Raindrops

Much of Saturday was spent playing Eternal Sonata, which is certainly a delightful game. The script unfortunately lays it on far too heavily and was a trite and uninspired affair from the word go, but the artwork is superb and easily makes up for it. The menus, abilities, items, equipment and other such RPG elements are mercifully simple and easy to use, without becoming restricting, letting you happily flow through the game without having any holdups, unlike Mass Effect where I must've spent hours sorting out my team by the time I'd completed it. One fantastic feature is the option to change the language to Japanese with subtitles, sparing me the painful American performances. Fun stuff so far.

I also recently downloaded Undertow, released free as Microsoft's apology for the Christmas downtime, which is a rather awesome game. The multiplayer's pretty bugged and levels reached in co-op don't get unlocked, but otherwise it's a lot of good fun.

Monaco kicked off the '08 season of the WRC brilliantly this weekend, however I don't think it could possibly be anything like as intense as 2007 with the epic battle between Marcus and Sébastien, all signs point towards the ridiculous Frenchman having this year in the bag. With Loeb unsurprisingly taking first and Hirvonen securing second in the final standings today, I think we'll be seeing pretty much the same thing all the way 'till the end from those two. Looking at the peasants in the lower rungs Atkinson surprisingly managed third place, with an unfortunate puncture and suspension problems completely removing Latvala from the runnings. Regardless of Gronholm's absence from the rally, it was an awesome event and I am very much looking forward to the rest of the year.