iven that perhaps the single largest playtime influence on my childhood was video games, it's surprising that I didn't see any blog entries worth turning into a video games article until April 28, 2003. More than a year and thee months after I began blogging. To measure it in another way, there were 144 other article archives before this one.  144 other things I blogged about often enough, or with enough intensity that I thought they deserved to be archived in one place, before I ever got to anything I'd written about playing computer games that I thought should join them.

This is partially due to my not-infrequent video game mentions usually being short and off the cuff, and partially due to me working on a website (diabloii.net) about my favorite video game (Diablo II) the whole time I've been blogging. And obviously, if I had much to say about a video game, it was going to be about Diablo 2, and I was going to say it in that site, not here.  Also, I have a whole site subsection devoted to a particular Diablo 2 mod, the Middle Earth mod, and what writing I might have done about that game I put into that section.

Those points granted, my silence about video games on this blog is largely due to the fact that I just don't play them much anymore. I've not been interested in any new ones in years, and haven't even played any demos or followed any development cycles.  I did play a bit of the Warcraft 3 beta, since I'm on Blizzard's beta list for my work on the D2 site, but I quickly tired of it and gave it away, as I did with the Warcraft 3X beta, and the WoW beta.

I never feel like I have time to play games anymore. Not big games, at least. I can play small stuff, online games like the ones at popcap.com, or solitaire or free cell or Tetris or other minigolf or yeti games or other such "ten minutes at a time" type games. But I have so much writing and website work that it seems insane to get involved with some massive new game; something I'd need to spend hours a day running on the learning curve, hours more reading strategies, memorizing skills info, etc. The feature-richness of a title, the sort of thing that would have given me sweaty palms and itchy anticipation in the past, now repulses me, since I know I'm not going to spend the time to learn it all. And I can't be happy just playing something like a noob and having fun while I know how utterly ignorant of the larger gameplay picture I really am.

I miss it, sometimes. The old days of totally abandoning myself to a game, spending hours and hours straight on it, building up a character, learning new strategies, etc. But when I try it now, I always feel so guilty, knowing how much other, better stuff I could/should be doing with my time. And now that I've been living with Malaya since July 2003, and since she's busy working on major projects of her own, it's even weirder. How can I sit there and play a game for hours while she's toiling away beside me?  That works both ways too, since she feels guilty playing something while I'm working beside her. Hey, it's one way to motivate each other.

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August 26, 2003

There are a couple of amusingly-sadistic games free to download from this Romanian site.  I was going to take some screenshots and talk about strategy and such, but then I realized that I just didn't really care that much.  They are sort of physics simulators where the object is to inflict as much damage as possible on a crash test dummy.  In the first game you simply push him (it?) down a flight of stairs, but the second game adds a lot more complexity with a truck and ramps and a big damn wall.  You can position the dummy on or in or in front of the truck, adjust the ramps and truck speed, and so on.  The fun part is watching the dummy fall and tumble in semi-realistic human fashion; the parts that are taking heavy damage turn red as they get nailed, and you score points based on how much damage you deal.

Aim for the head, neck and torso, those score by far the highest.  Try to avoid tumbling in a corkscrew fashion, since then your arms and legs whip around and break the fall, keeping you from inflicting gross bodily injury.

The downloads are around 2meg each and very easy to do; just grab the zip and extract them to a suitable folder, then run the .exe file.  They have simple interfaces, all done in flash with obvious function buttons (aside from "dismount" being the action button) and in perhaps the best feature, they have multiple camera angles so you can always see the gore and doom from the best angles.

It would be great if there were more options, like say 100 stairs instead of just a dozen, or slanted ramps, a bigger truck run up, multiple men, etc.  But hey, it's free and if you want more, learn to program yourself and you can make it just how you want it.

April 28, 2003

For some inexplicable reason, probably related to the mildly-entertaining Tomb Raider II movie trailer, I've had a desire to play the actual Tomb Raider game for the past few days.  I hadn't played it since about 1998, and don't even have a functional 3d card in my current main computer, but that didn't matter, I wanted to play it.

So finally I gave in Sunday night, and looked for it.  And looked. And looked. I have old games and install cds all over the place, in drawers in two desks and also some miscellaneous boxes, but it was not turning up.  I eventually remembered that I had another box underfoot.  Literally, an old cardboard box under my desk, back behind the towers. I dug it out and blew off the dust, and there was the Tomb Raider jewel case, along with some other old games I didn't even remember owning.

So I put it in and fired it up and... my god it was ugly.  Slow, jerky, and the pixeling was atrocious.  You might think 3d technology had come a long way since 1994, if you didn't know better.  I tried it in my older computer, which is less powerful, but has a Voodoo 3500, and it looked a bit better, but after twenty minutes I was sick of running around caves and shooting wolves and bats.  I used to have a lot more patience in games to explore everything and see all the areas and figure out all the puzzles myself. I never feel like I have the time for that anymore.  And in fact I don't have the time for that, since there is an infinite amount of website work and writing and fiction and such I should be doing instead.

In light of that, it's actually pretty handy that the game didn't interest me, eh?  And my feelings of lack of time/interest are what keeps me from buying other new games, and what I think will keep me from *ever* buying another game.  The death of an era.

Once I got sick of the game, I looked across my desk, and was just appalled at the amount of disks and such piled up.  I had install floppies for Win95 stuff, for God's sake. And for sound cards I had back then, and for video cards, and for motherboards, and 2 years of PC Gamer demo CDs, and much more.  Stuff I haven't looked at in literally 6 or 8 years, and know that I never will again.

I hate to throw out old stuff that might still have some use, but even I was disgusted by it, so I just pitched it all.  Sorted the 100+ CDs and floppies, and threw away probably 80 of them, only keeping actual games that I paid good money for, and install stuff for hardware I still actually possess.  I'll never use 95% of that stuff either, but just in case/you never know. Plus it makes my inner packrat happy.

I am much better at just stacking stuff under something, or on the back of my spare desk, than I am at organizing and sorting and putting it somewhere for keeps. You know, like throwing away what I'll never use, and saving what I might in a drawer, where I don't have to watch it collecting dust forever.  Tricky concept, but I'll try and embrace it.

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