I received a chunk of change from the college this semester, money left over from my grants and my loan. I decided I would use some of this to put together a new computer for myself, as my current one, while nice, is showing its age – particularly with newer games. I thought that upgrading my video card would fix matters, but while it did help, things still chug along occasionally. Bioshock is playable, as is Company of Heroes; but in both, the framerate dives frequently. I can’t play Call of Duty 4 at all, which I’d like to give a go.

So, a new computer it was to be. I spent a week or so adding things to my wishlist at Newegg, removing things, shuffling things, trying to find the best deal for a good gaming computer. I finally decided I had it all laid out as I wanted – an AMD dual core 5400+ processor, a PNY GeForce 8800GT video card, 2GB of RAM. Reading reviews at Newegg, it was clear such a machine would run Bioshock and my other games amazingly well.

I submitted my order Tuesday. In Newegg fashion, my stuff was shipped out that day. I dutifully refreshed the tracking page frequently, obsessing over the current location of my techno goodies only as a true geek could. This morning, the tracking information showed what I’d been wanting to see: out for delivery.

Things took a turn for the worse, however. No, the UPS driver wasn’t in an accident, thank goodness; no, what happened was, I discovered a flaw in my build. While perusing further reviews for the processor I’d bought, I saw something that threw fear into my heart: “like the fact that it doesn’t come with any heat sink or fan, so I can buy the one I want.”

No heat sink or fan? No heat sink or fan? But I thought it had one! It’s retail, just like the last AMD processor I bought, and that one came with a heat sink and fan!

Alas, no; I checked the specifications for the processor, and lo’ and behold, at the bottom of the page: no heat sink and fan. For those who aren’t geeks, this is bad. Why? Because without a heat sink and fan for your processor, you can’t even turn the computer on – you’d burn the processor up in a matter of seconds.

After getting off work, I called around town, checking with all of the local computer shops for a heat sink and fan combo. None of the shops had any. Shortly after I gave up calling around town, I ordered one from Newegg. Shortly after that, my computer parts showed up: a new case, power supply, motherboard, processor, memory, massive hard drive, and awesome video card. All good for absolutely nothing until my heat sink and fan arrive, which won’t be until at least Monday.

I went ahead and put it all together tonight, so now the new (unusable) computer tower is sitting my room. Unlit. Unpowered. Dead, even. Fresh electronic parts, all hooked up to each other, ready to go – and I can’t turn it on.

Geek agony, lemme’ tell ya’. Next time, I’ll double check such things. Until then, maybe I could set it up in our big chest freezer…

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been treated to some great gaming news, and some not so great gaming news.

The good news is that the next expansion pack to Civilization IV, Beyond the Sword, is coming along very nicely. It’s supposed to be released in July. The PC section of IGN has a nice write up about the additions here. There are a lot of new things in Beyond the Sword that I’m really looking forward to playing with. The Apostolic Palace looks quite interesting, letting you win a diplomatic victory way before you can build the United Nations. It also opens up a variety of other diplomacy “things” you can toy with. The corporations and colony stuff also sounds interesting. The colony feature, though, while it’s a bit more realistic, sounds like a huge trade off: basically say goodbye to your cities on other continents, while keeping access to the resources, so you can stop paying out the arse to maintain overseas cities. While having more income’s nice, I don’t know how I’m going to feel about basically “letting go” of my overseas holdings and letting an AI leader take over them.

I have to chuckle about one feature they’ve added, the espionage slider. This espionage slider thing is blatantly ripped off from Galactic Civilizations 2 and its expansion pack, Dark Avatar. The exact same espionage system is in GalCiv2. You can even sabotage buildings in GalCiv2, just like they’ve added in Beyond the Sword. Having said that, though, I’m glad they’ve put it in; while GalCiv2 is an alright game, Civilization IV is (in my opinion) leaps and bounds above its bound-in-space brethren. The espionage will be a great new layer of gameplay.

The bit of bad news is that Spore has been delayed again – sort of, anyway. While the information being passed around is a bit confusing, the fact of the matter is this: we aren’t going to see Spore anytime soon. It being a game that involves evolution, civilization building, space exploration, terraforming, war, and a ton of other open-ended goodies, this is a game that I really want to play. I don’t want to wait until 2008 or 2009 to play it. We wants it now, precious! If you’ve not watched a demonstration video of Spore in action, watch this one. It’s a good one.