So I gues it's safe to assume you agree with me in that Shinobi blows Ninja Gaiden X out of the water.

In a separate matter, I guess I have been playing a game. Some of the faculty in my department have been playing a web-based strategy game called Warband1066. I joined them for the current game, and we have an alliance of 8 people. (There are about 200 people playing; 100 actively so.)

It's pretty involving; perhaps too much so. Each game is 20 days long and the game runs 24 hours a day. It operates in half-hour turns. You get one action every 8 turns, and you can accumulate as many actions as you want and use them whenever you want.

You allocate citezens to farm, mine or and stone, and cut wood, and get your resources every turn. You use these materials to build castles, houses, and weapons, and you can attack other people for their resources.

I've gotten quite sucked in. We sit there and write perl and PHP programs to calculate things. It's causing me to lose sleep. I once set my alarm for 5:00 to make some raids. I haven't done that anymore, but I tend to wake up during the night, and when I do, I go and build some weapons to make sure my resources haven't built up enough to be a target.

It's a fun but exhausting game. I'll probably not play in the next round.