The bad thing is that I have had very little time to spend with my family, not to mention the three new games lying on my desk that I haven't even had the time to open the boxes. I've decided that I will take tomorrow off and spend some time with the family and hopefully get some time to catch up on the gaming over the remainder of the weekend in between all the sports on TV

After all these years of collecting games, I have always missed one of the must have titles (as far as my taste goes) from my collection, namely Diablo II - believe it or not.

I had almost resigned to the fact that it would be almost impossible to get hold of a brand new copy of Diablo II, seven years after it's original release.

Well, yesterday while going to pick up my copy of The Sims 2: Bon Voyage at the store where I usually buy my games, my eye immediately caught something amazing - Blizzard Entertainment had decided to re-release a lot of their older games under a "Best Seller" series, and one of them was Diablo II!

So funny enough, instead of getting my copy of BioShock, I rather spent the extra few bucks on getting Diablo II for now. BioShock will be around for quite some time yet anyway. I can pick that up later.

The other good news is, that this brings up my collection to the 130 mark.

It's been a pretty good week for the most of the Southern Hemisphere teams in the IRB Rugby World Cup, with Argentina beating France 17-12, New Zealand beating Italy 76-14, Australia beating Japan 91-3 and South Africa beating Samoa 59-7.

I guess that there aren't to many of you guys on my friends list that actually watch Rugby, but for us folks where Rugby is almost a religion, tonight is when the real games begin however (as far as I am concerned) when South Africa take on England - may the best team win!

It's now exactly 21:20 Central African Time down here and I can't think of a better way of finishing what has been a rather hectic two weeks at the business than killing off this rather nasty Irenicus guy in Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn and hence completing another chapter towards the personal quest I described in some earlier blogs.

What an epic game! It's like the storyline just carries on and on, and as soon as you think you've reached the end, then there are several new quests that pop out of the woodwork. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that this RPG, albeit five years old, rightfully earned its place in the all time Hall of Fame here on GameSpot.

I just noticed that it has been almost 10 days since my last blog. Hopefully things will settle down a bit at the business over the next few weeks. It's also taken me almost exactly a month to complete Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, although I must admit that I never got more than about an hour or two per day to play and that I really went out to complete each and every known quest in the game this time.

So I guess I'm off to start with the last chapter - Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, which is apparently the best in the entire Baldur's Gate universe according to the reviews here on GameSpot. I'll just have to find out for myself.

Fortunately I only have to wait another two weeks or so, since BioShock will hit our shelves down here on the 15th of September - the day after we meet England in the IRB Rugy World Cup I believe.

In the meantime, I've been so busy catching up on some old games and working on my GameSpot badges, that a week or so ago, I realized that the last time I bought any new games for my collection was in June! That's just not good enough. So, for a week now I've been searching for Fable: The Lost Chapters released in 2005, the original Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell released in 2003 and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow released in 2004.

Finally, yesterday afternoon after work, I got hold of all three these titles in some little computer shop "off the mainstream" so to speak. It's funny how one often gets hold of older titles in these little shops. It seems as if the mainstream guys are just interested in keeping the current, and obviously, much faster moving titles on their shelves. I guess that's fair from a pure business point of view.

While I'm waiting for the IRB Rugby World Cup 2007 to commence in early September, I'm using most of my spare time to catch up on some of those old games that I've never really played through before they ended up gathering dust in the cupboard.

In fact, I've been so busy playing through Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, that I almost forgot to blog that I managed to complete the single-player campaign in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War two nights ago. I must say that I really enjoyed it, although the game is exactly 3 years old, or will be in September. I also did a quick review with some of my thoughts on the game yesterday.

So, as far as that is concerned, I have moved on to Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Winter Assault, which was the first expansion for the Warhammer 40,000 series.

That's it as far as the gaming is concerned, leaving me with two big questions around here right now:

1. Who has bought and played (probably only part thereof by now) Bioshock?
2. Who else on my friends list actually enjoys playing or watching Rugby and can't wait for the World Cup in France to begin - I'm not holding my breath by the look of things!

As per my personal quest (see below), I'm delighted that yesterday evening, I eventually got out of Durlag's Tower and soon after returning to Ulgoth's Beard, got rid of that weird cult's little daemon.

In other words - Baldur's Gate - Tales of the Swordcoast is now also done and dusted. Another step towards closure. In the process, I also realized that I haven't actually written a review of Tales of the Swordcoast after all these years. That has also been added and you can read my thoughts on the game, or expansion rather,here. Now it's on to Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn.

In the meantime, I have also decided to start playing Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (the single player campaign) from start to finish for the first time - just as a RTS gaming alternative to all the RPG playing going on at the moment. I must admit, that I'm really enjoying that as well for a change.

I don't know if it's only me, or perhaps some other folks out there have the same frustration:

Like most of the dudes and dudettes here on GameSpot, we all have pretty big games collections - right. So, a while back I was taking some mental notes if you will, and I came to the sad realization that more often than not, I don't actually get to play through - and I mean really play through - an entire game, before the expansion or second and third releases on the theme appear. By that time of course, I've lost interest in the first game to begin with and it ends up in the cupboard that seems to be forever growing with games I haven't really finished, hoping that one day - yes that day that never comes - I will get a chance to go back there and actually finish the damn thing!

It's almost like it's become the dreaded mental closure thing for me, since every time I buy a new game, I have this nagging in the back of my head shouting out that I haven't even finished the previous one yet! This is really something I guess all the game developers and publishers out there would like to hear.

Enough is enough as far as I am concerned, and a few weeks back, just before I went on vacation (see below), I took stock of my entire games collection and sorted the list by release date. I then decided to consider anything pre-1998 as being "played", mostly because you can't get that stuff to run on Windows XP or Vista anymore anyway.

Given that information, I then made a concious (I hope I was the latter at the time), to re-start playing every single game in my collection since 1998 that I haven't completed yet. When I say completed, I don't include skirmish games, etc. like Age of Empires and such, but refer only to those games that have a campaign or storyline (a real one at that) that needs to be played from beginning to end. Most of you will probably realize that this implies mostly RPG and some/most FPS titles.

This, funny enough, left me to get started with Baldur's Gate, which I had played before (really played through), but I actually used some cheats along the way. So this time, I decided that I would get going with the entire Baldur's Gate series, from the beginning and explore every single area in the game series without using any cheats or other such under-handed tricks.

To make a long story somewhat shorter, I must say that I am already feeling a lot better this morning, since I actually managed to achive what I had set out with Baldur's Gate a couple of weeks ago and defeated that Sarevok dude early this morning - big time - without even having to try twice! Now, it's on to Tales of the Swoard Coast and one step closer to closure!

By the way, this doesn't mean that I am going to stop buying and playing new titles!