> 
> Yeah, everythings fine and normal. Except for that poison gas that turns
> people inside out. Argh, there it is! <now does an inside out dance from "A
> Chorus Line>
> 
> Standard Twix bar reward! ^_^
Newcomer (to Sam IRL) "Its the Simpsons, isn't it."
Sam: "Correctomundo, dude!"
Newcomer: " Gimme Twix."
(Holds out hand, IRL)
Sam: "Uh, Er, (points over shoulder) WHAT IN THE WORLD CAN THAT BE?!"
Newcomer looks over shoulder.
Sam legs it.

> It says FF7 is coming in June (or just summer), and demos will be
> available soon.  Also, an accelerator card is recommended, but not
> required.
> Just did an AltaVista search for Diablo 2, and discovered that it won't
> even be in beta-testing until August of this year!
Ok 
mini-rant warning ^_^

Dude, how much does an acellerator card cost?
How about PC FF7?
Will most PC's be able to run it?
How much will the overall PC setup cost?
How often will it crash?
HOW LONG AGO DID FF7 COME OUT ON PSX?
sorry about that.
I'll save everybody a long and involved rant and cut to a simple IMO:
PCs cannot run games.
They're a load of old cobblers.
There: I've said it, and it feels good.
Furthermore, the "game's" on the PC are either crappy, or 
unorigional.
I mean, take Starcraft (ahem), I mean Red Alert (ahem), I mean 
command and conquer (ahem), I mean warcraft 1&2, (ahem), I mean Dune 
2 (ahem), I mean Dune.  
How about the supposedly great Quake, that PC magazines shove in my 
face. i mean Doom 2 (ahem), I mean Doom (ahem) I mean Wolfenstein 3D 
(ahem) I  mean Wolfenstein. See what I'm getting at?
If you try and convince me that those are seperate, different games, 
I'll call you a liar.
Now don't get me wrong, I quite enjoyed dune 2, but infinite 
incarnations of exactly the same game do not a good selection of 
games make.
People keep on saying that the PC has loads of good games:
WHERE?
All I can see are games that look FAR BETTER THAN OTHER GAMES ON THE 
PC. 
There are jonres of games which the PC only really does, and does 
them far better than the consoles could ever manage, and those are
Flight Sims, Point-and-click "adventures", and anything actaully 
requiring a keyboard and dozens of buttons.
Aside from that Jonre ( which I personally dont like, but thats just 
IMO), the old PC is somewhat at a loss to compete with machnes THAT 
WERE MADE SPECIFICLY FOR PLAYING GAMES.
IMO, one should specialize:
If one wants to play games, one gets a machine made for 
playing games...
If one want's to work, or play flight sims, one gets a PC.... 
Or a Mac. I prefer Macs over PCs as bisiness machines,
partially because of the supporting the underdog mentality
(drummed into me by Sam), and partially because, well, they're just 
better...
PC's have the advantage of backwards compatibility; this is because, 
beneath all that flash outside hardware there beats the pulse of the 
old 8086 board which the designers of the latest chipset have to 
limit their machines to thinking with....
Macs on the otherhand are not Backwards compatible.
THIS IS BECAUSE THEY UPDATE THE HARDWARE!
Viva la difference...
Erk. this Rant is getting far longer than I intended it to be. 
back to the other point  I was going to make:
Diablo Vs FF7.
IMNSHO, FF7 grabs Diablo by the tonkers, slaps it upside the head and 
kicks the stuffing out of it.
Why? No, not because FF7 is PSX, and Diablo is PC,
but because FF7 is an EXPERIENCE: I give a damn about the 
Characters Tifa, Cloud and Eris. I couldn't give a flying F*** in a 
high wind about some randomly generated personalityless gimp who 
wanders round a dungeon smashin' stuff up. 
FF7 is a story. Diablo is a system.
Viva la difference.
On another note, lets talk about conversions.
The teams that do PSX to PC conversions, and the the teams that do PC 
to PSX conversions ought to be dragged out into the street and shot.
Why?
Neither team seems to like the destination machine very much at all.
The PC to PSX team know that the PSX has the hardware to handle XYorZ 
game, and thus do a straight conversion. They neglect to take in to 
consideration many of the differences in the PSX's hardware, and thus 
ones ends up with a game as slow as or slower than a the PC version, 
with  all the bugs of the origional.
Taking it the other way, we end up with a version of the game that 
was origionally designed to be hardware intensive, and now has to be 
adjusted so that the end result isn't merely playable on an absolute
top-of-the-line macine (thus excluding 95% of their audience).
Furhtermore, conversions in general suck, unless the two machines are 
in direct competition (eg Megadrive vs Snes), and the release dates 
are nearly simultanious ( Anybody Remember Mario/Mortal Monday or 
Sonic-Tuesday? Mk's simultainous release), and even then there are 
risks of worse versions (Snes had "sweat" instead of MK blood. Tosh 
game either way, really.).
Otherwise one ends up with a game that was fabulously popular 6-18 
months ago, being ported (badly) to a machine that wasn't designed to 
rely on machine specific hardware (like the PSX's FMV chipset),
whilst the origional machine may have moved on to far greater 
things...
(incedentally, PC's never really made a hit in Japan, which is why 
all the PC software houses are american or (sometimes) brittish:
The FF7 vs Diablo sort of takes on Racial overtones in that respect.
I guess I, as a rule just prefer the aisian outlook in preferences 
(Ranma, for one).)
At anyrate, this long post is making me look even more closemiinded 
and abusive than usual, so I better shut up.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Newcomer
<Viewer disclaimer: No PC's were harmed or Vomited on in the making 
of this E-mail.>