One of my friends in Arizona introduced me to cricket a few months back, and while I am by no means a huge fan, it is enjoyable. After browsing the net for a while, I noticed that Brian Lara International Cricket 2005 was available in England, so I decided to import it. Of course some of you may be wondering, "However did you play an imported Xbox game on a US console?" Technicalities aside, it is working and a fairly enjoyable game. However, I did notice a few points in the game do not seem to be realistic from my limited experience, but may easily be fixed in the new version due out this March (along with a graphical upgrade).

There are two problems currently plaguing me, first the game is available for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 2 (Both of which I do not own and the latter than I will not buy) and secondly the game is only available outside of the United States. While the first problem is solvable with a sufficient monetary exchange, circumstances are different this time around for playing imported games on the Xbox 360 (mainly no user friendly mod chip).

In my quest to play BLIC 2007, I decided to e-mail Codemasters (Publisher) and asked if I can expect to be able to play this game on a US system and sadly they informed me -

Unfortunately Brian Lara Cricket 2007 will only work on Playstations/Xboxes designed to run PAL format games. North American Playstations/Xboxes are designed to run NTSC format games only

I now have three options:

1) Buy an imported Xbox 360 (Very Expensive)
2) Mod a US Xbox 360 (Pain in the ass given my limited technical skills)
3) Buy the PC Version (Expensive considering my laptop cannot run this game, and no it was not mentioned earlier)

While I ultimately know I will buy an Xbox 360 in order to play Halo 3, Mass Effect, and Assassin's Creed, I imagine that I will pick one up closer to this Fall than right now, thus it is possible that I may push forward my projected Summer desktop purchase up to this Spring. This all sprung up from a game, cricket at that .

According to Newegg.com, my Summer Desktop wish list is currently just over $1300, a tad high for my budget (which is why I was hoping for a drop in price over the Summer for the specs I want). Of course taking out the 500GB hard drive and utilizing my 160GB SATA that I have lying around will save me $165 now which I can buy at a later data. Further if I choose a Intel 2 Core Duo E6300 rather than a E6400 that will save me another $50 or so. I do not know if I want to sacrifice the LCD at another $200 and use my 17" CRT, so I may just have to wait a few more months. In any case, I just picked up some extra RAM for my laptop putting the current spec at 1.2 GB which will hopefully help when multitasking (Haven't really tried yet).

Here are the current specs that I have chosen:

SAMSUNG 18X DVD?R DVD Burner Model SH-S182M/BEBN - $33
SCEPTRE X20WG-Naga Black 20.1" 5ms (GTG) DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor - $200
EVGA Geforce 7950GT KO 512MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card - $250
Thermaltake W0093RU ATX 12V 2.0 Version 500W Power Supply - $60
Patriot Signature Series 2GB DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300)- $201
GIGABYTE GA-945P-S3 LGA 775 Intel 945P ATX Intel Motherboard - $85
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 Conroe 2.13GHz LGA 775 Processor - $222
WD Caviar RE2 WD5000YS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - $165
Case - Already Own
WD 160GB SATA Hard Drive - Already Own

Well, that is certainly enough babble out of me for one day. I'm going to bed.

-Trevor